Of course (we will have heard it often) you can’t just choose the bits
of the Bible you happen to like, and ignore the rest.
You can’t just read your favourite passages about being kind to people
(though there’s a lot of that). Or you might be one of those Christians who
like the bits about being prosperous (rather tricky double edged passages,
those), or cuddling fluffy kittens (ok, I’m kidding, there’s nothing about
fluffy kittens in the Bible). You’ve got to accept the nasty challenging
uncomfortable bits as well.
All well and good. Except – this is exactly what Jesus seems to be
doing today. In today’s Gospel reading Jesus quotes the Bible, but leaves out
the bits that don’t seem to fit his message.
The occasion is a question from John the Baptist. Last week, we met
him in the wilderness, baptising people for repentance, being rather rude to
the religious authorities, and full of warnings of fiery wrath. “The axe is
laid at the root of the trees”, he said. “Every tree… that does not bear good
fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” John warns of the coming Messiah,
who will burn the chaff “in unquenchable fire”.
It’s clear that John is expecting something quite violent. The Messiah
is coming to punish wrongdoers.
In today’s Gospel reading some time has passed. Jesus has embarked on
his ministry, and meanwhile John has been thrown into prison. And he sends to
ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”
Why ask the question? Well, Jesus has been going round preaching the
Kingdom, but there is as yet no sign of any vengeance. John is wondering if he
Jesus really can be the Messiah, as he doesn’t seem to be sticking to the
script.
Jesus doesn’t reply yes or no. He simply says to tell John what the
messengers see and hear. And this is
where he quotes the Bible:
“The blind receive their sight,
the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and
the poor have good news brought to them.”
That is actually a compilation of
five passages from Isaiah about the coming of the Messiah. But Jesus doesn’t
quote everything that Isaiah says.
We heard one of the five passages this morning, Isaiah 35, “the eyes
of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped, the lame shall
leap like a deer and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy” But Isaiah also says what Jesus does not say: “Here is your God, he will come with
vengeance, with terrible recompense.” And there’s something like that in all
five of the texts that Jesus refers to[1],
both a promise of restoration and a promise of vengeance.
Jesus clearly understands what
John’s question is about. By leaving out those verses, by speaking of blessing
but not of judgement, Jesus is saying to John that, yes, things are not turning
out as he expected.
John expects wrath. As we saw last
week, wrath is about desire that cannot be satisfied, and so generates a vicious
spiral of rage: we cannot have what we desire, and that feeds our desire even
more.
What Jesus exposes in the Gospels
is that wrath is something we do to ourselves. Jesus shows us what God is like.
God is love, self-giving, overflowing, utterly alive. God’s desire is to give
himself. What Jesus wants us to do is to imitate the self-giving desire of God,
instead of the insatiable, death dealing desires that humans imitate from one
another. Wrath is not inflicted on us by an avenging deity for resisting his
will. It simply describes what turning away from God’s life-giving desire does
to us, what it is like to choose our own death-bound desires instead.
The parable of the sheep and the
goats shows us that the judgement Jesus brings is not the revenge of the Son of
God, but everything appearing as it really is in God’s light, measured by how
we respond to God’s love shown to us in his Son. “Whatever you did to the least
of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.”
Jesus is the Word of God through
whom the world was made, the ultimate measure and judgement of what the world
chooses to be. All our contingent actions, for or against the poor, the
outcast, the marginalised, all the ways in which we love or choose not to love,
all these turn out to be referred as their ultimate end to Jesus – whether we
are conscious of this or not.
The judgement of Jesus therefore
does not inflict wrath, but brings it to light. Wrath names the distance
between what we are and what we should be, and when Jesus is revealed to us we
cannot but experience that distance as both a pain and a longing in ourselves.
Both a pain and a longing.
Judgement shows us what we are, in order that we might become what we should
be. The purpose of God’s judgement is always salvation. So when Jesus quotes
only the bits of the Bible about God restoring things as they should be, he is
not ignoring the parts about judgement. But he is correcting John the Baptist’s
misunderstanding. Judgement is not God’s revenge, but is rather our opportunity
to be brought back to where God would have us be.
Someone asked me the other week
whether we still believe in hell. Well the Catholic Faith tells us that hell
exists, but we don’t have to believe that there is anyone in it. And if there
is anyone in it, it is only their own will that is keeping them there. Hell is
a choice, rather than a place. It is possible to reject God with the full and deliberate
consent of our mind and will, even to eternity, if we so choose. Love must be
free, in order to be love. And God respects our freedom, because his desire is
for us to live in love. But we know that his reach is further than we can
imagine, and his power greater than we can comprehend.
In Advent traditionally we reflect
on the “four last things” – death, judgement, heaven and hell. They are bound
together, facets of the great resolution when all things are brought into the
light of Christ. In Jesus, God has come near in judgement, but to save us. His
judgement exposes the truth about ourselves, but reveals to us as well his own
loving self-giving desire. Judgement makes salvation possible, turning us in
repentance from our death-bound desires to God.
The Kingdom of Heaven, into which
he invites us, is nothing less than everything restored as it should be. Hell
is simply what it is to continue, freely, to choose our own death-bound desires
instead. And the death of the body is when all our veils and illusions are
stripped away and we see ourselves and all our actions as they really are in
relation to their ultimate object, which is Christ.
The call of Advent then, as we
heard on its first Sunday, is to awake. To become conscious and mindful of
Christ. He is the coming Redeemer who restores all things. He is the Saviour
who proclaims the forgiveness of sins. He is the ultimate object of all our
choices and actions, in whose light we are judged. Therefore: repent, for the
Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
[1] The references are: Isaiah 29:18
(“vengeance” verse 20); 35:5-6 (“vengeance” verse 4); 42:8, 17 (“vengeance”
verse 13); 26:19 (“vengeance” verse 21); and 61:1 (“vengeance” part of verse
2).
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