Article
- Date:
- Sunday 17th October 2021
Year B, The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Parish Eucharist
- Readings:
- Mark 10.35-45
It is all too easy, from our post Resurrection position, to laugh at James and John for thinking that the Kingdom of Heaven was some sort of never-ending ceremonial banquet where your physical closeness to the top of the table represented your approval rating with Jesus. At that time the chosen people only had a very vague idea about the concept of an after-life and James and John must have thought that they had some kind of entitlement because they had followed Jesus and become members of his 'inner cabinet'.
Ever since then, one of the strands of the history of Christianity has been the debate about the relationship between our earthly conduct and our standing in the after-life. I put it this way because one of the usual ways of talking about the after-life which confuses the issue is the habit of talking about our "soul going to heaven" as opposed to the Credal "Resurrection of the body" when Jesus will reign over the united kingdom "on earth as it is in heaven".
But to return to the main issue. As early as the Third Century a young Brit called Pelagius linked human good behaviour with salvation and in spite of the overwhelming influence of Saint Augustine in the Western Church for almost a thousand years, Pelagius was never out of mind, which led in the Middle Ages to an extension of the idea that our behaviour affected salvation whereby the Church Militant could help the dead to become part of the Church Triumphant by saying Masses for the Dead and purchasing indulgences. The first great figure of the Reformation, Martin Luther, in a radical reaction to this heretical system said that we can only achieve everlasting life through our absolute faith in Jesus. Setting aside his problematic translation of the passage in Romans which is better translated that we are saved not by our faith in Christ but by his faithfulness, Luther's heroic effort failed because the human tendency to link conduct with salvation persisted both in the Catholic and Protestant Churches.
The objection to Luther's stark and simple proposal was that it rendered human good conduct redundant. Put at its simplest, this response said that if we were only saved by faith it didn't much matter how we conducted ourselves which, of course, is not true.
But the essence of the case can be put in two propositions which are not linked but operate in tandem. In the first place, we are saved as pure gift by the faithfulness of Jesus in his sacrifice of himself. Secondly, we should behave well because we were created in love by God to love him and each other freely. It is our nature to love, and to choose not to love goes against our nature as being created in God's image. Our love is, therefore, as love always is, non contractual; we love because were made to love not because we love in the expectation of getting something back.
I said that Martin Luther's simple proposition did not survive intact for very long and it unravelled in this way. Some Reformers said that only those predestined to be saved would be saved. Some Reformers and the Catholic Church said that only people of their own denomination would be saved and that, it followed, those not of their denomination were heretics and sinners which led to religious persecution by both opposing parties; in England Henry VIII was more apt to kill Protestants than Catholics while Mary Tudor killed Protestants and Elizabeth reluctantly killed Catholics. But the interesting case is that of Calvin's Geneva where people were killed not only for not being Calvinists but also because of their moral misbehaviour, which represented the complete undoing of Luther; for what was being asserted was that to be a Christian you had to behave in a certain way; which is where we came in with Pelagius. The underlying point was that to be a proper Christian you had to behave in the way that the Bible instructed; but the problem was that outside Rome there was no final arbiter about what the Bible required.
I have gone through all this history of theology because we need to know it before we can try to discard it. My two parallel propositions still stand: that we are saved as God's free gift in the death of Jesus; and that our conduct should be dictated by our createdness in love to love God and one another. And what follows from this is that we do not know who will be saved and that we cannot know from the outward result of conduct the extent to which people are or are not behaving in love. We do not know what hand other people are dealt and how well each person is playing that hand. I may behave atrociously having done my very best not to, and you may behave well because you find it easy to behave well. I may believe that my love for another is expressed in a stable, same sex relationship and you may believe that you cannot behave in love in such a manner; but love is a matter of motive and conscience, not conformity and external appearances.
In the pagan world where altruism was not considered to be one of the Aristotelian virtues, people marvelled at Christian conduct, "see how they love one another," but our defining characteristic is not simply how we love one another in the conventional way but is also how we love the whole world by spreading the good news of salvation, that we will not die because we have failed to love as we should. If, I say "if" advisedly, as I do not know whether it is so, but if we believe that only Christians are saved by the death of Jesus from the mortal consequences of our failure to love, then the logical conclusion is to see to it that we actively promote Christ's mission to the world. To be a Christian is not necessarily to behave better than other people, it is to enjoy the privilege of being Christ's messengers in the world. It is not to judge but to encourage. If we opened a beauty salon and greeted new customers with the remark that they were really ugly, we would not expect them to stick around but if we greeted them with the promise that they looked good but we could make them even better, we might have a thriving business. Our job is not to spend our lives thinking about our own salvation - God will take care of that - our job is to care for the salvation of others.