Article
- Date:
- Sunday 4th September 2022
Year C, The Twelth Sunday after Trinity - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- Evensong
- Readings:
- Isaiah 43.14-44.5
John 5.30-47
In their different ways, our two Readings this evening deal with the nature of God and present some issues which should lead us out of our comfort zone.
Our Reading from Isaiah, from the second writer in that book, represents the arrival of hope after catastrophe. From the middle of the reign of King Solomon where the author notes ominously "but King Solomon had many wives", most of whom worshipped false Gods, the story of the Chosen People, with the occasional blip, is all downhill. The united Kingdom is split into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judea; then the North is conquered and, finally, the South; and it is this latter remnant of the Chosen People among whom Isaiah is writing. To understand the impact of his message we need to understand that, under the influence of a succession of Prophets, the people had come to believe that the catastrophes were of their own making, as punishments for their idolatry, that God was acting through their enemies to punish them. This syndrome reached hysteria in the case of the Prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel who said that God would use the Assyrians as his agents to destroy Judah, rape its women and thereby also emasculate its men. There are passages from both of these prophets which are well-nigh unreadable; and they surely account for the idea that the God of the Old Testament was a God of cruel vengeance.
Our Second Reading, from the Gospel of John, is one of many passages which underlines the centrality of the relationship between Jesus and "The Father", that very father who threatened to destroy his people as he sent them into Assyrian exile. Gone, then, is the simplistic idea that we can make a distinction between the cruel God of the Old Testament and Gentle Jesus of the New Testament; we are, after all, a Trinitarian Church and hold that each of the three persons of the Trinity contains all the attributes of the other two.
In order to understand this Trinitarian concept more clearly, we need to look a little more carefully at the Old Testament story which is, over the long span of history, from the myth of the Garden of Eden to the return from exile of the Chosen People in the book of Nehemiah, an account of fall and a kind of redemption which is replicated in cosmic salvific terms in the second completion of the story of Adam and Eve in the death of Jesus on the Cross. Some people, particularly in the Middle Ages, saw the Old Testament story as a direct pre-figuring of the sacrifice of Jesus, whereas modern scholars tend to see Jesus living the Salvation promise; but, either way, these two stories are remarkably similar in their trajectory. Our understanding can also be helped if we are more sensitive to the psychological conditions of the different prophets; most are gloomy because it is their job to point out the faults of the people and, more strongly, the faults of their leaders; and this put an immense burden on these people who were frequently imprisoned or even killed for their troubles; and I think in the case of Jeremiah and Ezekiel they were actually driven out of their minds by the tormented visions of the future which they saw. But, ultimately, there was a return from exile and almost inevitably a falling away before the brief triumph of the Maccabees, the story closing with the arrival of John the Baptist as a bridge from the old to the New.
So what of our falling away and our salvation? Well, as so often, this question goes back to the Reformation and the falsification by each side of the other: the Catholics deliberately misunderstood Luther to mean that you could behave as badly as you liked but would be saved purely by having faith in Jesus; and the Protestants deliberately misunderstood Catholic doctrine to mean that humans could get to heaven through their good works. Luther was frightened of free will because he didn't want the responsibility; and the Catholics were frightened of losing control of their own salvation. A more considered position would be that one needs both to believe in the saving act of Jesus in the Crucifixion and to lead a holy life in order to be saved. That's an obvious human optimisation but actually we don't have a clue; all we know is that Jesus said he came to save Israel from its sins and that we, as collateral beneficiaries, so to speak, are also saved by the death and Resurrection of Jesus; as for leading a holy life, we do that because that is why we were created; it is our vocation; but further than that it is not really possible to go. If I have one major criticism of the current state of theology it is that there is too much certainty and not enough humility; too much reliance on metaphor as literal and not enough submission to the mystery of God. We have become - and this is a somewhat strange thing for a theologian like me to say - too intellectual, too apt to dispute small differences, too ready to indulge in controversy over matters far beyond the scope of human dispute.
Looking at the issues from a high vantage point, the shortcomings of the Chosen people and our shortcomings look very much the same although the Old Testament tends to be much less forgiving in the way in which it describes them than in the way we describe them to ourselves; for the root of these two kinds of shortcomings is pride, the idea that we know better than God, that human endeavour can surpass divine ordinance. There is a proper place for enquiry, it makes us what we are, but it has its limits. These two positions have to be held in balance: it is as bad to refuse to enquire as it is to ignore the limits. Those who think that everything is settled, that there is nothing left to be said, are as bad as those who think that everything can be said. The Trinitarian God manifested in the power of the Father, the compassion of the Son and the benevolence of the Holy Spirit is a subject of awe and admiration and a cause for worship and humility.
So, if we leave here this evening knowing that we know less than when we came in, that will be, in this context, as they say, a good result.