Second Terrace

read Jayber Crow

My whole purpose here is to get you to read a book, and that book is Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry.

It’s one of those rare books that when you read the last few words in the last sentence, you want to take a step back and take a new different look at things.

Recipient of the National Humanities Medal in 2010, Wendell Berry is the author of 25 books of poems, 16 volumes of essays, and 11 novels and short story collections. Since 1965 he has lived, worked, and farmed a plot of land on the Kentucky River with his wife and children. He and his family tried their utmost to subsist completely on what they harvested from their farm, going to the store only for the most necessary un-harvestable things.

As far as I know, Berry, who is all of 86 years of age, continues to till the fields with his horse and plow.

Wendell Berry’s main theme is that people change the land by living in it. And the land changes them. If the land is used well, and if other people are dealt with in a kindly fashion, then those changes will be good, or at least not so bad. He’s been a longtime critic of modern individualism, wasteful consumerism, self-aggrandizement, and conspicuous consumption.

He is a Christian writer who “tries to take the Gospel seriously,” but he makes partisans on both sides uncomfortable: no ideology can claim him. No one in the culture wars wants to hear, nowadays, words like these: “Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy” (from his essay “Economy and Pleasure” -- which is a very fine reflection on the great John Ruskin).

Rightwingers chafe at his pacifism and environmentalism. Leftwingers get hot and bothered by his lack of enthusiasm for abortion rights. Though most  contemporary conservatives (who are really libertarians) would not agree, I think Berry is very much an old-fashioned conservative -- so old that the moderns can't recognize him. But the same thing could be said of Christianity in general these days.

In this mean season of social media, techno-reality, and frenetic restlessness, Berry bucks the tide by his quiet insistence that there is no human life without community and nature. One’s life and work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one's place, and the people around him or her. 

Enter Jayber Crow, who did just that.

Wendell Berry is an acerbic critic in his essays. But in his novels, he’s a gentle artist. He portrays the citizens (or, what he calls the “membership”) of his fictional town of Port William with compassion. Even the villains, who betray human fellowship and violate land and nature, are still treated with humane-ness.

Port William is one of the most richly imagined communities in literature, certainly on par with Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Harper Lee’s Maycomb, Alabama. In every one of his novels and short stories (and a few of his poems to boot), Berry has populated this town with honest depictions of human nature, good and bad.

There are joys and there are sorrows. Jayber Crow, as the sole barber of Port William, has gotten to know these stories first-hand from the confessional that old-fashioned barbershops used to be. Jayber (whose name is really Jonah) was orphaned at the age of ten, and was moved to an orphanage in central Kentucky. From there he attended Bible college in Pigeonville, as he had felt, at the time, that he had received the call to become a preacher.

But in Bible college, he wrestled with too many hard questions to allow him to preach in good conscience. “You have been given questions,” his wizened NT Greek professor told him (whose nickname was “Old Grit”), “to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out -- perhaps a little at a time.” 

There’s more than a little of Berry himself here. He’s a Christian, yes, but certainly not what you’d call a “denominationalist.” He is one of many who has justifiably struggled with the organized church. Thusly, he had Jayber opine that “Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.”

Jayber left Bible college and wended his way to Lexington. After a few adventures and misadventures, he ended up back in his hometown of Port William, and set up shop.

He became the oral historian of the town. Oral history is the best kind of history, as it proceeds from the deep collection of community memory. “Telling a story,” Jayber reminisces much later, as he’s retired and over seventy at the time of his narration, “is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. As almost any barber can testify, there is also more than needs to be told, and more than anybody wants to hear.”

The thing I like best about Jayber Crow is his growing -- and glowing -- recognition of his community in Port William, and what that community means, and the beautiful, poignant thing that community can be. 

Despite his honest problems with religion, Jayber comes to his clearest vision of God and his community -- ironically for him -- in church. Uncle Stanley Gibbs was the church janitor and gravedigger, but had been lately getting himself into trouble with his questionable vocabulary and his being too open about his plans for becoming a tomcat again once his old wife passed on. 

Jayber became Uncle Stanley’s successor, and cleans the church each Friday evening in anticipation of Sunday morning worship. He had avoided attending church for years, but now he sits quietly in the back. He loves the singing (“In the sweet by and by” is his favorite) despite his withering critique of most of the sermons.

One night while cleaning the church, Jayber gets sleepy and lies down on the floor. He closes his eyes and sees all the people of his cherished Port William -- people he observes and loves. The chapter concludes, “They were just there. They said nothing, and I said nothing. I seemed to love them all with a love that was mine merely because it included me. When I came to myself again, my face was wet with tears.”

Now that’s community. That’s what a town can be and should be. Jayber’s best friend, Burley Coulter, says this of what being a “member” of Port William is all about: “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't."

The "membership" of Port William consists of any person who recognizes his or her place among -- and responsibility for the well-being of -- all the land, animals, and all the people of the place. It’s being totally pro-life as in “all life.”

Port William is, or should be, your town and my town. Your family and my family. Your church and my church. Your neighborhood and mine.

resolution and desire

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” This is the most famous opening line of any novel. It’s from “Pride and Prejudice,” of course, by the matchless Jane Austen.

I’d like to turn it into the language of self-help literature:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a New Year’s resolution, in order to be kept, must be an attainable goal.” Every counselor worth their salt preaches this, not only at the turn of the year but in every goal-making moment.

It’s also a truth sure as shootin’ that unattainable resolutions fly off like litter out of unsecured trash from a pickup bed just a hundred feet from the recycling center. Just like bags, wrappers, and french fry cups splayed out on the sides of exit ramps (you know where), unkept resolutions, still displayed in journals and on refrigerator doors, stare bleakly at us with persistent reproach.

The difference between a resolution and a decision is like the difference between a policy statement and an item on today’s to-do checklist. Governments and corporations make policy statements. But regular people? It seems unnatural, maybe even inhumane, thing to do.

It is a far better thing to break down big tasks into smaller, more do-able jobs. Big decisions are a lot less tense if they are divided up into a chain of smaller ones. If you want to get fancy and make yourself a flow chart, go right ahead.

But no matter what your preferred style is, it is generally a good thing to make molehills out of mountains, not the other way around.

The main difficulty with unattainable resolutions is that we keep making them, every year. Why do we do this?

Let’s open the hood of the resolution-making machine and see what’s going on. There’s a reason why this engine keeps running. What’s the fuel that keeps that fire going?

In a word, desire.

Hmmmm. Let’s check this theory. The most common resolution has to do with exercise and weight loss: “I hereby resolve to lose ten pounds a month, and I therefore will run five miles a day on my elliptical and do twenty reps on my rowing machine every morning. Plus, I will replace my burger intake with celery.”

Upon reflection, it’s pretty clear that under this resolution, which is obviously doomed to a quick demise, is a simple desire. As in, “I want to be healthier and I want to look better.” Not at the level of Lionel Messi. But definitely somewhere in between the World Cup champion and Cousin Eddie. 

There’s nothing wrong with such desire. It’s when desire becomes iron law that things get messed up. It’s one thing to say “I want to be more like Lionel.” It’s quite another to promise yourself “I will become like Lionel – so in 2023 I resolve to eat celery and run five miles a day.”

There are obviously bad desires in the world. But there may not be so many as we think. Most people for most of the time are motivated by good desires. Maybe they get distorted and they get derailed by the mean end of fortune’s stick – but at bottom there is usually a desire for the good. 

If you look deep enough and look far enough, all desires – even the nasty rotten ones – can be traced back to a primordial desire for the Good. Plato and Aristotle said this. Later on, in the first century, Philo and Justin Martyr identified the Good as God Himself. And two centuries later, my favorite saint – Gregory of Nyssa – proposed two most intriguing ideas:

The first point is that bad desire and bad behavior happen out of a distortion of knowledge of the Good.

The second is even a wilder proposition: If anyone ever sees God the Ultimate Good – or if one ever comes to know Him as He really is, then one cannot help but to love Him. And that is true for one’s fellow human being: if you ever come to know him or her as they really are, without the masks and the costumes, then they are no longer just the “other.” They are your neighbor as they always were. They are brother and sister. They are, essentially, friend.

At the points of extremity – like at the Great Feasts, or especially when faced with one’s mortality – all the disguises fall away. The number of enemies quickly subtract toward zero.

This is a handy method for making attainable New Year’s Resolutions. It’s helpful for steering a good passage through conflict. Consider two opposing parties of protesters, lined up on opposite sides of the street. Ask yourself: “What do those guys over there ultimately want?” Looking under the surface of slogans and banners and shallow partisan opinion, what is the deepest eternal desire? Is it possible at the Beginning and the End, the desire is the same? For real goodness, for real life, for the real God?

Sure, that essential desire often gets distorted and detoured into bad existential application, even bad resolutions. But maybe, just maybe, if we get to know each other better, and listen to each other’s real stories, we can recognize a neighbor, even a friend.

After all, that is precisely why God Himself called us “friend.” He reached out over a much wider, much deeper divide, a much higher wall of enmity. 

And that simple fact should make all the difference.

the christmas samaritan

– James Tissot, Le bon samaritain

This most famous parable, even though it is probably the one most familiar to everyone, remains a deep and beautiful mystery.

It is mystery – not in being unknown or secret, but that overwhelming and quiet sense that we’re touching upon a vast, fathomless Reality. In Orthodoxy, the Great Mysteries are like cosmic icebergs – what we know about is the tip that rises above the water, but below, submerged in the blue bottomless depths is that real enormous mass of the berg: hundreds, thousands of times greater than what can be seen and measured.

We can better appreciate the Mysterious dimension of the Parable of the Good Samaritan – and how it is related so intimately with Christmas – by thinking about a few questions:

Who is the Good Samaritan?

Who is my neighbor?

Who is the priest or the Levite?

Who are the robbers?

Who is the man who got beat up, robbed, stripped naked, and left for dead in a gutter?

As far as the last two questions are concerned, most of the Orthodox fathers, writing on this parable, say that the victim represents the human soul. The robbers are the passions that darken the soul and deform human nature, weakening and corrupting it.

This is a true interpretation, and is not to be disregarded. But it is not the only one.

There is another complementary interpretation as well.

Indeed, the victim in this parable could be you or me or anyone else. And that’s just it. It is not just the “soul” or the self – it is the other.

That is, it is your neighbor.

And the robbers? 

We need to pay attention to not only what the Parable says, but also to what it does not say. Nowhere does the Lord mention that the victim did anything to deserve being robbed. He was simply and innocently on his way to Jericho, minding his own business. 

There is no hint of fault or moral irresponsibility here, which would seem to be necessary for the onset of sinful passion -- i.e., the "psychopathological" interpretation.

So the robbers who rob and beat and abandon, abandoning the victim for dead, may be just and only a hard symbol of the cruelties of life.

In the fallen world, life can get harsh and especially unmerciful. All around us, caught along the wayside, the highways and byways, tangled in the hedges, are those who’ve been “beaten up by life.” 

This is the repeated and very clear theme of the Psalms. King David, the Shepherd Poet, wrote frequently – and I mean a lot – about being beset by the “enemy,” being beaten up, lacerated and bruised, and abandoned. He lamented that no one came to help, that those he had counted on for friendship either failed to show up or even ended up playing him falsely. 

“Have regard, O God, for Your covenant,” David prayed, “for the dark places of the earth are full of the houses of cruelty” (Psalm 73.20 LXX).

Recall that Jesus Himself was steeped in the Psalms. From boyhood, the Psalms was His Prayerbook, His Hymnal, His theological text. Indeed, the Psalms came ultimately from Him in eternity and through the Holy Spirit to David and the Prophets.

But as a human and Jewish Boy, Jesus sang it and memorized it and the Psalms passed into the deep layers of His human mind.

And thus you can find the Psalms everywhere in His words – in the Beatitudes, in the Lord’s Prayer, and in every single one of His Parables.

It is impossible to interpret the Gospels without the Psalms running constantly in one’s mind.

The victim left by the wayside is simply anyone that we might come upon. Someone that you know about. Someone that you recognized as being beat up by the cruelties of life. Someone beset by the Enemy. It is really not our immediate business to determine just who or what that Enemy is: whether it is demonic, foolishness, cultural or natural catastrophe, or completely irrational and unknown.

This sort of premature "theological pathologizing" may be essentially what the Lord is condemning when He denounced judgementalism so often.

It’s not for us to determine how they got beat up, or whether it’s their fault or whether they deserved it. It’s not even up to us to “lift up the hood” and to try to figure out what passions have left them in such a state. It's not for us to ask "Who sinned that this man was born blind?" 

The robbers in this Parable are “whatever in life” left our neighbor in such a tragic condition. Our neighbor is either someone like us or unlike us, even “the other.”

In any case, though, our neighbor is obviously, according to the Parable’s own terms, someone other than you or me. Our neighbor is our fellow human, our fellow bearer of the Image of God. 

Which means that “all of humanity” comprises the Neighborhood, and every human being is our Neighbor. “Inasmuch as ye have done unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it also unto Me” (Matthew 25.40).

This is a Parable less about interiority or introspection: it is a Parable about love, about kenosis (i.e., pouring out ourselves in self-sacrifice), about servanthood. According to the Lord's own terms in this Parable, the victim is not ourselves, but other than self. The victim is our neighbor -- whether or not we recognize him or her as such, whether or not we recognize the world and all of humanity, even creation, as the "neighborhood."

As we should.

The Good Samaritan Parable is about the giving of mercy. It is rather less about psychopathology.

Here’s the pivot, the “eu-catastrophe” of this Great Story. Here is the Mystery that has been thundering in the deep:

If humanity, beaten up by the fallen world, is the victim, the “man fallen by the wayside,” then who is the Good Samaritan?

Well, obviously, the Son of God. Jesus Himself. He bathed our wounds – deserved or undeserved – with the sweet oil of His mercy. He set us upon His beast of burden – all the prophets and the apostles and saints who established His covenant and His Gospel – and took us to the Inn, which is obviously the Church.

What happened at Bethlehem was the great Good Samaritan Who came – and Alone, He recognized our pain, our poverty, our lostness in the darkness.

From Bethlehem to Nazareth, to the desert temptation, to Galilee, to Jerusalem, to Golgotha, to Hell, to the Empty Tomb, to the Right Hand of the Father.

And at every place He saw you and me, and He didn’t pass by. He stayed, and remains in co-naturality with us. He is truly the Christmas Samaritan.

Let’s do the same.

As the chiefest of Good Samaritans, as the Gift of Christmas, He said, at the end of this Parable: "Go and do likewise."

universal and anti-universal notes

-- by the hand of iconographer George Makary (https://copticicon.com/icons)

In the ongoing, too often overheated, discussion of Christian universalism, here are some notes that might be helpful, especially in avoiding unnecessary runs down the garden path.

1. Universalism does not discount the possibility of hell -- just its co-eternity with God. Any such experience is not retributive, but purgative, therapeutic & educational.
   
   Gregory of Nyssa (et al) calls this a process of "purification," in which sin and death are consumed, making the "sinner no longer a sinner." This interval is the aeon after the present time and before the end, when there will be no more aeons but eternity.
   
   
2. Hell, or purgation, is not inflicted, but arises from the attempt of the self to oppose God's Love -- hence, it is the self revoking its own essence, which is to desire God's Love.
   
   
3. Universalism is not opposed to human freedom, as is often suggested. Rather, human freedom is preserved and protected by the eternal persuasion of divine love, as proclaimed and embodied by Christ.
   
   
4. To say that Jesus shall eventually surmount all & every refusal -- even the devil's -- is hardly an abrogation of freedom, but rather a vindication of Love & the "freeing" of freedom in theosis.
   
   
5. There is a difference between "aeon" (indefinite time, an age) and "eternity" (timelessness). The NT uses the former with regard to purgation, & reserves the latter only for God.
   
   
6. The interval of purgation may be long indeed. In fact, the "eternity" to which anti-universalists refer is probably this long interval, as they cannot conceive of eternity proper.
   
   
7. The notion that God would actively inflict retribution upon His creature, or that God would allow endless perdition (or annihilation), cannot be supported by apophatic or divine absolute-ness.
   
   
8. The difficulty of God's nature as love being also a despot that wages eternal wrath is more than the clay questioning the potter. That such conflation is utterly incoherent is a mark of the image of God that will not countenance such absurdity. "My thoughts are higher than your thoughts" is a statement of infinite transcendence, not discontinuity. That the thought of eternal punishment is (or should be) offensive is a sign that humanity has received God's revelation of His nature.
   
   
9. It is legitimate, even necessary, to interpret Scripture and Tradition under the rubric of moral coherence. Doing so is precisely the work of "the Spirit leading into all truth," a continuation of Jesus' hermeneutical instruction on the road to Emmaus.
   
   
10. Hermeneutics cannot avoid being essentially theological. Thus, one must interrogate the motives for defending the notion of eternal hell & divine retribution. What does such infernalism enable? What psychological & sociological structures are founded upon it?
    
    
11. It is likely that the old notion that eternal hell was necessary for evangelism & discipline was never valid. It is the knowledge of the Father through the Son glorified by the Spirit that leads to repentance & theosis. Alone. Nothing less.
    
    
12. It is true that since Constantine and Augustine, the majority of Christian leaders & writers seemed to think of Hell as unending torment, with no hope of change. But it is at least probable that before these two figures, the majority of Christians were universalists.
    
    
13. Universalism as above has not been condemned as heretical by Eastern Orthodoxy, despite the common assumption that the 5th Ecumenical Council had done so (which it did not), & despite some local anathemas saying so. Anathemas are not dogma & are often flawed.
    
    
14. Universalism produces a highly Christological eschatology. Christ reigns through the kenotic Spirit, exorcising the demonic, destroying sin and death, until everything is in voluntary and joyous submission.
    
    
15. This universal submission (with no remainder) of Philippians 2.9-11 is a free, loving, and saving submission. It is the perfecting of the person, vs the annihilation of person in despotic oppression.
    
    
16. The reign of Christ, in the actualization of "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth" is the "exorcistic" campaign of the Body of Christ against the antichrist structure. The demonic is constantly being evicted from the material realm. Permanently.
    
    
17. "Until I make Your enemies Your footstool." When sin and death are finally destroyed, when all "sinners are made no longer sinners," as Basil the Great said, then "God will be all in all."
    
    
18. It is inconceivable then that any should remain "sinner," after "Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire" (Rev 20.14). This verse is the goal of Christ's reign, the destruction of sin and death.
    
    
19. The lake of fire is the very fire St Paul describes in 1 Cor 3.15 -- the fire that burns up sin and death, but "he will not suffer loss, but saved as through fire." This is refinement, this is therapeutic. The sinner is made "not a sinner."
    
    
20. To suggest any other purpose for fire is to suggest another nature of God, and to diminish eschatology, and finally -- if Hell is made eternal, then the Lord is made to fail.
    
    

A few things I've learned, lately, about anti-universalism (which, like gnosticism, is more a mindset than a set doctrine):

1. If one does a word cloud from this online community, then the largest terms will be "heresy," "legalist," "weak-minded," "liberal."
   
   
2. Clearly, "legalist" is being confused with "casuist" or "sophist." It is unclear how universalism could be associated with Pharisaism, which seems to have needed the doctrine of eternal perdition for its own purposes.
   
   
3. Justinian is crucial in anti-universalism, if not essential, as he seems to be its main proponent. He is platformed with the Fifth Ecumenical Council.
   
   
4. The strategy for responding to substantial questions about the actual rejection of apokatastasis by the 5th Council (which is doubtful) is to make accusations about being overly technical, even "legalistic."
   
   
5. Origen is made out as the symbol of universalism, and is quickly denatured as a straw man. Sadly, this is hardly unprecedented in Tradition.
   
   
6. But then this straw man argument disregards the universalism of Gregory of Nyssa (who was never denounced, obviously) and Isaac the Syrian.
   
   
7. Also, it seems that anathemas from all sorts of authoritative levels (even quite low ones) are given great weight in anti-universalism. Anathematization is hardly a reliable foundation for dogma, and such practice could destabilize the entire practice of Tradition.
   
   
8. Anti-universalists quote lots of Scripture about hell, & blithely reject the aeon/aïdios distinction. But universalist ref's like John 6.45, 12.32, 17.7; Acts 3.21; Romans 5.18; 1 Cor 15.21, 15.28; 1 Tim 2.4; 2 Peter 3.9 are given short shrift, or torturous re-interpretive contortions.
   
   
9. And Rev 20.14? This is a clear statement that death & hell itself (which are not creations) will be annihilated from existence. Anti-universalists struggle to interpret this robustly.
   
   
10. It seems that there is an avoidance, in anti-universalism, of dealing robustly with the difficulty of hell persisting eternally. This is evil being co-eval with God -- and is that okay in one's theology?
    
    
11. I hope that the anti-universalist Fathers would not countenance the co-evality of hell with God. I wish that would be so with contemporary writers. I think most anti-universalists really mean an aeonic, indefinite interval of hell, rather than eternity.
    
    
12. But there are those, sadly, who embrace the notion that the pain of the damned is part of the blessedness of heaven. This is execrable, and that notion remains a cancer within the history of doctrine.
    
    
13. God doesn't need anything, & the God Who is Love does not need an anthropomorphized "satisfaction" of His wrath being excited or His honor being impugned. But some anti-universalists suggest that hell "must" persist, because "justice must be satisfied."
    
    
14. The simplicity and apatheia of God will not suffer any satisfaction theory. Mercy always trumps justice, as Isaac the Syrian insists. And if God does not "need" hell, then neither does any cleric or theologian.
    
    
15. And the poor & the meek, who have the Kingdom of Heaven & shall inherit the earth? They don't need hell after death because they probably have enough of it before death. But maybe those who are not poor & meek need hell -- or rather, the doctrine of it.
    
    
16. Anti-universalists, especially those with an existentialist bent, insist that eternal hell is necessary to preserve human freedom. But this is a false opposition. The ability to reject God's love is hardly a freedom at all. There is no possibility of eternity within the confines of hell, as hell is only a negation -- it is NOT a creation. Human freedom is the person's growth toward the perfection of his or her human nature. A willing devolution is hardly freedom -- and the overcoming of that possibility is the preservation and perfection of human freedom, not its abrogation.
    
    
17. There is no doubt that anti-universalists work hard to preserve the notion of eternal hell, despite that notion's absence in the Nicene Creed. It is not clear why there needs to be such commitment.

the rich man and lazarus -- getting the main point

– James Tissot (French, 1836-1902).
Le pauvre Lazare à la porte du riche, 1886-1894, at the Brooklyn Museum

 

The Rich Man and Lazarus: Getting the Main Point

By Fr Jonathan Tobias

 

Parables are stories

The Parables of our Lord are the most beautiful and meaningful talks in history. They are matchless in their depth. While the great third-century theologian Origen and the fourteenth-century poet Dante said that there were four levels of interpretation, G K Chesterton (the English Roman Catholic essayist from a century ago) said that he could count, in the Lord’s Parables, at least seven levels of meaning.

There’s no doubt about that.

Still, the Parables are simple and immediate. They “come at you” with personality, with familiar experiences and concrete images. In style and approach, these are not like St Paul’s epistles, which are filled with doctrinal and propositional presentations. 

No, parables are meant to be experienced as stories, first and foremost. While one is meant to take St Paul’s epistles, and the Lord’s addresses (like the Sermon on the Mount), with every sentence as a proposition, the parables are different.

No matter how deep they are, the Parables of the Lord are always fresh, ever new. 

With parables, one has to look for the moral of the story, which usually comes at the very end. Then, one reads that moral back into the story, and the whole thing opens up in depth and clarity.

This is important. It should be easy to tell the difference between a parable and a doctrinal exposition, because the simple experience of the two is sharply different. An exposition proceeds by logical argument, point by point.

But a parable proceeds by the building up of drama in the narrative. The listener or reader is meant to be “hooked in,” his attention focused on the characters and the chain of events. And then the crisis of the story and the climax, and the conclusion where everything is made clear.

The main point

I propose to read with you the great Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. We will try to pay attention to the story, and to look for the “main point,” the moral of the parable. What was the Lord’s main intent in telling this story? What does the whole parable say, the whole narrative? What is the main concern of this Scripture?

These questions differ from the unfortunately common attempt to construct a dogma about the afterlife out of details from the story. I understand that a number of writers in Holy Tradition have made inferences from this parable, and they have taken from the story a number of eschatological propositions. 

Some writers in Holy Tradition have taken from this parable some difficult, if not unfeasible, eschatological interpretations: they teach that the angels take up the souls of the righteous to the “bosom of Abraham” … that the souls of the unrighteous are sent to torment in the fires of Hades … that there is an uncrossable chasm between the bosom of Abraham and Hades.

In general, such writers like to see this parable as referring to the “intermediate state of the soul” – that is, the bodiless existence of the soul in the interval between physical death and the general resurrection at the Last Day.

Such an interpretation is a difficult case to make. For one thing, it is attempting to force out a  literalistic reading of a parable, which is a perilous thing. But at the same time these same writers interpret “the bosom of Abraham” in this parable as symbolically referring to the intermediate state of the soul in fellowship with Christ. So already, the strict “literalistic” interpretation is left behind.

But also, it is plain, for any reasonable eye to see, and any open heart, that parables must be taken in a literary sense, not literalistically. Stories are full of symbol and metaphor. They rely on rhetorical tropes like overstatement (hyperbole) and understatement (litotes). Everyone knows that in Aesop’s Fable, the fox moaning over sour grapes is not mainly about a fox denouncing grapes simply because he couldn’t get at them, but about an all-too-human and all-too-common defect. 

Everyone knows that Jesus really did not expect someone to literally pluck out his eye because it offended them, 

The key to interpretation 

Which brings up a traumatic memory. In my old life as a Protestant preacher, I was doing a Bible study on this very passage (Matthew 5.27-30). When we came to “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away,” one guy in my study got all excited and said, “Well that’s a great idea! They do that to thieves in Saudi Arabia – we should do that here!”

The guy missed the point of the parable altogether. In that chapter, Jesus was talking about adultery, and how it starts in the heart long before it comes out in actual behavior. That is the place where the passions must be fought against – the fight against the passions is symbolized by the hyperbole of cutting off one’s offending member.

It is interesting to look at what lay behind this guy’s harsh, literalistic interpretation. It is not surprising that he was legalistic in his Bible reading. In his angry daydreams, he populated eternal hellfire and damnation with many groups of people who bothered him. He resisted the whole idea of the Gospel as a proclamation of divine grace. “Surely, someone has to pay,” he liked to say.

It was clear that the reason why he could not lay hold of the real message of that parable of “cutting off the offense” was because his heart was closed off to the central message of the Kingdom of God – that our love for our neighbor is the necessary fruit of our complete love for God, because “He first loved us” (1 John 4.9). 

Our Lord’s linking of the Two Greatest Commandments confirms this undeniable fact: that there is no way to love one’s God without loving one’s neighbor. The Apostle John says this explicitly: “If any one says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4.20).

Love is the door into understanding the Kingdom: it is the prerequisite for “knowing the secrets of the kingdom of God.” Refusal to love is the reason why some people – like this guy, like the Pharisees and the scribes and the Sadducees – just can’t get it. “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand” (Luke 8.10).

That love is the “key” to understanding shouldn’t come as any surprise. God is Love is simply and only because God is Trinity – an infinite, eternal procession of mutual Self-emptying, from the Father’s processing of the Holy Spirit to rest upon His only-begotten Son in complete Self-revelation, and the Son completely returning Himself to the Father (and all that He has) through the Holy Spirit.

Gregory the Theologian called the angels the “second suns” of the Holy Trinity in reflecting the Light of Divine Love. We humans are the “third suns.” Insomuch as we love, we participate in the Trinitarian divine nature (2 Peter 1.4).

Love, obviously, is the only key to the Kingdom, and to its story and proclamation.

The audience of the Pharisees 

The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus opens up to us if we know, going in, this “exegetical key” of divine and Fatherly love. And we can contrast that love with the resistance of the Pharisees to that love. The Pharisees, along with others, had been attempting to confine the Kingdom of God to themselves. They were, in other words, shutting off grace from the very people that God wanted to hear about grace most. 

Jesus, the Good Shepherd, came to open up grace to the sheep: “When He saw the crowds, He had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9.36).

This Parable, then, takes a different tack from what we have come to expect. 

The Rich Man is described by Jesus as obviously rich – he “was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day” (Luke 16.19). 

You and I, from our vantage point, immediately take a negative turn toward the Rich Man. But that would not have been so with Jesus’ first audience, which Luke tells us included the Pharisees. To them, this linen and feasting would have been the marks of not only worldly success – but of religious success. To them, these obvious marks of riches were marks of divine blessing, amost like God’s endorsement of being “better than” other less successful people.

Poor folk like Lazarus, lying at the Rich Man’s gate, were interpreted by the Pharisees as being not only “un-blessed,” but even deprived of God’s grace. Obviously – to them – the abject poverty of Lazarus was somehow his fault. Maybe he was prodigal, or wasteful, in his spending and made poor financial decisions.

Even his physical affliction – his body covered in sores – was his fault, too. “Who was it that sinned, that this man was born blind?” the disciples asked Jesus about Bartimaeus (John 9.2), echoing the common presumption that had infected Israel since the Book of Job. The presumption was this: bad things happen to people because they must have been bad enough to deserve it.

That’s exactly how Job’s friends tried — and failed — to comfort him (and that’s exactly how we should not).

Some unlocking clues

But even here, with Lazarus, we get clues that the Parable is going to differ from expectations. The very name – Lazarus – would have been immediately associated by early Christians with Jesus’ good friend in Bethany, the one He raised from the dead after four days. The mention of the poor man begging for crumbs from the table and having his sores licked by the dogs is a heartbreaking reference to the Canaanite Woman: when Jesus initially refused to heal her daughter, He explained:

“Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7.27-28).

It is beautiful poetry that in one Parable, Jesus recalled this touching event: both the bread crumbs and the dogs are remembered.

Many times, we moderns are so familiar with Parables that we forget that we are pretty far removed from the first immediate hearing of the story. We don’t get shocked or rattled by the surprising turns, when the Story-teller lowers the boom. 

The lowering of the boom: slamming Pharisaical eschatology 

The boom fell precisely at the moment when the two characters, Lazarus and the Rich Man, died and entered into the afterlife. Jesus totally and profoundly and radically turned the eschatology of the Pharisees upside down:

“​​The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried; and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus in his bosom” (Luke 16.22-23).

This was all wrong. According to the usual religious opinion, it was the Rich Man who should have been carried by the angels to the bosom of Abraham – the final home and destination of all of Abraham’s children. His “election” had been confirmed by success, health and wealth – surely, God had favored him with His providence. And Lazarus should have been the one who had sunk down to Hades, because that’s exactly what he deserved. After all, the poor man had been practicing up for Hades all his life.

In overturning the Pharisees’ eschatological “map” of the bosom of Abraham and Hades, the Lord used a few features of this map to drive home His point of “reversal,” of turning all the common expectations upside-down.  Besides using the term “bosom of Abraham,” the Lord described the Rich Man as being in torment from the flames – a feature that seems to have been a favorite theme in the doctrine of the Pharisees. It may be that they were famous hellfire-and-brimstone preachers, who used the prospect of eternal torment to their rhetorical advantage. For them, God was a God of wrath Who demanded perfect adherence to the Law, punished any infraction, and looked upon any sin as a “debt” that had to be paid.

This system of penal satisfaction was described terrifyingly by the Lord in another parable: “​​Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing” (Matthew 5.26). You can almost hear the implicit echo of critique: “You threaten My sheep with perdition, but with what judgment you give out you shall receive” (Matthew 7.2). And this same theme runs through the Lord’s many mentions of Hades and Gehenna. 

Another feature of this eschatological map was the “uncrossable chasm” that separated the places of the righteous and the unrighteous: “Between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us” (Luke 16.26).

It is Abraham, in the story, who is saying this. This “chasm” may have figured prominently in the legalistic doctrines of the day, that there was simply no hope after death. Here is another feature of the Pharisees’ rhetoric that is turned upside down, and sent like a boomerang back to those who hurled it. “If you’re so confident that there is a hopeless sentence in the afterlife, and you use this to terrify your following, then that sentence may very well be your lot.”

Always hope

The fact remains that with the God of infinite and eternal Love, there can be no hopelessness anywhere or anytime. Surely, this is the meaning of Psalm 138 LXX: “Where could I go from Your Spirit? Where could I flee from Your countenance” (vs 7). Or “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19.26). Or “[Nothing] shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.39).

Another related fact remains that there are numerous accounts, in Orthodox Holy Tradition, of souls moving from Hades to Paradise. The story of Xenia of St Petersburg is one fine example of this. 

In any case, it is a general principle, in Orthodox Tradition, that any suffering in the afterlife is only for the purpose of therapy and education, not for retribution and the satisfaction of wrath or honor: “For the Lord disciplines him whom He loves, and chastises every son whom He receives” (Hebrews 12.6, quoting Proverbs 3.12). 

God loves everyone, and hence, this discipline and chastisement pertains to everyone – no matter who or when, or even what religious affiliation. Note that in this Parable, there is no mention of the circumcision (or, for that matter, the baptismal) status of Lazarus that qualified him to be in the bosom of Abraham. In the Parable of the Last Judgment (Matthew 25.31-46), there is not a single mention of whether the “sheep” were Christian or Jewish. 

Besides, several Fathers have pointed out that it is demeaning to Christ to ascribe to Him so worldly a motive as retribution. 

The utter absence of such qualifications or affiliations or identity underscores the universality of the Lord’s Parables, especially this one.

Now if the legalistic Pharisees were correct in their penal satisfaction eschatology, and their deterministic doctrine of health and wealth blessings, then yes, the chasm would need to be eternally uncrossable, and there would persist – for eternity – a realm of hopelessness and evil. God would have to permit evil to be as eternal as He. 

But here is the central irony of the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man: while the character Abraham said that the great chasm was uncrossable, the Storyteller Himself actually did cross over that chasm on Holy Saturday – that great and mysterious interval between the Crucifixion and Resurrection on the Third Day. In every Vesperal service for the Resurrection (ie on Saturday evenings), there are multiple emphases that the Lord descended into Hades and destroyed its gates. 

The Sadducees once attempted to entrap Jesus with an absurd afterlife question – a question that was not only absurd but also cynical (as they did not believe in any life after death). It was one of those ridiculous outlier questions that casuistic sophists just love: if a woman marries a man, and then he dies before giving her a child, and then she marries a succession of his six brothers, all with the same result, then who is she going to be married to in heaven?

Jesus answered them with this slam: “You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 22.29).

And Jesus is saying exactly the same thing to the Pharisees: “You don’t really get the scriptures – Moses and the Prophets – and you certainly don’t understand the power of God to do the impossible.” To us, Hades will seem hopeless and impossible. Not to God. 

“God will save a lot more people than you think, maybe even ahead of you.” That’s not an exaggeration: “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you” (Matthew 21.31).

A succession of reversals 

This Parable has been a succession of shocking reversals – especially for the Pharisees. Here was Jesus, an itinerant preacher who was attired in the impoverished philosophical simple garb of an agrarian prophet, denouncing their flowing vestments, their hunger for wealth and power by putting the Rich Man – someone who looked and lived very much like them – in Hades. 

Lazarus – the poor diseased wretch – was sent to the good place after death. There, he inherited the legacy of Abraham. There he was fed and received healing – everything that the Rich Man, who was his neighbor, had denied him. There he had entered the Kingdom of God, which is the full realization of God’s righteousness and the opening up of Eden again. 

Interestingly, the Rich Man recognized Lazarus and asked Abraham to send Lazarus to comfort him: “Send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame” (Luke 16.24). 

This is poignant, and unpleasant for the Pharisees: the very thing the Rich Man denied to Lazarus in their lifetime was what the Rich Man now wanted from Lazarus in the next. Abraham made this point explicit: “Son, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish” (Luke 16.25).

Everything is going to be turned around and upside-down, the Pharisees were told. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Don’t use speeches about the afterlife to reinforce your own power and wealth, the Lord was warning them.

A foreboding prophecy

But there is one more reversal. And it’s a tragic prophecy to boot. Having been told that Lazarus would not be sent to minister to him, the Rich Man begged Abraham to send Lazarus to his surviving five brothers.

He wanted Lazarus, coming back from the dead, to minister to them – “so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment” (Luke 16.28).

This interchange is laden heavily with meaning. The mention of Lazarus coming back from the dead could not fail to anticipate the fact that Jesus would indeed, in the near future, raise His own friend Lazarus from the dead.

And just like in that event, the raising of Lazarus would fail to persuade those whose hearts were closed off to Divine Love: “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead” (Luke 16.31).

The most tragic meaning of this sentence is its inescapable foreboding prophecy. The Storyteller Himself would do just that – rise from the dead. There had been no greater sign or proof of the Kingdom, nor would there ever be again, than Jesus Christ rising from the dead on the third day.

Signs, as Jesus had said, are never enough: “A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign,” He told the Pharisees and the Sadducees, “and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas” (Matthew 16.4).

Even that sign – the emergence of Jesus from the “great fish” of death after three days – would not be enough for those who could not hear Moses and the prophets.

Surely, Jesus was foretelling the reality that many would shut their eyes and stop their ears from His own Gospel, even with its confirmation in the Resurrection, even with the amplification by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

The last reversal

Still, there is hope. At the end, the Rich Man had shown, for the first time, concern for others. He didn’t want his five brothers to suffer in his place. He was now experiencing the force and consequence of his rejection of Divine Love – and the interval of that experience was now indefinite.

But he wanted to warn his brothers away from this place.

And too, he recognized goodness in Lazarus, who was shown to be his brother, who was now shown obviously to be “also is a son of Abraham” (Luke 19.9).

Are we reading too much into this Parable? That there might be hope for the Rich Man, who began this story – at least for us – clearly unsympathetic, clearly the villain?

The moral of the story 

The lesson of the Parable is clear. In this life, the Rich Man should have recognized Lazarus as his brother. He should not have ignored his brother’s starvation and pain. He should have been like the Good Samaritan and tended to his sores. He should have been like the little boy at the Feeding of the Five Thousand and offered him at least five loaves and two fishes.

He failed at this. And why? Surely he had enough and to spare. What is it with wealth and power that blinds a man to the suffering of his brother? What makes him so senseless, so devoid of pity and carefulness? What makes him “exalt himself and justify himself before men,” while cutting off even the closest relationship possible — one’s spouse — out of mere expediency?

“You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts; for what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God. The law and the prophets were until John; since then the good news of the kingdom of God is preached, and every one enters it violently. But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one dot of the law to become void. Every one who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery” (Luke 16.14-18).

The Law – Moses and the Prophets – was rejected by the Rich Man, and by implication, the Pharisees and Sadducees “who were lovers of money” and who were concerned mainly to exalt themselves. In that rejection, brothers and wives – who were closest in the neighborhood – were disregarded and discarded, left to suffer at the gate.

But now the Gospel is turning —  violently — the old eschatology upside down. People like Lazarus populate the Kingdom of God. 

In Hades the Rich Man suffered. But perhaps, the Rich Man was already in Hades. His rejection of Divine Love is precisely what Hades is.

It is always to be hoped that the Rich Men of this world – all the would-be Pharisees and Sadducees, those lovers of money who exalt themselves, who turn away from their neighbors and family, who break covenantal ties of love – will wake up one day and come to grips with the fact that they are in the Hades of their own making. After all, the Prodigal Son, when he came to his senses, recognized the fact that he’d been in the pig pen from the moment he left his Father’s house. And look — he turned out okay. 

It may be that one day they will ask Jesus then, “Please have someone go tell my brothers.”

And Jesus might say, “Well, then, go ahead.”

the angelic world

 

 – detail from Pinturicchio's The Annunciation (1501)

Since this Tuesday (November 8th) is the Synaxis (i.e., “gathering”) of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel (and all the angels), it would be good to go over a few Orthodox facts about angels. Angels are usually disregarded in thought and conversation. If the angels are thought of at all, it is usually in sentimental speech, or littered with maudlin devices like winged and rotund naked infants. Angelology – and yes, that word does exist – is not only deeply interesting, but it is necessary.

The nature of angels

Besides humans, angels are the only other beings in Creation that have “spirit.” Humans have spirit, soul, and body. Animals have souls and bodies. Angels have spirit and soul, but no bodies – hence, they are called “bodiless,” or “incorporeal.” Humans are the only species that have all three – spirit, soul, and body.

That said, angels are not omnipresent (i.e., “everywhere present”) – only God is that. They occupy time and space in a limited way: beyond this, not much more can be said about their locality. 

As bodiless, they are not physically perceivable – unless, of course, the Holy Spirit reveals them to human senses, as happens on numerous occasions in Scripture. This is one of the beautiful distinguishing features of the Gospel of Luke and its sequel, the Book of Acts.

Angels are sometimes called, by the Fathers, “second suns.”  Their whole nature is simply and completely to reflect the light of God, Who is “the First Sun.” But since God is the only One Who is infinite and eternal, no angel reflects all His light, but only a part. 

While humans share one single nature, but are as many persons as there are individuals, angels actually have as many natures as there are individuals. This is simply because of the particular reflection of God’s Light that their whole being is devoted to.

Their devotion and reflection is so complete that they really do not have any distinct nature in and of themselves, apart from the part of the Glory of God that they reflect.

This explains why, in the Old Testament, an appearance of an angel can be (and is often) the actual appearance of God – that is, an “angelophany” can actually be a “theophany.” This is clearly the case in the instance of the Visitation of Abraham, where three angels visit the patriarch. And one is addressed as the Lord Himself.

The assembly of angels

There is a far greater unity of angels than is true of humans. All the angels together are called an “assembly,” even a harmonious choir. 

It is such a unity in Christ, and such a clear love for Him, that is made possible by the Incarnation – the death on the Cross, resurrection, and ascension. This is why Jesus told the Sadducees that we will be “like the angels” in heaven. In opposing the Sadducean broken humanity (as evinced by their cynical question about a woman marrying a succession of seven brothers), Jesus described the heavenly humanity as unified and reflective of divinity. 

Speaking of the assembly of angels: they are described as “myriad” in number. They are uncountable: “I shall count them and they shall increase in number, more than the sands of the sea” (Psalm 138.18 LXX). They are not “infinite,” as only God is this. But they are beyond human imagination in number. St Basil the Great interpreted the Parable of the Good Shepherd (Matthew 18.12-13), in which the Shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to look for the one lost lamb. St Basil says that the lost lamb represents all of humanity, so thus the ninety-nine, representing the angels, means that angels outnumber humans by a factor of a hundred.

Angels are myriad in number because they are the immediate “executives” of God’s personal and divine action. We see in Scripture that individual angels are assigned to protect and manage different parts of Creation. St Michael, for example, is the guardian of the nation of Israel. 

Guardian angels

In fact, the entire angelic order, which Holy Tradition says is the lowest of the nine ranks of the bodiless powers, is composed of “guardian angels.” Jesus speaks directly of these angels in Matthew 18.10: “See that you do not despise one of these little ones; for I tell you that in heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.”

Every human has a guardian angel, who is in direct communion with God (as are all bodiless powers as “second suns”). The guardian angel is the closest friend, the one who persuades toward prayer and repentance and communion with God, the one who helps protect from spiritual harm.

It seems that guardian angels are appointed for individual persons, and also for groups of people. As mentioned, there are angels appointed for nations. In Revelation, we hear of angels appointed for churches in various cities. We do not know whether there are angels appointed for marriages and families, even extended families, but it wouldn’t be surprising.

The bodiless hierarchy 

The nine ranks of the bodiless powers are described by Dionysius the Areopagite (from his On the Heavenly Hierarchies) as follows: 1) Seraphim; 2) Cherubim; 3) Thrones; 4) Dominions; 5) Powers (or Virtues); 6) Authorities; 7) Principalities; 8) Archangels; 9) Angels. There is little revealed to human knowledge about exactly what these ranks mean. 

What is known is that the higher the order, the closer the order is to God. The higher order hands down divine enlightenment to the lower.

And here is something crucial. When we speak of heavenly hierarchy, we are speaking of a hierarchy that is entirely different from a worldly hierarchy. Here, in this fallen world, hierarchy means distance, even absence, as in the higher someone is the further away he is from us and the more he doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Hierarchy in this world means power and domination.

That is not at all the case in the heavenly hierarchy. God is everywhere present at all places in the hierarchy. And this hierarchy is a hierarchy of servanthood. The higher levels hand down knowledge of God through the self-sacrifice of kenosis, or self-emptying.

It is through this knowledge of God that the higher bodiless powers act as “agents of Divine Providence.” They are the ones who manage the stability of the physical universe. They may well provide the constants of physics. Through their efforts, the vast arrangements of planets, stars, galaxies and other great structures are sustained.

There is no place in time and space that is devoid of angelic presence. The sheer number of bodiless beings cannot be exaggerated. 

All this is done for the purpose of the revelation and glorification of Jesus Christ and the actualization of His Kingdom, as St Paul makes clear repeatedly, and is terrifyingly brought out in the apocalyptic visions of St John’s Revelation.

Demonic mismanagement

This may explain – as some Fathers teach – why bad things happen in Creation. Why are there disorders in the natural realm, catastrophes like hurricanes, earthquakes, and plagues? Not all bad things are produced by human evil. Many are natural catastrophes.

Some Fathers teach that these catastrophes are the result of “demonic mismanagement.” These are the bodiless powers that rebelled against God, joining Lucifer in his rejection of God’s love and providence.

Some of our own hymnody states outright that the devil and his legions rejected God mainly because of God’s plan to create humanity in His own image. It is plain jealousy that motivated the devil to tempt Adam and Eve in Eden.

Add to that the Orthodox emphasis that the entire hierarchy of the faithful bodiless powers are not only devoted to glorifying God in their direct prayer and work, but are – precisely because of this – completely devoted to the salvation of humanity and all Creation.

This devotion to humanity – as the heart of all Creation – is exactly what the devil and the demoniac despised the most. It is possible that the responsibilities assigned to these powers would fall into disrepair if that power would rebel against Providence.

That gives some possible explanation as to how and why natural catastrophes occur.

Angelic glorification in beauty

But far more important is the ongoing life of the faithful angels. They are constantly glorifying God. They suffer no confusion, as we do in the fallen world:: the Divine Light is completely clear to them, and they respond with joy and praise – their work in being “agents of Providence” is exactly that praise.

In the Song of the Three Youths (Daniel 3.58-82), all of creation comes together to glorify God: “bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord, sing and exalt Him forever.”

This is not figurative language: this is to be taken literally. The angels and the entire hierarchy of the bodiless powers lead and inspire the entire Creation – even the inanimate stones – in praise, the whole universe with all of its attributes sings and praises the Lord, with color, light, form, resonance, sparkling luminescence, transparency, fragrance, touch. Music is first and primarily the angelic glorificaton in melody, pitch and harmony, theme and variation, the great crescendo of seemingly disparate themes and chords finally reaching the heights of transcendent resolution.

So there is the visual and the auditory – all these ways are conducted by the Angelic World who behold the glory of God directly and convey it to us. But there is also direct thought. How is it that we are able to think of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth? Where does out philosophy, our wisdom, come from, except through the loving compassionate help from the faithful bodiless powers?

In a deep and mysterious way, human art that is beautiful participates in the angelic art of praise. That which is beautiful in our life – and there is much more of that than we think – is a procession of angelic glorification in beauty.

The angels pray for us, for the world and all Creation. They praise the Holy Trinity with their entire selves: their whole life is glory, and glorification.

And Beauty is the result.

Let us join them, as our Guardian Angels so deeply desire us so to do.

The hardest part

The hardest part of this whole discussion is not the angelic participation in the Creator’s continual action in His creation, and how we might happily think about it. That is indeed difficult, and is the root cause of all the philosophical work of humanity. Many times that work has failed utterly, with horrifying results in human history.

But many times, too, that work has apprehended much glory and beauty. Many – and I’m one of them – will think immediately of the golden legacy of our Holy Tradition. Others, too, will remember the voices of all the Mothers and Fathers of the Church who have called us to listen to our “better angels.”

But, I ask, why do we not listen, as Abraham Lincoln once whispered, to our better angels?

Why do we assume that the Angels are so exiled from our materialistic,secularistized, voluntaristic world? Is it their completel alterity from our constructions that so annoy us?

Why do we not listen, and see, and feel the reverberation of our souls (which is, if we’re honest, exactly what our thought really is)?

How is it possibile that we do not feel their myriad joy of complete self-oupoutring? Their rush to give themselves entirely over to the glory of the Son? Their ecstatic celebration of Life overflowing from the Triune Sun?

Soul, consciousness, this very moment. This here and this now.

Beauty calls you in desire, you and everyone.

 Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.

This is what the angels say. This is what the Angels’ Tradition say.

Listen. See. Be seduced by their beauty.

Enter into the communion of the Son.

✾

us and them

Us and Them

 

In a time when everyone and everything seem divided, it’s all “us vs them.”

Wendell Berry is 88 years old. As far as I know, he continues to drive a horse-drawn plow somewhere up in Kentucky (near where my ancestor moved from Edenton after the Revolutionary War).

And he’s come out with a new book from Plough Publishing: “The Need to be Whole.” In it, he takes on the all-too-common-sensible notion that “us vs them” is all there is.

No, it is not, he gently insists. We should work hard to replace the “vs” with “and.” The former is a disjunction, predicated on violence and domination. The latter is conjunction and community – what God is Himself.

There are Lovers and Haters in this world, the old farmer writes. But these two parties aren’t locked in a cosmic struggle of one side against the other. The Haters do this and to each other in spades. 

But the Lovers? They’re the ones who themselves are where conflict ends. They are the Peacemakers, the blessers of enemies, the forgivers of wrong-doers. The ones who turn the other cheek and go the extra mile. 

Yes, it is obvious that this soon-to-be nonagenarian is echoing the Sermon on the Mount. All his long writing life, he’s been one of the best vocalists of that particular section in Matthew, of which Mark Twain (hardly a friend of religion) suggested his most ascerbic witticism: “I am not troubled by the things in the Bible which I do not understand, but I am troubled by those things which I do understand and which I find very difficult to measure up to.”

It’s probably true that everyone thinks that she or he is on the good side, the ones wearing the white hats, and that every argument is like high noon in Gunsmoke: the other side simply must be the bad guy as he’s saying rotten things and tricked out in the obvious bad guy attire.

But Lovers become Haters when they hate, of course. “... it will be easy for the side of love first to understand love merely as opposite and opposed to hate, and then to generalize this opposition as an allegorical battle of Love versus Hate, exchanging slogan for slogan, gesture for gesture, shout for shout.”

The Sermon on the Mount commandment to love allows for no excuses. “But what about …?” is a question that is frustratingly dismissed, if only because that question assumes a “vs” and won’t rise to the “and.”

Wendell Berry has watched, over the decades, much of his beloved land – hundreds of acres owned and tilled by over two centuries of Berry generations – abused and polluted and subjected to modern consumption. The temptation to become adversarial was overwhelming.

“My concern might reasonably have made me an advocate for ‘soil conservation,’” he writes. “But I was a native. My affection for my place was already established in my heart and unspecialized. It included the people and other creatures along with the soil, and it has become ever clearer to me that you cannot conserve the land unless you can conserve the people who depend on the land, who care for it, and who know how to care for it – the people on whom the land depends.”

“You cannot conserve the land unless you conserve the people.” Yes and yes and yes. Here, writ large, are the words of love, instead of endless opposition. Instead of “vs,” here is the language of “and.”

The language of opposition and antagonism are replaced by “native” questions – questions that can only be answered in community and for community, from inside history and for the present and the future.

"How might we imagine imposing by mere law the principles of equality and justice and love upon a society dominated in its economic life by the violent principles of individualism, competition, and greed? How might we imagine the loyalty or patriotism that could protect the life of the land and the people of any place under the economic rule of 'maximum force relentlessly applied'? What must we do for the success of the personal generosity, the common decency, the good manners that are the ultimate safeguards of equality and justice, now that we apparently have settled into permanent war as the basis of our economy? Our economy, let us not forget, defines 'equality' as the 'right' of everybody to be as wasteful, violent, destructive, consumptive, lazy, and luxurious as everybody else … “

We are all tempted by the siren call of power, to win victory at great or even any cost.

But love doesn’t consist of the defeat of enemies. The prize of love is love itself:

“ ... If you see the world’s goodness and beauty, and if you love your own place in it (no deed or title required), then your love itself will be one of your life’s great rewards."

Get this book. Do a Bible Study with the Sermon on the Mount in one hand, and this book in the other. Be a Lover, not a Hater. 

Switch out “vs” with “and.”

the watershed miracle: good news for the poor

-- La résurrection du fils de la veuve de Naïm, James Tissot, Brooklyn Museum

 “Do not weep”

The raising of the widow’s son at Nain was a watershed.

The Evangelist St Luke emphasizes the fact that this is the very first raising of the dead performed by Jesus.

It took place at a large funeral. It was in the most tragic of circumstances – the newly-deceased was a young man, the “only son of his mother, and she was a widow” (Luke 7.12).

Jesus comforted the widow in the public procession behind the open coffin. “Do not weep,” He told her. 

He told her this not because He rejected weeping or because He prohibited it. “Blessed are those who mourn,” He said in the Beatitudes. “Weep with those who weep,” St Paul wrote later in Romans (12,15). 

After all, the shortest verse in the Bible might be the greatest: “Jesus wept” (John 11.35) as He gazed at the tomb of His friend Lazarus.

Even though He will “wipe away every tear,” Jesus understands and embraces weeping. He told the widow not to weep because He knew what He was going to do. Unexpected joy was about to happen: the greatest lack, the worst poverty, was about to be upended.

Jesus touched the coffin and said, “Young man, I say to you, arise” (Luke 7.14).

And he did.

The watershed

It’s really what the people said about this momentous event that links this miracle with what came before and afterward:

“A great prophet has arisen among us!” And, “God has visited His people!” (Luke 7.16).

This miracle of raising the dead was a Sign – a glorification by the Holy Spirit – of the presence, the immediacy of Son of God. All miracles are exactly that – this is their primary meaning. The Son of God has come to be the Once and Only Ever True King. He has come to bring about the only righteous government, the spiritual descent of the New Jerusalem. 

The real Signs of the Kingdom are thus apocalyptic: they reveal mystery, a depth of reality beyond our common perception.

These real Signs are also Trinitarian: they are expressions of the love of God the Father shown to His beloved world – all of us – through His revealing Persons, the Son and the Spirit.

That is why we should pay attention to tiny expressions like this in the Gospel: “He had compassion on her” (Luke 7.13). This is God Himself comforting those who mourn.

Obviously, the miracles that Jesus performed were not for the purpose of spectacle or crowd entertainment. 

The Gospel of Luke emphasized this point immediately after Jesus’ raising of the young man in Nain. The disciples of John the Baptist heard about this miracle, as the news of it spread far and wide in the region of Galilee (Luke 7.18-23). 

When they came, they saw firsthand Jesus curing “many diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many that were blind he restored sight” (7.21).

The main question

John the Baptist’s disciples asked Jesus the primary critical question – the question that every person was waiting upon, whether they knew it or not, since the world began:

“Are You the One Who is to come?”

This is the elemental expectation, unavoidable and psychologically deep-rooted, in every single human being. Human nature cannot help but to grieve and mourn the Fall of humanity from full communion with God.

Humanity, as a result, became desperately poor.

And human nature also knows – from the bottom of every heart – that Someone needed to come to repair that breach, to achieve reconciliation, to make Peace between God the Father and prodigal humanity that set its face in enmity against its Creator.

I know that many people might take offense at the notion that “all humanity lies in wait for the Saviour.” What about those who don’t believe that God exists? 

I understand and respect this. Nevertheless, the heart and height of humanity – unbelief notwithstanding – and of all Creation is the Logos of God Himself. Humanity was created in the image of the Son of God, as the Son is the only “image” of the Three Persons of the Trinity.

Thus, for humanity to turn against the God of Love – Who is the Trinity of Three Persons, Which is the very meaning and destiny of humanity – means that humanity will be desperately homesick in the most pathological meaning of that word.

So – “Are You the One?” is the question that we all ask, every single one of us, millions and billions of human hearts who have ever and will ever “live and move and have their being.”

When you need rescued, you’re always waiting for the Rescuer – no matter how hard and for how long you try to deny it.

And “Rescuer” is exactly what the word “Jesus” means.

Surmounting the Fall

So Jesus answered the question posed to Him by the disciples of John the Baptist:

“Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is he who takes no offense at Me” (Luke 7.22-23).

Yes, it is Jesus Who is the One Who was to come. He is the Only-Begotten Son of the Father, Who by the Spirit proceeding from the Father rests upon the Son and glorifying the Son to all humanity, to all Creation.

By the Spirit, Jesus the Son – as God but now also as human – overcomes the consequences of the Fall: by turns, He surmounts the debilitation of lameness, the corruption of leprosy, the closing-off of deafness, the immobility of death …

… and, saved for the climactic end of the phrase, the cessation of poverty by the announcement that “This is He, the Messiah,” the One we were always waiting for.

The reality of poverty

There is a consistent them that the Gospel of Luke makes very clear here – a theme that runs through the Gospels, the New Testament, and indeed the entire Bible. And that is this:

If the Garden of Eden means anything, it is that Creation was meant to provide every physical need. No one was ever to starve or to need protection from the elements. God’s Table was always richly laid in plenty – only if humans would reflect the fellowship and communion that was God Himself, the complete Self-sacrificing love shared by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit toward Each Other.

When humanity rejected communion with God in the Fall, it also rejected humanity. With the breaking away from God’s Table, then came the breaking of the Edenic common good. Famine arose from the Fall. So did abuse and exposure from the elements.

So did oppression, violence, strife, and famine. There cropped up, all over the world, “rich fools building unnecessary barns” (Luke 12.13-21). 

The “poor” are those who have been prevented from God’s Table, who have been obstructed from His providence in Creation. Even after the Fall, Creation is intended to provide every real need. 

I take the experience of Joseph in Egypt as instructive here:

Under the wise and righteous stewardship of Joseph (Genesis 41), Egypt – emphatically “post-lapsarian” (ie., after the Fall) and not at all like Eden –  was able to store up sufficient provender against seven years of famine. There was enough to supply the needs of more than just the Egpytians, but also many refugees … like certain refugees from Canaan: Jacob (Joseph’s father) and all his clan.

So it seems clear that God’s Providence through Creation continues to be sufficient for the real and physical needs of everyone in the world.

If people starve to death or suffer from desperation and exposure, it is not only because of the Fall, but because of very contemporary wickedness.

Scarcity seems to be, more often than not, a human construct. It arises from all the unnecessary barns of Rich Fools who live only to “eat, drink and be merry.”

So it should come as no surprise that when it comes to the signs of damage from the Fall, or symptoms of the rages of sin and death, God looks – from the Old Testament to the New – how the poor are treated. He looks at the welfare of weakest humans, the unborn, indeed, but He looks at the condition of all the weak, all the powerless, all the marginalized, all the left-behinds and leftovers from history. 

What God judges most

It is a deeply challenging thought that of all the sleights and insults to God’s holiness that man can commit, it is the withholding of hospitality and generosity from people – and all Creation – and the result of the millions, perhaps billions, who are poor that God most often condemns in Scripture.

“Do all the workers of wickedness know nothing at all? They eat up my people as they eat bread” (Psalm 13.4 LXX).

This is only one of many, many verses about God’s preference for the poor in the Bible, Old Testament and New. At the Last Judgment, when the sheep are divided from the goats, what is the main standard upon which humanity is judged?

However we treat the poor is exactly how we treat Jesus Christ: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the last of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me” (Matthew 25.40).

What does it mean to be poor? Simply this: desperation. It is not just living “hand to mouth.” For too many, the hand never makes it to the mouth.

For too many in this world, there is a constant panic over food, shelter, water and heat, clothing – not just for themselves, but for their children, the elderly and infirm.

Henry David Thoreau famously said “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” He is talking about the generalized depression and anxiety that modern man suffers. Existential philosophers and psychologists have said much the same.

Modern desperation

But there is no such thing as “quiet” desperation. For the poor, desperation is always very loud. And frankly, out of all the concerns that Jesus spoke about in the Gospels, the “quiet desperation” of modern man ranks pretty low, especially compared to the real desperation that is cured not by good intentions, but with healing, provision, and resurrection. 

The implication is clear: modern man is miserable mainly because he is not living according to his created nature, according to God’s design of providence in Creation. He has subjected himself to alien goals and destinies – a hunger for power and wealth rather than righteousness.  It is for this reason that Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God (Mark 10.25).

If you set your sights on power and wealth – if your hunger takes you into violence and selfishness – then you will starve your heart, that is, the very modern “quiet desperation.”

There is, in the world of the Fall, never any good news for the poor. If there’s a war, they are always the ones who suffer first and suffer most. If there’s an economic recession or depression, they are the ones first to go homeless and starve. If there’s pollution, they’re the ones who have to drink poisoned water and breathe toxic air. If there’s global warming and rising sea levels, they are the ones who get flooded first.

At long last, the Good News

Into this bleak context, Jesus walks and speaks:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4.18). 

The Good News (ie., euangelion – “evangel” – in Greek, and Gospel – from Old English “godspell”) for the poor is that the Kingdom of God, which is the immediate presence of the Risen Son ushered by the Spirit at Pentecost, overcomes the Fall.

“They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11.9).

“Knowledge” here means full communion in the Holy Spirit, fellowship with the Holy Trinity itself.

And in that very communion, in the Kingdom of God, there will be no lamentation or sorrow, there will be no violence or domination, there will be no infirmity or pain, there will be no hunger or thirst …

… no one will be left behind, no one will be pushed away from God’s Table of Providence.

The biggest miracle

Here is the main point:

The promise of “He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor“ (Luke 4.18) is fulfilled three chapters later: “The poor have good news preached to them” (Luke 7.22).

The poor getting good news – the good news of the Kingdom starting to grow in the here and now – is the greatest of Jesus’ Gospel miracles, the Signs of the Kingdom. 

The Gospel of Luke emphasized this main point from the beginning. Who was it in all the earth that got the good news of the Saviour’s birth? The humble shepherds watching their flocks by night: it was the poor who visited Jesus first.

This preaching of the good news to the poor is exactly what John the Baptist was looking for: because only the Son of God Who has now and also become the Son of Man can actualize that Kingdom as a reality.

The Kingdom in the light of the Son is the overturning of the order of sin and death. It is “abundant life” (John 10.10). It is “drinking deeply from the torrents of God’s delights” (Psalm 35.8 LXX).  

The Kingdom is so contrary to the ways of the Fallen World that Jesus’ descriptions of the “blessed poor” hardly make any sense – especially to those who put their hope in commonsense riches and in power.

His Words and Signs are all unsettling. He defeats the temptations of the devil himself. He evicts demons with a simple command. He heals multitudes of every kind of ailment. He calls His disciples by telling them to put their nets down on the other side of the boat – as if that would make any difference – and it did. 

He forgives sins – which should always be amazing, as sin is the worst ailment of all. The Pharisees and religious experts were correct in being scandalized by His doing so (Luke 5.21): no one – until He arrived as the Expected One – could even dare to forgive sin. 

He heals and harvests grain on the Sabbath – because healing infirmity and feeding hunger are exactly what the true “Sabbath rest” calls for.

In Luke 6.20-49, He gives the “Sermon on the Plain,” and upends the cynical “it is what it is”  sensibilities of the Fall:

“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh” (6.20-21).

Notice that Jesus is not giving a spiritual, allegorical meaning to the word “poor.” One can add “spiritual impoverishment” to the interpretation of “poor” (πτωχὁς), but one must never disregard the primary meaning of “physical destitution.”

Because in Him – and later on, in His continuing Body after the Ascension, which is the Church – the hungry are fed. He demonstrated this in the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Now, we feed the poor, beginning at the Eucharist on the Holy Table, and extending from there the generosity and hospitality of the all-sufficient Christ to the poor of the world.

Just as Jesus told us to pray: “Give us this day, our daily bread …”

Upending the Fall

The Church is only the beginning of the Kingdom. 

Just as our work to comfort the poor has only just begun, so also is our work of healing and leading everyone to the knowledge of their salvation from sin and death, and resurrection into eternal life in Christ.

This all starts in the here and now, and starts from the inside out, in us. The Kingdom of God, Jesus says, grows from smallness (like a mustard seed or a lost coin, even the widow’s mite), weakness, even apparent foolishness – but mightily it grows:

“The Kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden; and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches” (Luke 13.19).

The Presence of Christ does not grow from the top down, in power and violence, riches and domination. It does not and cannot grow from the State. “My Kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus said to the tyrant Pilate. His miracle at Nain made this clear from the start. And how many times have we Christians forgotten this truth over the centuries.

It grows from the heart to the complete person's body and soul, to the family, to the neighborhood. “Love your neighbor as yourself. Love and bless your enemies. Feed My sheep. Forgive freely as you’ve been forgiven. Be salt and light.”

“Let it be that through Me – and you – the poor shall eat and be satisfied” (from Psalm 21 LXX).

“And turn the world upside down.”

Which the Kingdom of God, the Body of Christ, did just that. 

Every miracle performed and every word spoken by Jesus is just this command, to upend the fallen world in His Name.

Just think – the people recognized all of this in that great Sign: “A great prophet has risen among us” and “God has visited his people!”

All because Jesus did His first raising of the dead, of the widow’s young son at a place called Nain.

✾

the great man theory and the boasting of st paul

-- Le Lavement des Pieds, by James Tissot, Brooklyn Museum

How is Jesus to be represented?

This is the most critical question in history. Is He to be proclaimed and presented in greatness, as greatness has been generally understood?

But does that greatness -- with all the trappings of royalty, riches, naked power, even domination and violence -- square with the Jesus we read in the Gospels? Did the character of Jesus' presence change from His earthly ministry after He rose from the dead and ascended into heaven?

Apparently, to the latter question, some indeed think so.

I do not.

The bleak life

The world of the Apostle Paul and the early church was a lot wilder than what we usually think.

People were generally pessimistic. Most people in the Graeco-Roman world of the Roman Empire (that stretched all over the Mediterranean, touching on India in the East and Ireland in the northwest), really believed that nothing was going to change. If you were born poor or enslaved, then that was the way you were going to die. 

And the afterlife was just a faded existence of shadows, languishing forever underground (literally) in Hades or Tartarus.

And it was always and only meant to be. You were pre-determined by fate. 

[How intriguing it is that certain of these pagan pessimisms continue on, as undying artifacts even in Christianity: fate and determinism, underground and fundamental inferno, even the idea that nuptial relations are somehow impure and disqualifying from consecration.]

This, obviously, worked out just fine for the aristocrats and princes of the day: it was an effective means to keep the lower class profitably in its place.

Secret societies and conspiracies

Well, this is just wretched stuff. So it’s not surprising at all that into this Graeco-Roman world came all sorts of imported religions, mostly from the Orient.

“Mystery religions” and cults sprouted up like mad. They promised an escape from this prison of fate and doom.

There were all sorts of wild cults that cropped up all over the Roman Empire. Most, if not all, insisted on secrecy. There were coded signs and secret gestures. There were dark rituals held in caves and way out in the countryside. 

Some of these cults were called “Dionysian.” They engaged in wild drunken frenzies called “bacchanalias” (from the Greek god Dionysius, or “Bacchus” as he was known in Latin). They’d whip themselves up into excess and ecstasy, speak in tongues, and often engage in violence (occasionally, it is said, in homicide).

The Gnostic hope

On the tamer and much more civilized side was the “Gnostic movement.” This was more of a culture than a specific religion. It had its influences on the Jewish community and even in the new Christian community of the first century.

Gnostics generally believed that there was a mystical path to escape the cold hard fate of the dark world. Maybe, if one could grasp a “knowledge” (ie., “gnosis,” hence “Gnostic”) of the way things really are – not the “fake news” of what everyone else knew – then one could pass through a whole sequence of levels and gates and tollhouses from this present darkness up and up and up to “The One.”

I don’t wish to demean this Gnostic desire. It is a valid one. It is a rejection of that horrid despairing culture of fate and oppression.

But the problem of Gnosticism, aside from its rejection of the Incarnation, was that it left the rest of Creation behind. It was essentially individualistic. There was little regard for the neighbor and the neighborhood. There was little to no care at all about the land and the animals, the rest of the people and the world.

Gnosticism was very much a “religion of escape.” 

I’m sure you’re already thinking this: “Holy smokes, nothing much has changed. We’ve got mystery religions and gnostics all around us today.”

Indeed. There are all sorts of Christian communities that are “religions of escape.” Conspiracy theories are the “mystery religions” of today that dismiss common civility and rationality as “fake news.” We’ve got loads of secret societies – real ones, not just online – that promise to whisper, in your ear, the “way things really are.”

The new society

So when the Christian Gospel entered the scene, starting about 33 AD, it was viewed very much as another Gnostic Jewish sect. 

It’s true. Christians were considered by the Roman Empire as Jewish until about 70 AD. At that time, the Jews rejected Christians because they did not join them in the Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans. And thus the Romans, because of this rejection, considered the Christian movement an illegal religion and began to persecute them. Why? Because the Christian community refused to join in with the Graeco-Roman crowd of a thousand gods, where every religion was counted as valid, just as long as you considered the Roman Emperor a god, too, and burned incense in front of his statue.

Because the Christians refused to become part of this polytheistic civil religion of the Roman Empire, they were called “atheists.”

I’m not kidding.

Signs and wonders

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. In this first century especially, the proclamation of the Gospel was often accompanied by “signs and wonders.” There were many miracles of dramatic healings and exorcisms.

These signs were mainly shown to demonstrate that this Christian movement was an extension of the Gospel ministry of Jesus Christ Himself. He was indeed sitting at the right hand of God the Father, and through the Holy Spirit He was enacting the Kingdom of God through His Body, the Church.

There is nothing like “signs and wonders” to attract a crowd or create a movement. Great men have always used spectacle to gain power.

A man named Simon Magus (ie, “the Great One”) was performing spectacle in the land of Samaria (north of Judea) in Acts 8.9-24. He heard Philip (of the Seventy)  preach the Gospel and believed and was baptized.

Then, after he saw the “signs and great miracles performed” by Philip and the Apostles Peter and John, he actually had the chutzpah to go up to the apostles, offer them money, and say “Give me also this power” (Acts 8.19).

He found that you don’t say things like that to real apostles, the true representatives of the true King. “Your silver perish with you,” the Apostle Peter said, “because youth thought you could obtain the gift of God with money. You have neither part nor lot in this matter, for your heart is not right before God” (Acts 8.20-21).

Simon Magus thought Christianity was expanding through greatness, through spectacle, and he wanted to get in on the ground floor of this new powerful scheme.

But he was way off the mark.

The golden rule

In the Body of Christ, in the only true Kingdom with the only true King, one doesn’t succeed through performing spectacle and get powerful by manipulating crowds.

One becomes great by being the least. One becomes first by being last. 

Because the Master Himself, Jesus Christ, came to serve, not to be served. He denied Himself, and poured out His life as a ransom for many.

Christianity is about meekness, poverty in spirit. It is only about peacemaking and proclaiming God’s forigveness and mercy, and giving forgiveness. 

Christianity is opposite from and upside down to everything we are used to in the world. We don’t take an eye for an eye (ie., lex talionis). We don’t be nice to our friends and rotten to our enemies. We don’t harbor grudges, keep long accounts, and take revenge.

Jesus tells us to do good despite our getting done bad by. “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return … Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” (Luke 6.35-36).

The great man theory

There is a “Great Man” theory in the writing of history. Many historians believe that the history of civilization is ushered by “Great Men” who move mighty peoples and events. These men might be good and wonderful like Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius, or awful and bad like Hitler, Stalin, Orbán, and Mussolini – what matters in this theory is that Great Men forcefully make a big impact on the way things really work.

Christianity completely disagrees. We reject the “Great Man” theory in the Body of Christ. We don’t need heroes or illustrious men. We do not bow and scrape before kings or despots. We are not impressed by power and celebrity. We don’t pay particular heed, certainly not favoritism, to the rich and to the aristocracy:

“Not many of you were powerful, not many were of noble birth” (1 Corinthians 1.26).

“Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you, is it not they who drag you into court?” (James 2.5-6).

The Great Man theme of history is a symptom of authoritarian ideology that is infecting the world, as all sorts of people are relapsing into fan clubs for Strong Men like Stalin in today’s Russia, Franco in today’s Spain, Mussolini in today’s Italy, even Hitler in nationalistic cults all over today’s world.

So much agony has been inflicted, so much blood has been spilled, in the self-promotion campaigns of the Great Man. How much abuse, how much propaganda and cultism has been erected by sycophantic structures for the sake of protecting and enabling the power of the authoritarian? The world reels.

True greatness

Authority and leadership in Christianity is totally the opposite of the Strong Man. Christian authority and headship go only in the way of servanthood, of self-emptying (ie, kenosis), of self-denial and bearing one’s own Cross …

… of following in the way of Jesus, Who thought His equality with God the Father as something not to be grasped (Philippians 2.6), but instead, “humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (2.8).

The symbol of Christian authority is not in a crown nor a sword, not kingly robes and thrones or majestic edifices.

The symbol of Christian authority – true greatness – is Jesus washing the feet of His friends, on the way to Golgotha.

Enter the Apostle Paul. He worked tirelessly and at great pain and self-sacrifice (2 Corinthians 11.23-29), just like the Risen Christ told him to on the Damascus Road (Acts 9). 

It is a little-known fact that Christianity, at the time, had a lot of poor representatives. There were many like Simon Magus who subscribed to the Great Man Theory, and tried to apply it to themselves.

They were the “super apostles” that St Paul mentions in 2 Corinthians 11.5. These Great Men were not the real Apostles of the Twelve or of the Seventy. They were instead poseurs – self-anointed celebrity preachers who loved fame and celebrity. Many of them – and I know this is hard to believe – actually call themselves “super apostles.”

Today’s “super apostles” (and we've got them by the hundreds) love huge venues and slickly produced variety shows and televised extravaganzas (eg, the hideously called “New Apostolic Reformation” movement), so they didn’t disappear after St Paul.

They did a lot of boasting, of self-promotion. They preached unceasingly about their special hyper-spiritual experiences. They spoke in tongues. They ginned up the crowd. They even performed miracles. 

They were mightily impressive. They were Great Men indeed. And they raked in the cash.

The Weak Man Theory

Only at this point, in this context, can we understand the odd, arresting words of the Apostle Paul: “I must boast; there is nothing to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 12.1).

The Apostle Paul, too, had visions, just like the Super Apostles. He had been “caught up” (ie, “raptured”) into the same heavenly worship as would the Apostle John later on in Revelations. He too heard things that he couldn’t really understand and certainly could not articulate.

But St Paul said that he could not really “boast” or self-promote or brag (because that’s what self-promotion is) about visions and ecstasies at all. 

Instead, what St Paul actually could boast about was not his strength or greatness, but his weakness.

“I don’t want anyone to think more of me than he sees in me or hears in me” (2 Corinthians 12.6). That is perfect congruence. That is the total opposite of hypocrisy.

That is also outright foolishness in real-world politics. That kind of thinking will get you nowhere in power and wealth. That is not the way to become a celebrity or influencer on TikTok or Instagram.

And then St Paul doubles down on this anti-Strong-Man anti-common-sense:

“And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too enthusiastic” (2 Corinthians 12.7).

This is hardly the stuff of charismatic religion, hardly ecstatic. This is not dionysian enthusiasm at all, not the stuff you hear in rallies or crusades.

Who knows what the thorn is? There have been many theories. For my part, I’m pretty sure that it was bouts of severe depression – and who could blame Paul for these, as he had to contend with memories of his own persecution of the Christian Church that he now loved, that he lived for, and that he was suffering and dying for?

Three times St Paul begged for relief from this torn. Three times -- despite the fact that the Apostle had gone up into the third heaven and had started many churches and had performed miracles and written the Epistles that would forever structure Christian doctrine.

God had other ideas: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 6.8).

In the Body of Christ, Christ can only be King once we resign from the throne of self. The Holy Spirit – which is the Comforting Kingdom of God – will fill a soul, a psyche, only when it is no longer stuffed by ideology and idolatry.

“I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses,” the Apostle said, against all the histories of the world, “so that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Corinthians 6.9).

The Apostle Paul utterly rejected the Strong Man Myth.

He subscribed, instead, to the Weak Man Theory.

“But God forbid that I should glory,” he wrote to the Galatians, “save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Galatians 6.14).

There was never, nor ever will there be, any greater weakness than crucifixion, far worse than any weakness inflicted by a thorn.

Yet at that very point, the "still point of the turning world," is that singularity, precisely when and where, God revealed his greatest power, His greatest Sign and Wonder of all time, that He is indeed and only Love.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

✾

the christian nationalist's problem with amos

"During the long and peaceful reign of Jeroboam II (786-746 BC) Israel attained a height of territorial expansion and national prosperity never again reached. The military security and economic affluence which characterized this age were taken by many Israelites as signs of the Lord's special favor toward them which they felt they deserved because of their extravagant support of the official shrines."

-- Dr R Lansing Hicks (Yale University), in his introduction to the Book of Amos, in the New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: Revised Standard Version (1971) -- my favorite Bible, purchased at Winebrenner Theological Seminary in 1978

For those who like thinking the nation has special providential status, even an eschatological role, they might do well to consider the prophetic peril of being "God's chosen nation" -- for this is surely what Christian Nationalism claims.

If one wants to be a Christian Nationalist, then one subjects herself or himself to the Prophets of the Covenant, Old and New.

Like Amos:

"Hear this, you cows of Bashan in the mountain of Samaria,
who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,
who demand of their husbands 'Bring so we may drink' ...
Behold the days are coming upon you
when they shall take you away with hooks ...
and you shall go out through the breaches ..."
(Amos 4.1-3)

"Seek good and not evil that you may live,
and so the Lord, the God Sabaoth, will be with you
as you have claimed.
Hate evil and love good,
and establish justice in the gates"
(Amos 5.14-15)

"I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies ...
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your instruments I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream"
(Amos 5.21-24)

"Hear this, you who trample upon the needy,
and bring the poor of the land to an end ...
The Lord has sworn by the honor of Jacob:
'Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.
Shall not the land tremble on this account ..."
(Amos 8.4,7-8)

And that's just Amos. One should be careful about making claims of possessing extraordinary historical status. If there's anything clear about the history of Israel in the Old Testament, it's that God expects more from His people. Their status of being His chosen people never excused them from moral obligation: actually, it increased the obligation.

A supposedly "Christian" nation is one that will be marked not by territorial gain or military success. It will be one that is only anticipated by the critiques of Amos and all the prophets. A truly Christian nation, or people, will be "peculiar," contrary to the ways of the world, the "realpolitik."

A "Christian Nation" will embrace the poor instead of abusing them, and find in their company the kingdom of heaven.

Such a people will mourn the suffering of the weak, the marginalized, the oppressed.

They are meek instead of self-aggrandizing, instead of self-promoting, instead of grasping for greatness -- because the real arc of real history bends toward justice.

They long for righteousness, real (not legalistic) righteousness that heals and restores all the people and the land, and that longing is fulfilled in "Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

They are merciful, and they are forgiven as they forgive.

They are pure in heart and refuse to be confused by ideologies. They seek instead the theological vision of God's love for His creation instead of seeking power and calling what they do "Christian" simply because they do it.

They are peacemakers. They do not denounce. They do not revel in conflict. They do not fuel their power with grievance and scapegoating.

In short, such a "Christian Nation" is utterly impossible within the confines of world politics. Such a State would have to live by the Beatitudes and the entire Sermon on the Mount in a world that is governed, secularly, by the sword (Romans 13.1-4).

And what is usually overlooked here is this terrible fact: despite the fact that the State is an authority "instituted by God" to "execute His wrath on the wrongdoer," it is still true that "he who lives by the sword dies by the sword" (Matthew 26.52).

There is utterly no salvation, no grace in the way of the sword.

"My Kingdom is not of this world" (John 18.36) -- so said the only true King.

Instead of holding to the foolish political notion of so-called "Christian Nationalism," it is simply better to love one's nation, its land and people, as a gift from God.

It is better to actually be God's people and to follow the call of the Sermon on the Mount in whatever place one is.

Let the State be the State, and "be subject to the governing authorities" (Romans 13.1).

But pray, do not set your faith in getting power as a Christian. "Put not your trust in mortal princes" (Psalm 146.3).

Otherwise, a Christian Nationalist is going to have to contend with the likes of Amos, no less.

a nonpartisan voter’s guide for the perplexed

 

“When you need a plumber, you want a good plumber. You don’t hire one only because he’s a Christian.”

That was Rev. Pat Robertson, decades ago on his 700 Club broadcast. He was talking about government and elections. “You want someone competent in positions of responsibility,” he said to co-hosts Ben Kinchlow and Danuta Rylko. “By the same token, you don’t ask a Christian plumber to do neurosurgery just because he’s a Christian.”

He was spot on. Competency and responsibility are the primary qualifications for an office or position in civic institutions.

That should go without saying. There have been many candidates who were completely confident, even enthusiastically so, about their own hi-gloss quality.

They may even think that God spoke to them and urged them to run. They may be one hundred percent sure that they will win because God told them so. 

This is tragic thinking. It reminds me of many instances when, while a youth minister and seminary prof, moonstruck young men would tell me that they just knew that God had chosen for them a certain pretty girl to be their “helpmeet.”

And I would always ask, “But did God tell the girl this?”

How many candidates for office will find out on election day that the Lord must have forgotten to tell the voters the same thing He said to them?

I don’t think God calls anyone to political office, mainly because He wants everyone saved. 

I do not doubt that such passionate candidates are sincere. But they are sincerely wrong.

Sincerity cannot be the sole qualification for office. 

Then there are some who are not sincere. These are the ones who have agendas that are contrary to their community and to democracy. One good way to flush out such a ruffian is to ask whether he (or she) will accept the results of the election, or if he’ll be just another sore loser.

In putting together a nonpartisan voter’s guide for the perplexed, one might consider a few more qualifications to add to competency and responsibility. 

That’s assuming, of course, a shared commitment here to democracy and civilization. If there’s a desire for a dictator or some other malodorous un-American society, then number one, that would count as a hidden agenda (see above), and number two, dictators don’t need voter guides in the first place.

The last thing dictators want is a fair and wide-open election. The only election they like is the predictable sort – the kind where only their friends (dead or alive) vote.

So add this to the voter’s guide: American. That is, a person committed to the democratic republic. A person who respects the institutions and traditions of our political system. It is really not a good thing at all that being a maverick or going rogue has become such a fad.

And, dare I say it, could it be that populism is no good for the population?

Here’s an idea: for every candidate running for political office, from local to state to federal, he or she must first pass a hard test on American history and civics. It should be at least as hard as the one given to people who want to be naturalized as American citizens.

What grade do you think today’s politicians would get, circled in red at the top right-hand corner of the exam? And please, no essays on this test for obvious reasons: a maximum of 25 words would drive most lectern-pounders madder than a Wampus Cat in a rainstorm.

And that brings up another item on the guide: Civility. 

I don’t just mean “decency” here. Although it sure wouldn’t hurt a candidate to have a passing acquaintance with genteel speech instead of being an enemy of the English language. These days, we poor Americans are awash in a storm surge of uncouth knavery. 

“Goodness,” the peanut gallery raises an objection, “Andrew Jackson’s campaign was mad as a mule chewing on bumblebees. Jefferson and Adams went at it hammer and tongs.”

Objection overruled. Just because a problem is old doesn’t make it not a problem. An old problem is still a problem. I think we all agree that sin is bad and sin is old, but it’s still bad.

Civility means that a citizen (or candidate) addresses his fellow Americans (even the opposition) with respect. It means that a politician is willing to work with the other side of the aisle and compromise for the greater good. 

Civility also means that a politician is never going to only vote with his party. He’s going to say no to the Whip. A lot. And Republicans will play poker (literally) with Democrats over bowls of Senate Bean Soup (which is pretty good, by the way).

Civility is a nice Johnny Walker blend of rationality and courtesy. On one hand, a rational candidate would avoid conspiracy theories like a red light district. On the other, a courteous candidate would debate, with dignity, his opponent on the issues and actually answer questions posed by the moderator, instead of squirreling off to that miserable and craven tactic of “pivoting” to memorized lines from his stump speech.

I try to vote at every election. This is the American thing to do. I also pray that the Lord will protect our beautiful country and democracy, and establish peace, justice, and reason in our world. This, I’m quite sure, is the Christian thing to do.

I pray, too, for clarity in perplexity. And for leaders who are grown up. Who are not partisan.