Just Mercy

This homily is posted a week early, as I have a family reunion to attend this coming Sunday. The icon above is of Christ Pantokrator, at once merciful (left) and just (right). I am both humbled and enthralled by George MacDonald’s powerful meditations on the oneness of God’s justice and mercy. Would that some of his spirit, in the mystery of God’s Providence, express itself here below.

Scripture: The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 20), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Christians can often sound a bit bipolar when talking about God. There seems to be this general understanding that the God of the Old Testament was all about justice and vengeance, while the God of the New Testament is all about forgiveness and mercy. We may have trouble squaring the God who forgives seventy times seven with the God who unleashed the Ten Plagues of Egypt.

This is not a new mistake. Early in the Church, a heretic named Marcion declared that the God of the Old Testament must have been an entirely different God from that revealed in the New—a false god, an evil god, a Jewish demon who had nothing to do with the Christian Christ. Best to be rid of him altogether! Accordingly, Marcion tried to do away with anything Jewish in the Bible, which proved quite the feat, given that every single book of the Bible was written by Jewish people, about Jewish people, and largely for Jewish people.

In response, the Church reaffirmed that the Old and New Testaments are one and the same revelation: that the New Testament lies hidden in the Old, and that the Old Testament is revealed in the New. The God who created the heavens and the earth, who proclaimed, “Let there be light!” is the same God who was born of the Virgin Mary, who proclaimed, “This is My Body, given for you.” God is not schizophrenic. He doesn’t have multiple personality disorder. The Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier are Three in One. The God of justice and vengeance is the God of forgiveness and mercy. It’s a paradox, but not a contradiction.

Nor is it a roulette wheel. I remember, years ago when I lived in Boston, that there was a newspaper column jointly authored by a Lutheran pastor and a Roman Catholic priest. And a woman had written in to confess the terrible guilt that she suffered over an abortion that she’d had in her youth. And these two experienced, theologically educated clergy replied in print to her anguished tears: “We never know if God will respond to us with His justice or with His mercy. But let us hope that it will be with His mercy.”

Holy Jesus. That response was so wrong—so utterly theologically incompetent—that to this day I hardly know where to begin. But I have to start by saying no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. When someone confesses their brokenness, when someone repents of their sins, when someone in the midst of vulnerability and tears begs the mercy of a called and ordained minister of the Church of Jesus Christ, there is no uncertainty, there is no question as to how God will respond. The penitent is forgiven!

That doesn’t mean that our sin isn’t sin, or that there aren’t repercussions for our choices, but as far as God goes our relationship in Him is restored and our wounds are healed and we are raised to new life in Jesus Christ. That is the promise of Christ: I forgive you all your sins. And God does not break promises!

But what’s even more amazing to me is that these two men of the cloth—a priest and a pastor, heirs to a religious tradition some 4,000 years in the making—honestly believed that God’s justice and mercy were two entirely separate things, and that whether He would deploy the bow or the olive branch is utterly unknowable. As though God were some foppish Roman Emperor presiding over the Coliseum, His fist thrust dramatically outward, and the whole crowd waiting with bated breath to see whether the Almighty Thumb would jut up or go down!

That’s not how God works. That’s not who God is. Can you imagine God putting a single bullet into a revolver, spinning the cylinder, snapping it shut, then pointing it at us and pulling the trigger to see which it will be—justice or mercy? The lady or the tiger? That sort of God couldn’t make a friend, let alone a world.

The truth is that God is just and God is merciful. It’s not that He’s just on Mondays and Wednesdays, merciful Tuesdays and Thursdays. And it’s not that He provides us some alloy of the two, half justice and half mercy. Rather, the deeper spiritual truth here, the mystery that lies at the very heart of Christianity from the beginning, is that God’s justice and God’s mercy are the same thing. They are both Truth.

Think of it like this. Lutherans speak of God’s Word as both Law and Gospel. The Law lays bare our brokenness and sin, our inadequacies, revealing our desperate need for mercy and forgiveness. This then drives us to the Gospel, the Good News that even though we cannot earn forgiveness nevertheless it is given to us as free and unmerited gift, purely by the grace and love of God. Hallelujah! The Law is just, the Gospel merciful. The Law kills us, the Gospel makes us alive. If we had only the Law, we would despair of our sins. Nihilism! If we had only the Gospel, we would deny any need of healing, of forgiveness. Together, Law and Gospel bring about the Resurrection of Christ within us; they do the Word of God to us, not just as some obscure theory but as lived reality, our living revelation.

But this doesn’t mean that one passage of Scripture is only Law, another only Gospel. No. The same Word works as both Law and Gospel, justice and mercy. Take the Beatitudes. “Blessed are the poor!” proclaims God in the flesh: a word of terror for the wealthy, astonishing comfort to the poor. Or think of the Passover, the Tenth Plague of Egypt: death to the slaveholders is new life for the slaves. God’s justice cannot be separated from God’s mercy, for they are one and the same Truth.

See, truth is like light. If we prefer the darkness, if we prefer the lies we tell ourselves to the illuminating truth of who we really are, who God means us to be, then we will experience God’s light as a horror, as harsh justice revealing, laying bare our sins. But if we prefer Goodness and Truth and Beauty to all else, if we prefer reality to falsehood and God’s will above our own, then we will experience God’s light as glorious mercy, radiant gift. It’s the same light, experienced differently.

This is why St Paul speaks so powerfully of our God as a consuming fire. We are like unrefined ore, corrupted, corroded by sin. If we define ourselves by our corrosion, then we will experience the refiner’s fire as torture, as hell. It destroys us! But if we trust instead that we have a more glorious destiny, that God sees within us the pure and shining metal that He can use to astonishing purposes the likes of which we cannot now imagine, then we will experience the refiner’s fire as purification, as mercy, as heavenly bliss. It remakes us! Again, it’s the same God, the same Truth. But what one experiences as justice, as the fires of hell, the man of faith experiences as mercy, as the glories of heaven.

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” cries Jesus in our Gospel reading this morning. “I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” This is not the sort of thing we’re used to hearing from Jesus, especially not in the Gospel according to St Luke. We prefer a mellower Jesus, a Cupcake Jesus: Jesus as the Buddha, as the serenely imperturbable Dalai Lama.

But no, our God is a zealous God. Our God is a consuming fire. All around Him He sees satanic oppression, injustice and pain, and He cannot wait to overthrow His enemy, to conquer sin, death, and hell, to liberate His people Israel and bring about the New Jerusalem, the New Creation. Christ has come to conquer! Do not think, however, that this is Air-Strike Jesus. Do not think that He’s calling down the Apocalypse as imagined in Mad Max. But remember, the baptism with which He yearns to be baptized is nothing less than His death upon the Cross, His descent into hell, and His rising triumphant from the grave.

And He does call down fire from heaven, a fire to consume us all. But it is not the fire of destruction, the fire of wrath. It is the fire of the Holy Spirit, the fire poured out upon the Apostles at Pentecost and upon each one of us in Holy Baptism. It is the raging fire of God that always burns yet never harms: the same fire that appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush; the same fire that blinded Paul on the road to Damascus; the same fire that awaits both sinners and saints at the end of the age.

The Holy Spirit is the fire of God’s own love, the Consuming Fire, the Refiner’s Fire. He is both justice and mercy; He is both Gospel and Law; He is our death and our Resurrection. And He burns even now, spreading, consuming, refining, until that Last Day when His flames shall illumine every crevice of this world and every corner of the cosmos. Then the old things shall pass away. There will be no more darkness, no more lies, no more suffering, no more death. There will be only Goodness, only Beauty, only Truth. Then shall He wipe every tear from our eyes, and God will be all in all.

I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.