To Blave

Propers: The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

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

There is no truth without love and there is no love without truth.

If you have a friend or loved one who is deluding himself, it is not loving of you to encourage his delusions. You can be a friend or you can be an enabler, but not both. There is no love without truth. Yet neither can this be an excuse for haughtiness or cruelty. I’ve recently been introduced to the term “nean,” a portmanteau for someone who claims to be nice by being mean: that is, they speak hard truths bluntly. Yet we needn’t be mean at all. For there is no truth without love.

In the mid-twentieth century a movement arose called “Death of God” theology. This movement argued that the Church could either speak the truth, or be loving, but not both. To be loving, they insisted, meant that all people were to be accepted without condition and without judgment. And since truth claims always carry within them an implicit judgment, the Church had to abandon all claims to truth, even to bedrock truths of the faith such as the love of God and the dignity of the human person. To follow Jesus, the Church would have to abandon God—indeed, the Church would have to die.

“Death of God” theologians thought that truth and love were at odds with each other, and that therefore we must pick either love or truth. But that’s insane. Love without truth isn’t love at all—it’s just some deracinated political program of blind progressivism without neither goal nor end in sight. And truth without love doesn’t work any better. In fact, it’s the very thing the Bible so often condemns.

“Shout out, do not hold back!” God commands the prophet Isaiah this morning. “Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to My people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins!” Boy, that doesn’t sound terribly loving, does it? “They ask of Me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to God. Yet why do we fast, but You do not see? Why humble ourselves, but You do not notice?”

God’s people want to know why God appears to be ignoring their petitions. They’re fasting, they’re praying, they’re making all the proper sacrifices according to the Law of Moses given to the people at Sinai. They’ve crossed their t’s and dotted their i’s. Why then is the Lord displeased?

“Look,” God says in reply, “you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and He will say, Here I am.”

The people know how to go through the motions. They know all the proper pieties and practices, all the feasts and the fasts. And indeed these are things that are good and true, things that God has given to humanity for our flourishing! But the point of such external signs is to inculcate within us the Spirit of love, the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of compassion and mercy and justice. Without love, our truths are no longer true. We’re just a bunch of idiots miming mumbo-jumbo.

Our Gospel reading this morning says much the same thing as regards the unity of truth and love, yet from the opposite pole. “Do not think,” Jesus says herein, “that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Love does not do away with truth; rather, love fulfills truth.

In this, Jesus defies lazy caricature. On the Right, we often have this image of Jesus as the bloodthirsty conqueror—no more Mr. Nice Christ—who will return one day to bathe the unrighteous in fire and blood, as though He’d undergone some sort of brain transplant since His previous advent. On the Left, we find the corresponding cartoon of Jesus as laid-back hippie, preaching the Gospel of Anything Goes. In real life, Jesus calls all peoples to Himself, including sinners and tax collectors and foreigners, flummoxing conservatives. But rather than saying to the assembled crowds, “I’m okay, you’re okay; you do you,” He instead commands us, “Go and sin no more,” baffling liberals. The Jesus of love and the Jesus of truth are one and the same.

“You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus says. “You are the light of the world.” Now, salt and light are powerful images. These days we summon light with the flick of a switch, and if we’re at all concerned about salt it’s that we have too much of it. But 2,000 years ago, salt and light were rare, precious, and indispensable for life. In a world without refrigeration, salt was the only thing that could preserve perishable foods; in a world without electricity, even the light of a single lamp saved lives.

That’s our job now, Jesus says. We are to be salt for the earth, light for the world. We are to preserve and provide for life, as salt does; we are to illumine and reveal reality as does light. The salt is love, the light is truth, and the two are inseparable. “But what good is salt that has lost its saltiness? And what good is light hidden away beneath a basket?” At first these questions seem absurd. How can salt not be salt? And who would bother to light a lamp only then to conceal it? But if Jesus is talking about truth and love, then we already have our answer. Truth is no longer true if it’s separated from love. Love no longer loves when it is separated from truth.

Love and truth, justice and mercy, judgment and grace: we are often told that these things are polar opposites, but in fact they are one and the same. They do not cancel each other out, but they fulfill one another. Perfect justice is mercy; perfect mercy is justice. And perfect love is truth.

You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. And together we are called to spend every moment of our lives seeking the truth in love, loving each other in truth. And we live in this way, as Christians, not because we seek to earn a place in Heaven, but because Heaven has already come down to dwell among us, and to dwell within us, in Jesus Christ our Lord.

I tell you this because I love you. I tell you this because it’s true.

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