Three Truths

Propers: The Third Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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

It really is all about Jesus. He is for us the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. There simply is no Christianity without Christ.

I read a remarkable letter just the other day from a British man who had converted to Islam, become a Muslim. And he said that his studies of philosophy had convinced him of the rational necessity of monotheism. In other words, the great thinkers led him to God. But he had been raised effectively without religion, without much in the way of roots of any kind. And the churches he encountered struck him as wimpy and limp-wristed, unwilling to stand up for their own professed beliefs, embarrassed by the very God whom they preached.

The real stumbling block, however—the straw that broke the camel’s back—was Jesus. How could God, he wondered, the omnipotent, all-knowing Creator of all possible worlds, die? How could God come down as one of us to suffer and bleed, naked and humiliated, hanging from a Cross for all the world to see? The very thought struck him as scandalous, indeed blasphemous. It was all too messy, too bloody, too human for this fellow. He wanted a majestic God, a sovereign God, resplendent in might and power, infinitely removed from this fallen world of mud and blood. That is the God he wanted to worship.

And that’s what Islam offered to him: a God who does not suffer, indeed cannot suffer, let alone die in shame on a tree. And I’m grateful for this letter because it really does cut to the heart of the matter, for the entire edifice of Christian belief falls and rises on the person of Jesus Christ.

What is God like? Whom does God love? Will reason tell us, or perhaps a book of sacred scripture? Will we find the face of God written in history, or in mysticism? Or is it somehow impossibly true that we find the face of God in Man—even a Man on a Cross?

Years ago there was a much-ballyhooed debate between celebrity geneticists Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins. Dawkins, an outspoken atheist, was famous for writing books like The Selfish Gene, while Collins, an open Christian, had headed up the Human Genome Project, which he famously called The Language of God. And there was this very revealing moment in the debate when Dawkins admitted that he could accept the idea of God—as something grand enough, majestic enough, to be worthy of belief—but what he couldn’t accept was this idea of God’s love.

He couldn’t imagine that any God worthy of the name would ever deign to take notice of squishy little mud-bound naked apes like us. That seemed unworthy, to him, of the majesty of God. Too local, too small, too parochial. All too human. Dawkins could appreciate power. But he could not see the power subsistent in love.

Let us consider this for a moment. Both the atheist scientist and the Muslim philosopher lauded the power, the majesty, the might of God, the transcendence of God, the greatness, the glory, the otherness of God. But any sign of weakness, or sacrificial love, or (God forbid) death struck both men as offensive, as parochial, as too small-minded and too human to truly be of God.

Now, with respect to both—I think they’ve got it exactly backwards. Their notions of God are upside-down.

I think that the notion of a God who is only transcendent, only great, only above and beyond us, is really the all-too-human idea. Because it’s what we would be like, if we were God, isn’t it? We would imagine ourselves to be above it all, beyond it all, perfect in power and majesty and might, immune to sufferings, dismissive of death, knowing ourselves much too perfectly enlightened to be encumbered by mortal notions of love.

That’s the human idea. That’s a parochial notion of God—too big to bother with the small. Of course we would crave power and aloof enlightenment. Those are always the things that humanity wants, always worrying about big or small, strong or weak, permanent or temporary. But it’s all just so much posturing.

The real God, the true God, doesn’t worry about what’s grand enough or powerful enough to be worthy of Him. God is beyond size, for He invented space. He is beyond permanence, for He invented time. He is beyond worthiness because it is He who gives to everyone and everything its worth.

But He is never beyond love. He is never beyond giving of Himself, pouring Himself out, so that others might live, so that we might have life and have it in abundance. God never ceases to love, never ceases to give, because that is who He is—God is Love—and the font of His infinite, self-giving Life can never be emptied.

Christianity preaches three truths that I don’t think humans could ever have come up with on our own: the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection.

First, the Incarnation: What would God do with infinite power, infinite knowledge, and infinite life? He would give them all away. He would empty Himself, humble Himself, to come down here as one of us, to share our life, to bring us home, to laugh and cry and dance and mourn and suffer and die, all for love of us. Now that is truly transcendent. That is truly divine. No human could ever have come up with a god like that—a God who does the exact opposite of what we would do if we were God.

Second, the Crucifixion: What would we do in response to a humble, holy, human God? We would kill Him. We would absolutely murder Him in the worst ways we knew how. “He brings us love! Break his legs!” We are the Cross. It’s so awful—but we know it’s true, isn’t it? We wouldn’t come up with that, we wouldn’t willingly tell that story, but we know it’s exactly what we would do, because it’s what we did.

And third, the Resurrection: How would a God of love respond to being murdered by the very people He came to save? I know what we would do in that situation. We would call down the planet Mars to knock the Earth out from under our feet. We would rain fire and brimstone from the sky, burning them up forever in hell. We would lash out and make them suffer for our humiliation and their betrayal.

Of course, the last thing we would do is forgive them—forgive them even from the Cross. The last thing we would do is to take all of that suffering, all of that evil, into ourselves, turning the other cheek, and thereby transform all that violence, all that horror, into the very instrument of universal salvation. Only God would take a Cross and make it the implement of the whole world’s redemption. Only God would take a race of murderers and sinners and say to us, “You can do absolutely nothing that could ever make Me stop loving you.”

Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection. We fall and we rise on the person of Christ. Either He is God—or there is none worthy to be called by that name.

How funny it is to read in the Gospel this morning of the Risen Christ, the glorified Christ, appearing on the lakeshore; offering fishing advice; cooking breakfast over a charcoal fire. He is so human, so humble, so utterly divine. How funny that God is Himself more human than we could ever be. And that somehow this makes Him more God than we could ever have imagined.

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