All in Him

Propers: The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 15), AD 2021 B

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.

With all wisdom and insight He has made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure that He set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth.

So writes Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians—assuming of course that this is Paul, rather than a disciple of his writing in his name in order to sum up Pauline theology. Either way, it is a remarkable letter, and one that rather lets the cat out of the bag. St Paul’s understanding of Christianity is remarkably universalist, as is plain for anyone with a Bible to read. There seems little doubt for him that Jesus Christ will save, and in some sense has already saved, the entire world and all the cosmos.

“At the name of Jesus,” he writes to the Christians at Philippi—and there’s no doubt here that these are Paul’s own words—“every knee shall bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” That is, our world, the heavenly realms, and even the hells beneath us, are gathered in the Kingdom. Christ descended into hell, after all, according to St Peter and the great Creeds of the Church. And there He conquered! There He liberated! Thence He rose to heaven with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train.

This is the great secret, “the mystery of His will” made known to us “as a plan for the fullness of time.” Christ is not Lord of some, Savior of some, God of some. He is Lord and God of heaven and earth and of all that lies beneath. Nothing lost is lost to Him! There is no corner of the cosmos which Christ has not redeemed, which He shall not claim at the last. Paul again, this time to the Corinthians:

As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. Then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after He has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power … [and] the last enemy to be destroyed is death … so that God may be all in all.

All die in Adam. All rise in Christ. Death is destroyed, and God at the last shall be all in all! What a promise this is! What a wonder of mercy and power revealed! There is no equivocation here, no but-but-buts allowed. Paul leaves no room for it. “This is the destiny prepared for us before the foundations of the world,” he proclaims. “This is the purpose of Him who accomplishes all things according to His counsel and will.” This indeed is the Good News, the Gospel of the Lord.

We don’t talk about this enough. I don’t talk about this enough. In a world that is rightly repulsed by the notion of a God who tortures sinners forever, we are entrusted to bring them the promise of the Savior who rescues us all from sin and death and hell, by no merit of our own, but purely out of grace, purely for His love of us.

This is the Christ who liberated the spirits imprisoned from the time of Noah—those of whom the Scriptures state, “Their every thought was only evil all the time.” This is the Christ who forgave His murderers, forgave us, while we tortured Him to death on the Cross: “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”

Our job, as Christians, is not to threaten people with hell. People already know hell. Our job, our calling, our vocation, as “we who were first to set our hope on Christ,” is to “live for the praise of His glory.” We know that Jesus saves, and not just a few. “This cup is the New Covenant in My Blood,” He proclaims to us, each and every Sunday, “shed for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sins.” And no, it shouldn’t read, “many,” for it is literally “the many,” which in Greek means all!

You, O Christian, must live for joy. You, O Christian, must live for forgiveness. You, O Christian, must be a conduit, an incarnation, a little Christ of God’s mercy poured out for the world from His Cross. That is who we are. That is what we do. We, who have already died in our Baptism, and risen to life everlasting; we, who are already feasting in heaven when we gather to join in the Eucharist; we are to see every person as a child of God and all of Creation as His own beloved.

Every human being we meet, Jesus died to save. And if that one person had been the only person in all of Creation, the only Adam or Eve, Jesus would still have died, still have gone to hell and back, to save that one, to bring that lost sheep home. Everyone needs to hear this, and we need to hear this, for if there is any hatred in our heart, any judgment, any disdain, then we are failing Jesus, failing our calling, failing our brothers and our sisters by obscuring the Image of God, both in them and in ourselves.

And no, we cannot do this on our own. We cannot purge all judgment and hate from our hearts by our own moral efforts or our stamina of will; but only in humility, asking forgiveness, forsaking pride, and welcoming the grace of God in Jesus Christ, which cannot be earned and yet shall never be withheld from us. We are all of us sinners in need of salvation. And we are all of us saved by grace alone.

None of which is to say that God is not just, or hell is not real, or that sin produces no consequence, for the world or for our souls. God is just, and God is true. He provides for the needy, protects the oppressed, avenges the wronged, and punishes guilt. “Vengeance is mine,” proclaimeth the Lord, and terrible is His judgment. But the justice of God is that of a Father, exercised ever and only for our good.

The Lord allows for a season, so it would appear, for us to rebel against goodness and beauty and truth. And this we know as hell. But it is no rival kingdom. And it hasn’t a prayer against Christ. Hell is but a shadow, a void, to which the damned may flee to escape from the Light, but only for a time, only for a season. Hell has already been broken; one day it shall all be consumed. For God indeed is a jealous God, and will not relinquish even one of His children. All shall bow in heaven, on earth, and beneath. All at the last shall come home.

God is always for us. Even when He must be against us, He is for us. For indeed, here below we tend to treat mercy and justice as separate and contradicting. But for God, they are one and the same. Both of them are truth. Both of them are love. A perfect justice culminates in mercy. And a perfect mercy allows for us to make amends to those whom we have wronged. There is a vast abyss into which our sins may tumble us. But beneath that is the far vaster abyss of Jesus’ depthless love.

So, if in the end, in the fullness of time, it is the mystery of God’s will, according to His good pleasure, to gather up all things in Christ, why ought we then to bother being Christian? Won’t we all end up purified by the light of God regardless, in the age and the aeon to come? Paul certainly seems to think so, even if some will be saved “as through fire.” But we are called by Jesus Christ to witness to heaven now; to proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom here and now, the forgiveness of sins here and now, eternal life and joy and bliss in God here and now, here below, eternity breaking into time.

People are suffering now. People are despairing now. And God does not stand idle. He leaps down from heaven, down from His throne, down to the womb of the Virgin, down to the manger in Bethlehem, down to the Cross, down to the tomb, down and deep into hell. And there He conquers! There He harrows hell! I want to make this clear: God has already saved the world. His victory upon the Cross is eternal, which is to say transtemporal, affecting all that before and all since. From the perspective of heaven, the perspective of eternity, salvation is already done.

It is only here below, in this broken, fallen, beautiful world—still groaning in pains of labor, still so full of suffering and disappointment and doubt— that we cannot see it. We cannot see the perspective of heaven, cannot see the salvation that awaits for us before and beyond all time. Yet we trust that Christ is true. That is what faith is: not denying pain or ignoring injustice, but trusting in the mercies and salvation of our God, trusting that God is good and life is true and Christ is risen. Alleluia! So that even in our mortal lives we can touch immortal glory.

We can suffer with others in mercy and love, even unto death, precisely because we know that suffering does not have the final word. Death is not the end of all. Christ is with us, has gone before us, into pain and doubt and death. And as surely as He’s risen, we too shall arise, for in Him has all of humanity, all of Creation, already been reconciled to the love of the God who pours out His life for the world.

And if that’s not Good News, then I don’t know what the hell is.

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