No Dominion Here

Propers: The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 13), 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.

Jesus is our image of God: this is the heart of Christianity, the strongest and most scandalous aspect of our religion. This is the faith that raises the dead.

It makes no sense to ask if God exists. God does not exist. Rather, God is existence itself, reality itself on its truest level. He is Being with a capital B, the source and ground of everything, “in whom we all live and move and have our being.” We only exist insofar as God pours out Himself into us. That’s what we mean when we say we’re created. We’re not just talking about Adam and Eve in the garden. We mean that every breath, every thought, every moment only exists because God gives of Himself for us—purely by grace, purely by mercy, purely by love.

To ask if God exists is like asking if truth is true, or goodness good, or beauty beautiful. It is self-evident that God exists because God is by definition true reality. The only question then becomes: What is reality like? What is it really like? Now, some would say that because the world is broken, because it suffers from tragedy and sin and suffering and death, that God—or reality—must be impersonal, uncaring, or cruel. If God is good, then why do bad things happen? Why’s the world so messed up? Where’s the good in that?

But let us dig a little deeper. For if God were not good, then there would be no transcendent standard for justice, for goodness. There would be nothing beyond the world with which to compare the world. And so we should never have known that it’s bad. No-one knows a crooked line unless they’ve seen one straight. And so the very fact that we can tell that the world is not as it should be, not as it ought to be, only makes sense if God is good.

And again, just asking if God is good is literally the same as asking if goodness is good. But I’m trying to make a point. The suffering of the world is not proof of God’s absence or indifference. The very fact that we are able to imagine a better world proves that God is with us, and that He intends better for us. And we might wonder why He doesn’t just snap His fingers and force the world to be good. But this I think speaks more to our own tendency toward swift and violent solutions than it does to the self-emptying, self-giving, self-denying love of God.

Which brings us back to the beginning: Jesus is our image of God. If we as Christians want to know what God is like, we look to Jesus. If we want to know what humanity was meant to be, we look to Jesus. And if there is ever a question as to God’s inaction or apathy, we look to Jesus; who tirelessly healed the sick and fed the hungry, rebuked the sinner and forgave the sins, uplifted the low, leveled the high, taught the ignorant, welcomed the outcast, and raised the dead the from their graves.

There is no question in the Gospels as to the status of suffering and death: they are enemies to be defeated, period. They are to be given no quarter at all. Raise the black flag! Raise it against ignorance and poverty and prejudice and pain. Raise it against demons, diseases, deceptions, and death! Christ will have none of it. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather. All the world shall be His conquest, all the world shall know the King, and so shall all be saved!—that is, if Jesus has anything to say about it. Oh, and I assure you that He does.

“God did not make death,” quoth the Wisdom of Solomon:

For He created all things so that they might exist. The generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth. For righteousness is immortal. For God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of His own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it.

Now that is a powerful theological statement. It is to say that evil is not a thing, that it has no substance, no participation in the Being of God. Evil is simply a lack. In the same way that cold is the absence of heat and death the absence of life so is evil the lack of God: a void, an emptiness, a no-thing, an anti-creation. God makes nothing evil, and so evil cannot exist in and of itself. Nothing can be created bad; that’s a contradiction in terms. There are only good things fallen, good things twisted, good things that have missed their intended mark of eternal bliss. Even Satan was an angel, and still is one at heart.

So why does God allow it? Why would God create a world with even the possibility of evil, the freedom to go bad? Well, again, I suspect it has to do with love. Love cannot force, cannot coerce; love can only entice, invite, seduce. Love is freely given, and freely draws us home. Perhaps the possibility of evil is the necessary price for true freedom, and thus for true love. Wiser and more faithful Christians than I have certainly thought so.

Or maybe it’s because the world is still in the process of creation. There are still pockets of nothing, pockets of chaos, beyond us, around us, within us; that is sin. What we shall be has not yet been revealed, save to know that we shall be like Christ. For God, in His eternity beyond time, the salvation of this world has already been achieved! The dead have already been raised, our tears have already been dried, and the victory has already been won for us in Jesus Christ our Lord. That’s how God sees Creation. And that’s how Christ would have us see it as well.

This is the gift that is given to Christians, and the mission that we have for the world: to reveal the foretaste of the feast to come; to be little Christs for a cosmos in need of Him; to witness in suffering, in poverty, in persecution, in humility, that death has no dominion here; that in Jesus Christ the battle is always and already won. He is our King in eternity! And here in the liturgy, here in the Word and the Sacraments, in the love that we show to our neighbor, and in the Spirit of God alive in this community, alive in the Body of Christ, here are we an outpost of eternity in time.

Jesus shows us our destiny. Jesus shows us the love with which God has loved us from before the foundations of the world. What a blessing, what an honor, what a responsibility to be for the world a chosen priestly people connecting, embodying, incarnating heaven here on earth! That’s what we are now, because we are Him. And we are chosen, not because we’re worthy, not because we’re different, but purely out of grace, purely out of love, so that we can share this grace, share this love, with everyone of everywhere and everywhen. Salvation is always already here, because Jesus’ accomplishment on the Cross is transtemporal.

C.S. Lewis wrote that Jesus’ wonders and Jesus’ promises are the same wonders, the same promises, that God lavishes upon all peoples, just compacted; manifested in a specific space and time. God turns water to wine for everyone, doesn’t He? He multiplies loaves to feed the masses each and every day through the wonders of the natural world. Jesus incarnates these wonders of God—the deepest and truest and best of reality—in ways that we can see more clearly. Christ is God in microcosm.

But keep in mind it works both ways: God is Christ in macrocosm. Whatever Jesus does, God does, for He is God’s true Image, the only begotten Son of the Father. And this holds true for the forgiveness of sins and healing the sick and raising the dead. When Jesus encounters a hemorrhaging woman, He heals her without a thought, automatically, just by dint of who He is. For God is liberation itself. And when He finds a dead little girl and all her household mourning, there is no question, no hesitation. He raises her up. He brings her to life. For God is life itself.

So why not then save everyone? Why doesn’t God just heal every wounded woman, raise up all the dead to life? And the answer is, He does! The answer is, He has! We can’t see it yet. Few of us have the privilege of witnessing true miracles, but keep in mind what they are for. They are a foretaste of the feast to come. They are eternity breaking into time. They are a preview of the destiny prepared for us all.

For God in His heaven, for Christ on His throne, every little girl is raised! Every flow of blood is staunched! Every loss, every grief, every death is already undone! And we are saved, we are saved, we are saved! No more dying, no more crying, no more hell, ever, for Christ has conquered! Alleluia! And all of life shall bow—not in horror, not in terror, but in joy inexpressible, joy never-ending—before the glory of the throne of the Lamb who was slain.

For God all of this is already accomplished; for the world it all seems yet to be. And for we who have a foot both in time and eternity, the Kingdom is already and not yet. Until that day of revelation, we are to be signs to the world—images of the Image of God—that God is good, and life is true, and death has no dominion here.

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