Gnostic America

I’m always amazed how often the structure of Biblical episodes have a liturgical structure. What do I mean by a “liturgical structure”?

Well, consider what the liturgy is. (1) Jesus is present (by invocation); (2) we acknowledge our unworthiness and “beggarly” status; (3) we beg for mercy; (4) we’re healed; (5) we glorify God; (6) we’re in joyful communion with Jesus. Old Testament worship was structured along these lines; specific episodes in the lives of the saints (for instance, Isaiah in Isaiah 6) are framed this way; and most of the accounts of Jesus healing someone follows this pattern.

Most certainly it is true in this week’s Blind Beggar Gospel.

He first hears the word that Jesus is passing by. This is faith arising from the preaching of the Word. He calls upon Jesus’ name. This is invocation. He begs for mercy. This is Kyrie or Confession of sins. He gets healed. This is absolution. He glorifies God and follows Jesus. This is the Gloria in Excelsis and Holy Communion. His confession that Jesus is the Son of David would parallel the confessing of the Creed. It’s all there!

People often like to make a distinction between formal and informal worship. Worship must be formal, because we have a formal Lord, that is, one who “took the form of a bondservant.” Faith, as we have been contemplating, is not an end in itself, anchored in the misty projections of self. Faith has the exact contours of the formal Lord which is its object. Faith, therefore, is formal.

The blind man didn’t cry, “Please, oh universe, take this blindness away.” No, it had formal reference points – the idea of a messiah, an anointed one, a son of David, and all the host of words from the Old Testament carrying those ideas. Thus, the blind man’s faith had clear doctrinal outlines, even as his prayer “Have mercy on me” had a formal structure.

The Church’s historic liturgy was not a bunch of monks in the middle ages – the creative worship team of the 1300s – getting together and praying the Holy Spirit might move them to have uplifting worship that one week in 1347. No, the Church’s liturgy is simply what happens when faith in a formal Lord takes shape.

Where is Jesus right now? What’s He doing? How are we related to Him in this state of being? Those are really the questions the liturgy answers. A teacher of mine once said, “The best questions are the ones for which the Lord has answers.” And all those questions have answers which the liturgy answers.

Jesus is at the right hand of God interceding for us. We leave our sins behind and commune with Him. The liturgy from beginning to end simply fills in the details. One example. We leave our sins behind when we confess them. What happens when one sinner repents? The angels rejoice. What are the angels singing? Two places in the Scriptures answer this question, Isaiah 6 and Luke 2. They are singing, “Glory to God in the highest” and “Holy, Holy, Holy.” These two songs serve as the basis of the canticles, Gloria in Excelsis and the Sanctus. These canticles are sung because we sinners are at church!

Oh, and if Jesus is present – which He is because He promised to be – but also sitting at the right hand of the Father, then of necessity we must be with Him at the right hand of the Father. We’re in heaven! So, these two canticles not only confess that we are forgiven sinners over which the angels are rejoicing, but that we are in heaven!

Formal elements of a formal worship of a formal Savior. The Kyrie, the prayer of the blind beggar, is an incredibly powerful and beautiful moment of the liturgy. Like we contemplated before, the Kyrie weaves through the whole service. This prayer, this prayer of a forgotten, pathetic blind beggar, whom we know as Bartimaeus, has been put on our lips, joining us to him, so that Jesus can say to us as well, “Your faith has made you well.”

Why would anyone cut out the Kyrie? If it was powerful enough to have Jesus proclaim Barimaeus’ name throughout all time – “If you confess my name before men, I will confess your name before my heavenly Father” – will it not do the same with your name?

Last devotion we meditated on how the blind man laid the foundation for his faith in the objective truth that Jesus is the Son of David, the Messiah. The objective aspect of faith is the foundation for subjective faith.

Both are essential, of course. A purely objective faith the demons have, St. James tells us, and they shudder as a result. Many Christians may have that faith as well. They objectively know Jesus is Lord, but don’t believe He’s Lord “for them.” So they shudder too.

A purely subjective faith, by contrast, can slip into idolatry. How so? Because the reference is all the self – what I think; what I feel; what I’m willing – any reference about Jesus simply becomes projection. “I feel Jesus would tolerate gay marriage, because wasn’t he all about love and tolerance?” Well, no. What you’re doing is projecting your own values and naming them “Jesus” so as to deceive yourself that what you believe is something more than solipsism. Your “Jesus” has become your idol. This indeed is the Antichrist, a replacement Christ.

So the faith of demons or the faith of Antichrist are the two sides we must avoid as we contemplate faith.

What then was the subjective faith of the blind man? It was pretty simple: “Have mercy on me!” Yes, that’s subjective! “Lord, I know objectively you are the Messiah, the Son of God, my Lord. Now, please, I beg you, use your authority to heal me, for I have no power to do so myself, beggar that I am.”

“Have mercy on me!” of course is the Kyrie, the prayer of the liturgy that goes, “Lord, have mercy on us.” The ecclesiastical version is beautifully rendered with the more communal “us” rather than “me.” The liturgy is very much like the four friends carrying the lame man to Jesus, and Jesus saw “their” faith and healed him. The liturgy is all of us carrying each other to Jesus, so that again Jesus might see “our” faith and heal us. It’s a communal thing like the Our Father is a communal prayer.

An essential component of faith is taught in that the blind man didn’t give up. When others tried to keep him quiet, he cried out all the more. Faith without patient endurance is not faith. Faith cries out until answered. The Church prayers her Kyrie until Christ’s return.

In fact, the Kyrie is a prayer woven throughout the entire liturgy. It begins as a “stand alone” prayer, the Kyrie. But it’s also in the Gloria in Excelsis, almost as if the Gloria in Excelsis shows how the Lord will answer our prayer. It comes up again in the Agnus Dei, prior to receiving communion.

Why so many times? Well, ask the blind beggar. When you’re a beggar and you objectively know someone else can relieve your distress, you don’t give up. That would be a loss of hope. So, even when others were trying to silence him, he just cried out louder.

Who or what is trying to silence you? Perhaps the accuser dormant in your own soul. Perhaps the judging stares of others. Perhaps a pop culture mocking your faith in “unicorns.” Perhaps nagging doubts. Whatever it is, are you a beggar or not who knows objectively that Jesus is the risen Lord? The answer is, “yes” and “yes.” So don’t stop praying. You will be answered.

Jesus of Nazareth was passing by And hearing a multitude passing by, he asked what it meant. So they told him that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by. And he cried out, saying, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”This passage is a perfect illustration of faith. Not seeing with his eyes, the blind man still had the sense most related to faith, hearing. As St. Paul writes, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”

Against Gnostics old and new, we uphold the word and language as having one to one correspondences with the truth. Language is reality’s herald. God spoke the world into existence and by language we, made in the image of God, speak community into existence. And in the communion-community of the Church, the Word once again speaks the new creation into existence. The spoken Word has done it since the beginning, being Truth’s herald. Gnostics who deny fabric of reality likewise deny the ability of the word or language to herald anything but illusions and lies.

But not orthodox faith. For us, the word names, identifies and singles out unique, separated, distinct truths. When that truth is the Truth, Jesus, that word is great indeed.

What was the word in today’s Gospel? “Jesus was passing by.” When Jesus passes by, and beggars hear of it, they cry “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Here you see two aspects of faith, the objective and subjective aspects. The objective aspect is “Jesus, Son of David.” The subjective is “Have mercy on me.” Both aspects are necessary. Both aspects are the basis of our liturgy. Today we focus on the objective side.

So often when people think of faith, they see it as an end in itself. “Keep the faith,” they say. The question is, “Faith in what?” They’re missing that objective quotient of faith. Yet, unpack what is often meant, and you get some variation of “have faith in yourself.”

That is not the faith of the beggar. If faith is in the content of “things unseen,” the beggar more than anyone knows and “sees” one thing: he can’t be any object of any sort of faith. He’s helpless.

But the beggar did have faith in the Messiah. As a Jew, he knew the Jewish teachings on the coming Messiah. He obviously had heard that Jesus was doing things that fulfilled the messianic expectations. So when he heard that Jesus passed by, there was a lot of “word” going on behind that. And so he confessed this faith: “Jesus, you are the Son of David. You are the messiah. You are the one who is promised to be a healer of the blind.” On that objective foundation, he proceeds with his subjective faith: “Have mercy on me!”

We are very much the blind man. We are those who “have not seen, and yet believe.” And when we hear that Jesus is “passing by” on the basis of His promise, “Where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am present among them,” faith compels us – if indeed we are beggars! – to cry out and lay the objective foundation for His having mercy on us.

Notice how this plays out liturgically. The service begins with the invocation, the gathering “in his name” which signals His presence. And then for almost the first third of the service we get this interplay between objective and subjective faith. Most especially we observe this in the Gloria in Excelsis. What objective things do we confess of Christ? He’s the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He’s seated at the right hand of the Father. He alone is the holy one. And so on.

Leading in to the Gloria in Excelsis is exactly what the blind man cried, the Kyrie: “Lord, have mercy.” We pray the Kyrie, and then confess why Jesus can, should, and will have mercy on us. Because objectively speaking, He is our Savior, who takes away our sin, who intercedes for us at God’s right hand, who alone is holy. (Of course, the creed adds to the objective foundation as well.)

The point is, faith without this objective, doctrinal side can drift off into solipsist, narcissistic platitudes that mean nothing. Or worse, faith becomes a psychological game we play with ourselves. We ourselves are doing something, but to sanctify what we’re doing we project something of ourselves outward and name that “Jesus.”

Keeping faith objective prevents this temptation. The doctrinal foundations for our subjective faith are spelled out clearly. This is what Jesus did. This is who Jesus is. I.e. This is not who we are or what we did. Never the twain shall meet.

An objective basis for faith is premised in the rather obvious truth that Jesus is an outside of us, objective Savior. This might seem obvious but how often do we hear people talk about “what Jesus means to me,” and how often is that nothing more than people trying to sanctify or justify an aspect of themselves.

But Jesus is an objective, outside of us Savior, and this because He is in flesh and blood. He is completely “other,” therefore there are objective things to be said about Him, like “Son of David.” By contrast, when Jesus “leaks out of” His body and blood, then that’s where the line between Him and us becomes fuzzy, and the line between objective and subjective faith becomes fuzzy as well.

Not so today. The blind man knew Jesus was completely other, and that His only hope was this objective Jesus being true to what He was objectively expected to be, a Savior.

The Gospel of the blind man – blind Bartimaeus, as we know from Mark’s Gospel – crying out to the Lord nicely segues with Ash Wednesday. It reminds us of Martin Luther’s last words, which serve nicely as an Ash Wednesday affirmation: “We are beggars, this is true.”

Wow. Talk about a reliance on the truth devoid of all systems and ideologies. Luther was answering the question whether he stood by the doctrines he espoused. “Yes!” he replied, and then said his last words that sum up what he taught. “We are beggars.” We are totally reliant on God. Few moments better teach this than our final ones. Can anything more true come from someone’s lips than those words from Martin Luther? Yes, “this is true.”

Ash Wednesday echoes the sentiment. “We are dust and ash, this is true.” Ash Wednesday is a response to the temptation of the first temptation and sin: “We can be like God!” No, without God we are dust and ash. Is anything more true?

To be at the beggar point is to be at the zero point. It’s to be at a point devoid of all illusions of being like God on our own. It’s to realize without God we are nothing.

But it’s not a nihilistic sentiment, as the beggar in the Gospel shows us. After all, he cries out to Jesus for salvation. He cries out in faith. Faith trusts that being at the zero point means good things for our future, because God makes things from dust and ash, even as He did at the beginning, drawing out life and existence from the formlessness and void. Or as He drew Adam out of the dust.

The Lord cannot work with dust that runs from him with what little will it has left in it, thinking itself self-sufficient and capable. But He does great things with dust. So yes, count me with that dust and ash! That’s the message of Ash Wednesday.

And the Lord proves Himself faithful. Consider, we know about Bartimaeus and Lazarus, two pathetic creatures. They’re names are proclaimed and confessed by none other than the Lord in His Gospel. But who are the “rich man” or the “pharisees” who rejected Jesus? Their names are forgotten.

But of course Jesus would confess their names, because they both confessed Him. And as Jesus says, “If you confess me before men, I will confess you before my heavenly Father.” So, Bartimaeus and Lazarus’ names are proclaimed yet today, even as they confessed their Lord. The Lord is faithful.

What can we make of Bartimaeus’ blindness?

There’s an interesting “blind monk” motif that finds its way in literature and cinema occasionally. We think of the Greek prophet Tiresias, a character popping up in Greek drama, who helped steer Odysseus home. The Graeae shared one eye between them as they foretold the future. Or there’s Odin, whose one eye signifies a heightened wisdom. In modern cinema, there is the literal “blind monk” found in Rogue One, who continually chanted “I am one with the force. The force is with me” as he kicked but – his blindness was his strength.

There is something perverse about the motif, in a Gnostic way. Gnosticism considers reality an illusion; therefore anything seen only conspires in the illusion. Far better to be darkened to the sights of this world order and see a higher truth with “the mind’s eye.” Far better to be blind to the false thought that all the distinctions of beings– trees, animals, people, rocks, and all such things – should be made manifest in the light. Better rather that all these things blur together and disappear in the darkness, all the better so we can see what all along we could not see.

Nothing in the Bible or in Jesus’ ministry ever suggests support for this understanding of blindness. Blindness is the return of part of our body – a rather important part – to dust and ash. It’s deadened. It’s something that needs to be restored. When the blind man cried out, it wasn’t because he was tired of his “mind’s eye” perception. He was broken and needed to be fixed, and he knew it.

And Jesus, who created the light on the first day, is the Light of light. He brings all the life He made into our perception of reality, so that we can discern all the creation in its glorious specificity. We can see male and female. We can see what marriage is. We can see the truth of who we are (beggars) and what we need (God). This is all what reality demonstrates when the light is working.

To the one who like the beggar confesses himself dust and ashes – confessing himself to be “formlessness and void” as far as his existence goes – how fitting that his re-creation begins where the first creation began: “Let there be light.” And there was light. As it was for him, so I is for us. What did you think the candle at baptism symbolizes?

“But they understood none of these things; this saying was hidden from them, and they did not know the things which were spoken.”

How on earth was this saying hidden from the disciples? What part of “He will be delivered to the Gentiles and will be mocked and insulted and spit upon; they will scourge Him and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again” did they not understand? Jesus couldn’t be more clear, could he have?

There’s nothing really hidden here. Jesus is using language exactly as it is intended to be used, as a one to one correspondence with the truth conveyed through the instrumentality of human speech. Nothing mysterious. Nothing esoteric. Nothing hidden in cryptic riddles or mystical sayings.

What, then, hides Jesus’ clear words? It’s our preconceived systems, formulas, and philosophical frameworks.

This happens all the time. It might be the one believing faith is an activity of our faculties of mind, will, or emotion, for whom “be baptized every one of you… a promise for you and your children” doesn’t compute. It might be the one believing Jesus came to begin a political movement  for whom Jesus’ departure from this world doesn’t compute.

Did you know the word “relationship” isn’t in the Bible once? Yet how often is this mature word (children don’t have “relationships” – “Hi Billy, how’s your relationship with your mother?”  “Huh?”) used in sermons.

Did you know the phrases “surrender your life to the Lord” and “give your heart to Jesus” are never used? Yet for how many people is this the driving message of the Gospel?

Did you know how many times the word “care” is used it the Gospels? Maybe four our five times, three of which are used in the context of Christ NOT caring (the disciples, Martha, and the Pharisees – “nor do You care about anyone.”) Yet how often is “the caring Christ” used as the basis for a congregation’s slogans: “We Care!”

Do you know how many teachings Jesus has about love? Love God. Love neighbor. Love enemies. Love one another. That’s it. A handful of passages covers it. Yet for millions of people with only a surface understanding of Christianity, “Isn’t Jesus all about love? Of course He’d welcome a married gay couple to church and accept them.”

Do you know how many times the word “commitment” is used. Never. Sins are committed, and the Gospel is committed to us. But our being “committed” to Christ? Not so much.

Do you know how many times the word “rights” is used.  Never.

How many books of the Bible were written by a woman? How many apostles were women? Which persons of the Trinity were revealed as female?

You get the idea. The point is not to claim there is no correspondence between biblical teachings and these ideas – the word “Trinity” after all is nowhere in the Bible, or the word “sacrament.” (And indeed, sometimes we get into trouble when we begin with these concept words and have them drive the textual details rather than letting the Gospel qualify what these concepts mean – for instance in the numbering of the sacraments.)

The point is how often we allow our systems, formulas, and philosophical frameworks to keep Jesus’ word hidden from us, when they couldn’t be more clear.

Going back to the Parable of the Sower, the word is like a seed. A rotten, corrupted seed will not do its work. When we corrupt Christ’s words with our forced interpretations of them, they can’t do their work. This is what the Pharisees did. Think, for instance, what happens when we qualify the hardness of “love your enemies” with all sorts of “Well, that doesn’t mean this or that.” Jesus had to shake this qualification game with the lawyer to whom He told the Parable of the Good Samaritan. “Who exactly is my neighbor? How can I qualify that?”

“What did Jesus really mean about divorce and remarriage?” “What did Jesus really mean about ‘This is My Body.’” “What did Jesus really mean when He said marriage is one man, one woman, becoming one flesh?” “What did Jesus really mean by calling the Twelve apostles?” “What did Jesus really mean when He effectively said the day of the Jews as a people of God were winding down and a new people of God were being created?” “What did Jesus really mean when He said my kingdom is not of this world?”

The very difficulty of Christ’s word – as it is given in all its clarity – is its power, the power to drive the sinner to his knees, the power to lift the humble one up with His grace and forgiveness. Our formulas and systems always are acts of self-justification.  They cloud Christ’s will.

Throughout history Christian allegorists – what some have called the “half gnostics” – claimed Christ’s clear words are too “earthly” in their clarity, and only the enlightened elite who have a woke glimpse of true understanding can interpret them. Many a non-sacramental church will even change Jesus’ words at the last supper to say, “This bread symbolizes my body.” Guess how many times the word “symbolize” is in the Bible. (Actually once, when St. Paul compares the two covenants to Hagar and Sarah.)

Here’s a fun one. The name that is above every name was given to Jesus. (See Philippians 2: 9) What is the name that is above every name? Not something we think about a lot – probably Jehovah, right? – but it’s something the Jehovah’s Witnesses know intimately as the heart and center of their faith – of course it’s Jehovah! And who was given that name? Jesus? Oh, you mean Jesus is Jehovah? But that is impossible according to the Jehovah’s Witness’ rejection of the Holy Trinity. What to do with Philippians 2: 9? Well, look at a Jehovah’s Witness bible and see what they do – “Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every [other] name.” I.e. every name other than Jehovah.

Wow. How much is hidden from us because of our preconceived frameworks we’ve set up for our own personal self-justification.

I’ve often challenged people to read the Gospels for the first time, and just read them. Don’t try to dig for passages supporting your political ideology or theological system. Just read it. It’s actually quite surprising.  You may be shocked  by what you read and also what you don’t read

There’s nothing hidden about Christ’s words. They are proclaimed from the rooftops. Children get them, because children don’t think in abstractions. Christ bids us to receive them as little children. The beauty of this is it doesn’t require some disciplined “getting in the right mind” or “sitting still so you can discern God’s voice in the silence.” It just requires you to open your ears and listen. He that has ears to hear, let him hear!

“Then He took the twelve aside and said to them, ‘Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be accomplished. For He will be delivered to the Gentiles and will be mocked and insulted and spit upon. They will scourge Him and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again.’”

There’s a lot going on in this passage, much more than meets the eye. For instance, what’s “up” about Jerusalem? Well, literally Jerusalem is at a higher altitude than most of the surrounding terrain. But insofar as Jerusalem is Zion – God’s mountain, the place where He meets His people and they meet Him, at the temple – the “ascent” to Jerusalem has spiritual significance as well.

This typology of Jerusalem feeds the “New Jerusalem” motif popping up time to time in the New Testament. New Jerusalem is the Bride of Christ (Revelation 21: 2) with whom Christ the Groom, as the Temple (the head of Jerusalem, so to speak – literally the high point in Jerusalem), is intimately in communion. Christian commentators have traditionally seen New Jerusalem as fulfilled it the Church, an earthly entity with a heavenly image.

The writer of Hebrews nicely describes what New Jerusalem means for the Christian, “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven, to God the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus the Mediator of the new testament, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel.” (Hebrews 12: 22-24)

Where are the angels (…and archangels and all the company of heaven)? Where is the “general assembly and church”? Where do we meet “God the Judge of all”? Where do we meet Jesus mediating the “New Testament in His blood” which speaks “shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins,” something far better than, “my blood cries out for vengeance” (Abel’s blood)?

Of course, this all happens in the church’s liturgy. So yes, the Church is New Jerusalem, and when Christ returns, the Church will be a manifestation of “the revealing of the sons of God” and we will see the things our faith only clings to now.

Do a quick study on New Jerusalem, and you will see the idea has been hijacked by millenarians who believe New Jerusalem is a political event or movement brought about by some charismatic leader. The Puritans, for instance, were driven by this idea, that America was to be the place of a New Jerusalem, something they would inaugurate by their political governance. If you’re wondering where the idea came from that the government is a replacement for the Church, you need to look back at some of our earliest colonists. Did you know Harvard was first founded as a “school of prophets”? Does it not remain with that same role, as its spawn sees its mission to lead America into the glorious “right side of History”?

As with all heresy – including the current Christian Zionism that looks forward to the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple – Jesus is taken out of the equation. Not so in this week’s Gospel. Jesus is central to Jerusalem’s history.

He goes up to Jerusalem with His Twelve. Why? Because He’s going to destroy the Temple and create a new people, taking ownership of it all in Himself.

Keep in mind Jesus is the Temple. He is the “Word made flesh and [tabernacling] among us.” And as He specifically said, albeit in the Gospel of John (not this week’s Luke), “‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up’….He was speaking of the temple of His body.”

The Temple belongs in Jerusalem, which is why Jesus needed to set His face toward Jerusalem. He, the Temple, needs to be in His home town!  Yet, the Gospel reveals, there, the gentiles would destroy Him – He would be “mocked and insulted and spit upon.”

Now, we all know more than the gentiles destroyed Jesus. Jews were among them as well. They began the persecution, lying, and torture. By Jesus referring only to “gentiles,” He’s issuing a stark judgment against the former Jewish race – they’re as good as gentiles. This is the same Jesus, after all, who referred to “those who say they are Jews and are not.”

Jesus is creating a new people, a new Israel, around a new Temple, and in a New Jerusalem. From the stones, John the Baptist promised, God can raise up a people for Himself, so no one should boast that Abraham is their father. And to the Christians St. Peter wrote, “But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people.”

Why did Jesus take His Twelve with Him? They weren’t persecuted, yet He said, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem.” Why did He bring them?

The apostles are key elements in the New Jerusalem. If Jesus is the Temple in New Jerusalem, the apostles are the gates, even as New Jerusalem has twelve gates around it. And so it is, the apostles are the gateway to Christ, even as we confess ourselves an “apostolic church” and are founded on the prophets and apostles. As far as we are concerned, Jesus never said a thing but that the apostles testified to it. They, their doctrines, their writings, are truly the gateway to Christ.  Let us keep this in mind as we behold liberals ever seeking to establish the “true, historical Jesus stripped of all that framing by the patriarchal apostles.”  No, there is not Jesus for us outside of the apostles.  As Jesus said, “He who receives [an apostle] receives Me.”  They are truly the gateway to Christ, the gateway into Jerusalem and its Temple.

Jesus was going up to Jerusalem with His band of Twelve as an invasion force. He was going to put to death in Himself the old Temple, under the old covenant – the old testament – and old law, tailored to an old people in an old city, and from that death He was going to bring to life all things new, a new people under a new testament, going to a new temple in a New Jerusalem.

When I first began this project of daily meditation on the Gospels for the historic lectionary, I thought very quickly I’d run out of things to say.  This is only a problem when Christ is reduced to a simple, abstracted narrative devoid of the humanity into which He came. The mysteries of human life and human society are never exhausted, and so shouldn’t Christ’s human life in our human world be exhausted either.  But if Christ is reduced to a narrative formula, how quickly to exhaust Who He is beyond a few slogans.

Let’s look into this idea of “narrative” for a moment.  Narrative is one of the great soul-crushing, non-life-affirming, anti-human specters of our day. What is narrative? It’s the fitting of a human life to an abstracted structure crafted by the mind of an author. It reduces the human person to a “character” in an abstract system.

The author could be a philosopher, like Karl Marx, setting up his system of dialectic materialism and placing all of us as characters in his story. Those who become “woke” to his narrative are on the right side of history; those who don’t have false consciousness, not knowing what’s best for them.

So, for instance, a housewife may be happy, healthy, filled with joy making pies, being with her children, and washing her husband’s clothes, but according to the feminist narrative, she doesn’t know she’s in bondage to a patriarchal system. She doesn’t know she’d be happier sitting in a cubicle, getting calls from the daycare about her toddler’s illness, pushing papers, and spending two hours a day in rush hour. She has false consciousness.

Our culture’s obsession with race, gender, and sexuality is nothing less than an attempt to draw focus away from the truly human and reduce real humans to two-dimensional images fitted according to whatever narrative the “authors” of society have crafted. For, what is our identity-obsession but a project to understand one another based on not on the real stuff that makes up a person – his experiences, his history, his thinking, his beliefs – but on a phantasm generated from his identity-projection. Potential for real human relations and contact is cut off at the skin. How sad.

Narrative is a myth begot by our unwavering belief in the validity of social science, the idea that people can be reduced with mathematical precision to a specific predetermined character. If they act “against character,” that is a matter not of simply being human, but of false consciousness or unwokeness.  How many bad movies are full of these two-dimensional characters?  How often is our media framed in the stark black/white narrative formula characteristic of the Manichaean (Gnostic) mind.  Trump-Bad vs. Woke-Good!  Which character are you in that mythological psychodrama?

Due to the dominance of mass media in our society, we are in a “narrative moment” culturally. Our Facebook posts, Tweets, and texts all present a narrative of who we are, with all the virtue signalling and carefully managed image-making that requires. We’ve become estranged from our humanity and the real world as we become experts at the art of crafting a narrative of who we are. It’s not real.

Jesus is the Word who became flesh. By this act God signaled the end of abstractions and systems and the beginning of something far greater, Truth.

The historic lectionary takes us through a year of Christ’s life, His human life. And each year  spirals us into deeper depths of human truth, introducing us not just to characters in the “Christ narrative,” but to true humans and true events.  This is what separates the Bible from other ancient mythological texts.  Pagan myths are stories about characters, heroes and villains.   Their tales very quickly have a narrative structure, the likes of which scholars like Joseph Campbell were able to outline in his “Hero of a Thousand Faces.”  Jordan Peterson has developed a cottage industry telling these “stories” according to his psychological narrative, and has tried to assume the Bible “story” in his project as well.

The Gospel has something very human about it eluding all attempts to fit it to the rules of narrative.  There are few heroes and few villains; the sins of the saints are manifest; there are no stock characters.  Jesus becomes human in fully human context, and the people he meets are real and true, even as He is Real and True.

Last week’s Parable of the Sower taught us this. Our narrative-impulse immediately wants us to see the overarching, abstract system presented by Christ, a teaching on the Word, for instance, and then we move on. We might forget the infinite variety of life cast into the world of our faith life by that parable. Thousands of seeds begetting trillions of varieties of life, each unique. Jesus took one such life when He presented the lily and begot a teaching which itself has changed the lives of millions.

Christ’s life is not a narrative. It’s not a story. I don’t know when it happened, but around the 80s and 90s you began to hear the faith and faith lives of Christians described in terms of “stories” and the Gospel as a “narrative.” I’m not sure this is healthy. It’s been commented that Tolstoy is a great author precisely because he’s not an author, but a medium, so to speak, of human nature. He gets out of the way of real humanity and lets it manifest as it is.

There is one Author, the Author and Finisher of our faith. Today’s postmodern authors seem well aware of their role as God-usurpers, replacing His reality with their fantasy realities. The teenage boy absorbed for hours in his video-game world is way removed not just from Tolstoy, but from God.

Christ is a Tolstoy author taken to the next level. If Tolstoy is a medium of human nature, Christ is a manifestation of human nature as it is intended to be. The modern authors of humanity craft their ideologies and narratives and sap us of our humanity as we pair ourselves with what they think we should be and see how far short we fall – think the poor person going through his newsfeed and seeing the glamours lives of others, or the poor woman paging through her woman’s magazine beating herself for not “having it all.” It’s soul-sapping.

Christ is soul-enhancing, showing us in Himself a fuller – the fullest! – version of ourselves. To be in Christ is to live in a fuller humanity.

This is a long introduction for this week’s Gospel, which in a way is an answer to last week’s meditation on the Word. The Word creates faith, and that’s what this week’s Gospel on Jesus healing the blind man invites us to meditate on. It’s an incredibly human moment, drawing on several layers of faith. And these layers we will explore, with unfortunately only five days to do so (with an Ash Wednesday interruption!).

“The ones that fell on the good ground are those who, having heard the word with a noble and good heart, keep it and bear fruit with patience.”

So often the Parable of the Sower is interpreted in a way that puts the onus on the hearer to “do something” with God’s Word. If the first three seeds were warnings about how not to hear God’s Word, the final seed must be encouragement about what we should do with God’s Word.

But this sort of goes against the entire metaphor of the parable, doesn’t it? What does a seed do to grow? What does good ground do to cause the seed to grow? Perhaps Jesus isn’t issuing tasks for us to do, but describing how people hear God’s Word, so that we understand why some people don’t hear, some hear but fall away during difficult times, some hear but fall away because of hedonism, and a final group actually hears and bears fruit. Perhaps He’s prepping His apostles for what to expect!

Still, He does use two descriptors which inculcate what we might call “passive virtues” of the noble and good heart, these are to “keep it” and to “bear fruit with patience.”

The word here for “keep” is not the same as other times we run into “keep,” which can be a translation of the Greek word for “to guard” or even “to treasure.” While that is true, the “keep” we run into here means simply “to have or hold as ones own possession.”

This is an extremely powerful concept. Like the ground, if we simply hold the seed in our bosom, we can trust it will do its work. We simply have to hold it there. God’s Word will do the work.

There are lots of words God teaches us; there are lots of facets to the Gospel; there are deep, deep levels of goodness and righteousness to Christ’s teaching and example we could aspire to. At any given time we could say, “Enough of this. I’m not suited for the Gospel.” The fourth seed says, “No, just hold on. Take possession of each Word of Christ no matter what it does to you. Don’t let your love of pleasure reject it. Don’t let its difficulty drive you away. And don’t just reject it because it doesn’t fit your preconceived ideology about how the world should run, which usually has something to do with us seeking out and doing something for God. Hold on to it. It will do its work, as God has promised. It will drive you to His forgiveness; it will drive you to deeper understandings; it will drive you to what its purpose for you is.

And it will bear fruit.

Here again, people often run to good works when contemplating the fruits born by God’s Word, as if God’s Word were a self-improvement program devoid of Christ.  By this reckoning, the “fruits of faith” are seen in someone who is nice, loving, kind, giving or whatever the standard of “a good person” is at any given societal moment.  Yet, those are not fruits of faith. Lots of religions have those fruits, and I challenge anyone to show comparatively that dedicated Christians are nicer or kinder or more virtuous than the finest of Jews, Hindus, or Muslims.

To contemplate what the fruits of faith are, we have to remember what faith is. That’s simple. It’s “Whosoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.”

Faith is belief in Jesus! To spell it out and summarize all the important New Testament texts succinctly, we should believe that Jesus is the Christ, our Lord, how has come in the flesh, who was crucified for our sins according to the Scriptures, and rose again the third day.

A fruit of that faith would be what arises or results from that faith. And what is that? What is the one thing that Christians do that no other person on the planet does. It’s worship, worship of Christ, confession of Christ and the Holy Trinity; it’s offering thanksgiving in His name, praising it, confessing it, and calling upon it in mercy. It’s the divine liturgy. None other but Christians do that. None.

That is the fruit of faith, as Hebrews 13: 15-16 says, “Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name.”

Fruits have derivative blessings, all the fruits of the Holy Spirit for instance, but if we take out the confessional, worship link, we end up with a definition of fruits that makes us no different than any other religion.  Christianity becomes reduced to a religion of us working our path to God – the very path that bore no fruit!

Finally, Jesus adds that the fourth seed bore fruit “with patience.” Faith without patience is not faith. Patience is the key ingredient that indicates whether faith was in a projected God of our own making – the Reward God, the Kingdom-of-God-Now God, the Your-Best-Life Now God – or whether it was in the true God. Our faith promises life everlasting with Christ, and all the joys of the world to come. Any fulfillment of this now would render faith fulfilled, and therefore end faith. On the flip side, any non-fulfillment of this of faith in this world would have the same effect.

Patience is what puts faith over the finish line, keeping it focused on what our prize actually is, not what we want it to be.

The third seed of the Sower fell among the thorns. These are “those who, when they have heard [the Word], go out and are choked with cares, riches, and pleasures of life, and bring no fruit to maturity.”

Cares, riches, and pleasures of life. Cares are anxieties about the concerns of this world. Riches are, well, riches. The Greek word for “pleasures” of life is the root of the word “hedonism.” It’s a life lived in pleasure.

The common theme in each of these temptations – the thing which chokes the faith – is the eclipsing of faith’s vision. Faith sets its heart and mind on the “life of the world to come” rooted in the conviction that Christ has risen from the dead – the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep – and one day we will follow where He has gone and enjoy a world we cannot even fathom now, a world we will find immense “pleasure” in, in our bodies.

Such a vision is why Christians see themselves as pilgrims passing through this world. Things may go well for us during our pilgrimage; things may go not so well. If they go well, praise God and may they be used in reflection of God’s own liberality and generosity, for the welfare of our neighbor. If they go not so well, how blessed a reward will be that moment when we face our Lord at the end of our struggles.

In both situations – things going well and things going not so well – the spaces and moments of this world are redeemed by Christ, for He holds the world together still and is its Creator. For the one for whom things go well, he sees the world around him through the sanctified vision granted him through Christ, and sees the beauty of his Lord even in this fallen world. For the one for whom things go not so well, he too sees the beauty of his Lord – the beauty of his Lord’s cross – and sees the dark valleys and niches filled with the presence of Christ.

Here’s the non-pilgrim way to look at the world. This is the way of the weed, which chokes faith. The vision of a world to come is eclipsed, and one begins to think his life in this world isn’t just a pilgrimage, but he’s got his one shot to squeeze everything he can out of this world, before his spirit is freed and returns to wherever.

If this world is all there is, I’d love someone to explain to me how anything but hedonism would be the ultimate quest. I’d love someone to explain to me how “Eat, drink, and be merry” would not be the motto. I know, I know, the likes of Aristotle argued the pleasures of higher virtues – though more difficult to discern – are in the end better. There’s a far greater pleasure in learning knowledge or wisdom about something and building something based on that wisdom, than, say, living each day seeking out your next buzz or high. But for the less philosophically endowed, why not live each day simply going from one buzz to the next?

The flips side of hedonism is not the virtuous life, however. This is something we learned from the Gnostics. The opposite of vice is not virtue, but vice on the opposite extreme. The lazy man’s extreme remedy to his vice is workaholicism.. The opposite of gluttony is extreme asceticism. The opposite of promiscuity is scorning any sexual contact, even marriage. In each case, the latter is simply the negative image of the former, often with the same root compulsions at work, even as hate and love are very often flip sides of the same emotion.

Such was the position of the Gnostics, either to indulge or deny every bodily activity, both rooted in the notion that the body is irrelevant as far as the spirit is concerned, so either deny it altogether, or indulge it because it doesn’t matter. Both hedonism and asceticism are rooted in the same gnostic compulsions founded on their negative view of the body.

We are seeing these extremes once again. The indulgent sexual revolution has spawned the #metoo piety of total removal from any sort of normal human interaction with the opposite sex. Profligacy in eating or drinking habits gives way to veganism. The same society that seems to idolize in vanity the perfect human body fosters the flip-side view that the body is nothing more than a canvass for one’s dark self expression.

It’s all the same: the body is a vessel we use for a few years before our spirits drift off into the eternal beyond. Both the hedonistic pleasures of the body and the perverse pleasure of mortifying it are guilty of the same weed-choking temptation, that this life and this body is all we got, and then that’s it.

A faith rooted in the God who became flesh recognizes a “sweet spot” in the middle of these extremes, centered on a healthy understanding of the body. Our bodies we will resurrect in, and we will enjoy divine pleasures and divine riches in our bodies forever. With this guarantee, there need not be any anxiety about getting the most zest out of life now, or else we’ll miss out.

The weed bears no fruit, even as a life of hedonism and wealth-seeking ends up pretty empty and full of many anxieties. But the one with faith in Christ can forego these things, bearing the fruit of confessed faith, and reaping divine pleasures that will never end.

Among all the questions we face as humans, perhaps the most difficult one is the problem of evil. Where does evil come from? Why does it happen?

In fact, the problem of evil is only a problem to those who assume the existence of a good God. Think about it. If there is no God, what is good or evil? Isn’t what we consider evil just the workings out of evolutionary nature? T-Rex has a big ole brontosaurus burger, using his mouth like a woodchipper for its poor victim, and we’d say this is nature doing what nature does. How different is that from a murderer or rapist preying on the weak. Some evolutionary biologists have even argued rape is perfectly in line with evolution!

On account of nature’s brutality, the “pessimistic philosopher,” Arthur Schopenhauer, rejected the God of this natural order (i.e., our God) and pursued a more Gnostic understanding of God, that is, a divine force transcending this material world order with all its darkness and death.

And this is another solution to the problem of evil, the Gnostic one. Gnosticism proposes there are two forces at work in the cosmos, a greater good God who transcends this material realm, and a lesser evil God who created the physical universe. They famously rejected the Old Testament God as this evil God, and embraced Jesus as a messenger of Light from the good God who has nothing to do with this world.

Gnosticism pervades the thinking today of those who look at the evils of the world and lay the blame at the “systems” and “institutions” of this evil world order. Only by a revolutionary rejection of nature and all its laws – by rejecting this world’s Creator! – can we ever begin to undo all his evils.

The problem with Gnosticism is it denies the almighty nature of God. God created the heavens and the earth, and all things visible and invisible. There is nothing not outside His management. If there are evils, we must confess He is ultimately in control of them. He’s not authoring the evils, but allowing them and managing them in accordance with His wisdom.

What then? How do we solve this problem of evil?

I always like to ask these two questions to explain the Christian solution to the problem of evil. First, what is the worst crime, evil, and injustice ever done in the history of our world? Second, what is the best thing that ever happened in the history of our world? The answer to both questions is the same. Jesus dying on the cross. Here, God took the greatest crime ever and turned it into the greatest salvation ever. He’s simply laying the foundation for St. Paul’s words, that God works all things for those good of those who love Him.

In any event, this is a long set up for today’s meditation on the rocky ground. Some seed fell among the rocky ground, and it grew up for a while, but as soon as times of testing came, the seed withered and died. These are they who fall away when hardships arise, when they have to lose friends on account of their faith or because they hold to what seems to be archaic Christian teachings (on sexuality, for instance), or when a loved one gets a fatal disease and suffers terribly. These are very often faith-crushing things.

Their problem is they had a false god. Or perhaps better put, they projected onto their god their ideas of how the problem of evil would be resolved, and named that god “Jesus.” In other words, they believed having faith in Christ would make everything good in their lives, and they’d be freed from many evils. Jesus never promised this. He promised persecution. He said, “Take up your cross daily and follow me.” Further, there is no suggestion whatsoever in the rest of the New Testament that the Christian life would or could not be harsh.  Quite the opposite!

Jesus never promised miracles save that of the resurrection. He never promised a life free from drudgery or even slavery. He never promised an end to wars and in fact predicted the opposite: wars, famines, and diseases would rampage the earth til His return.

Simply put, life is rocky. But for those with faith, the power of that faith has always been their absolute certainty that whatever evils afflict them here are but a momentary prelude to a glorious redemption. These were the martyrs singing hymns in the lion’s dens. Their sights are set toward another world, and this recasts their vision of all the evils of this world. In every evil they see their crucified Lord. They see – even in the depths of Sheol – a place filled with God’s presence, and therefore they see a place of hope where no hope seems to reside.  In what others see as death, the Christian sees as the meeting place of his Lord.

There is nothing in Scripture to suggest that the Lord doesn’t send times of testing. He does it out of love. He does it because He disciplines those He loves as His own children. He does it in such a way that we cannot comprehend why He’s doing it – ask Job.

To update and paraphrase what God said to Job, just look at the universe. It’s staggering to contemplate how many stars are just in our galaxy, to say nothing of how many there are in the whole universe. Just to get to our nearest neighbor star would take four years at the speed of light, which will not happen. Even Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, has only just recently left the solar system – the solar system! Oh, and God created all that in an instance.

If God’s head were the universe, we’ve just explored an area the depth of an atom on a follicle of hair on His ear, to say nothing of comprehending how His brain works! To think we can wrap our heads around the problem of evil, or why things happen as they do, is simply foolish.

But God sent His Son to be a powerful testament to His ultimate purposes. Whatever evils there are, Christ has assumed them all, and has redeemed them, conquering over them in the resurrection. And this victory He has promised us. We don’t seek to escape the evils of this world as the Gnostics do. No, we take their burdens up daily and follow Christ, who Himself did the same.