by CCW | 16 June 2013 17:00
It is a tough saying, one of the toughest and, yet, one of the truest. Forgiveness is there for all who want it but if you deny the very possibility of forgiveness then that is to ‘blaspheme’ against the Holy Spirit. The unforgivable sin is about denying the power and the possibility of forgiveness. Nothing captures so completely the Christian sense of the incredible power and dignity of the human will. It is this passage[1] that makes possible Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost and the whole power of Goethe’s Dr. Faustus. Our bond with the deceiver is captured in the denial of the possibilities of forgiveness. It is dogmatic and coercive. It means the rejection of any sort of realization of our own weaknesses and shortcomings; for to acknowledge sin is to recognize grace. But even more, it belongs to a denial of the possibilities of God’s grace. It denies God’s grace entirely! It denies to God what alone belongs truly and properly to God – mercy and forgiveness. This is actually the great insight of the Christian religion.
While it provides an insight into the nature of God, we might say, it also points to the radical nature of human freedom. We are free to condemn ourselves, to will our complete and utter separation from God. In other words, Hell is us precisely because we get what we want but deny what God wants for us. Heaven – a state of blessedness – is only possible through the grace of God. This, too, is a deep truth of the Christian religion. Hell is entirely our doing.
Our first lesson[2] from The Book of Joshua also throws light on the theme of human redemption and the humility which is the condition of our joy, as signaled principally in the eucharistic readings[3] for this day in the double parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, parables which recall us to the divine will for our blessedness, a blessedness which is the joy of heaven. It requires of us that we be, as St. Peter puts it in the epistle reading[4], “subject to one another, and clothed with humility.”
The lesson from Joshua captures an important moment in the history of Israel which sheds light, too, upon the subsequent history of Christianity. The story of the conquest of the Promised Land begins with the theme of crossing the Jordan, a biblical image that has taken on a whole raft of meanings and associations in the hymns and prayers of the Church as well as a whole set of significances politically down throughout the ages right up to and including our own. There is the religious significance of the promised land; there is the political significance of the Jordan Bank in the state of Israel. The crossing of rivers is a perennial theme in the history of conquests: Washington crossing the Delaware, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and so on. The Book of Joshua is a book of conquests, the conquest of the promised land. But the entire purpose of The Book of Joshua is something theological. God is the agent of Israel’s victories and conquests over all who oppose the truth and unity of the One, Holy God of the Mosaic Covenant.
Critical to the perspective of The Book of Joshua is the ark of the Covenant, a kind of portable temple, you might say, that contains the Law and embodies the spiritual identity of Israel. Our story is about the Levitical priests carrying the ark of the covenant across the Jordan.
The story is a reprise, a reworking, of the crossing of the Red Sea and to get at the significance of this crossing of the Jordan, you need to note the differences between these crossings. In the crossing of the Red Sea, it is all and entirely God’s doing. In the crossing of the Jordan, God appoints twelve men from each of the tribes of Israel to bear the ark of the covenant. “And when the soles of the feet of the priests who bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan shall be stopped from flowing, and the waters coming down from above shall stand in one heap.” It is a lovely image – the priests bearing the ark of the covenant “while the people of Israel passing over on dry ground.” The priests, too, “stood on dry ground in the midst of the Jordan.” “Led them with unmoistened foot through the Red Sea waters,” as one hymn puts it, but here, too, they cross Jordan with “unmoistened foot.”
The theological point is that our humanity participates in this act of redemption. We don’t just see what God is doing; we are commanded to act with God. This points us, especially in the Christian understanding, to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the union of God and Man in the person of Jesus Christ, and to the radical nature of human redemption which requires our participation with God, doing what God commands, what God seeks and wants for us. “God,” as John Donne remarks, “will not save us without our wills” but only through our wills, our wills willing what God wills for us. In a way, the story of the crossing of the Jordan signals that larger theme captured most profoundly in the Mary’s ‘yes’ to God, her “be it unto me according to thy word;” and in Christ’s prayer in the agony of Gethsemane, his “let this cup pass from me, yet not my will but thine be done.”
Only so can there be rejoicing, a rejoicing which is ultimately about our being found in the love of the Father. Perhaps this gives added poignancy and meaning to the celebration of Father’s Day in our contemporary culture. The two parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin celebrate that divine love but they actually serve as prologue to the greater parable of the lost or prodigal son which shows the dynamic of human redemption and signals again the theme of our participation in that saving work. The lost son, having wasted his patrimony, almost literally throwing off his relation to his father, “comes to himself” in a far-away land. He repents and returns. But it is the father’s love which makes that return possible. When we deny that love we remain in the hell of our own choosing. We blaspheme the Holy Spirit of God when we deny to God what belongs to the truth of God and we exclude ourselves from what God would accomplish in us; we deny our sonship in Christ. This gives heightened poignancy to our daily prayer, “forgive us our trespasses, even as we forgive them that trespass against us.” Sometimes the toughest teachings, it seems, can open us out to the greatest truth.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 3, MP, 2013
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