“Be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”
Today’s Epistle reading sums up wonderfully the whole pageant of sanctification in what belongs to the qualities of Christ in us and what God seeks for the redemption and restoration of our humanity. It is very much about what we learn from Christ and about our life in Christ. The Gospel illustrates what God wants us to learn and know. “That ye may know”, Jesus says, “that the Son of man hath power to forgive sins.”
The healing miracle of the Gospel is about the radical nature of human redemption. Jesus wants us to know that he is the forgiveness of sins. That is our restoration and the moving principle of our sanctification. It is something which has to be learned. How? By our being awakened to self-consciousness, to the awareness of who we are in God. In a way, these lessons concentrate for us the whole pageant of human redemption and restoration.
The question about self-consciousness is perhaps the defining question for modernity in and through all the confusions and contradictions about identity and freedom, in and through the various forms of our certainties and uncertainties, our fears and anxieties. And yet, it belongs to the much larger story of human redemption as revealed in the Scriptures and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the questions of God to our humanity that come to a kind of clarity in today’s Gospel. Here Jesus’s question – “wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?” – articulates a constant theme of God’s questions to us in the pageant of the Scriptures. They are questions that call us to account and to a deeper understanding of ourselves, questions that perhaps, just perhaps, speak to us in our current perplexities.
The first question in Genesis is the question of the serpent to the woman in the Garden of Eden. It follows directly upon the accounts of creation as an orderly whole and of our place within the order of creation that emphasise the inherent and absolute goodness of creation, and our humanity as made in the image of God and as the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. The story of the Fall undertakes two things: first, the question of sin and evil, and secondly, the form of our awakening to self-consciousness. As we saw last week at Michaelmas, sin and evil are only possible through the relation of intellectual and spiritual beings to God as their principle. Sin and evil belong to the contradiction and denial of the very conditions of our being and knowing; yet they also belong paradoxically to the awakening of ourselves as selves through our separation from God. But that is what launches the whole pageant of redemption through the questions of God to our humanity that recall us to the truth of ourselves in God.
“Did God say?” the serpent asks. We know what God said and Eve recounts exactly what God had commanded about not eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The serpent symbolises an aspect of human rationality in the form of a kind of twisted reasoning. He offers an alternative interpretation of what God means by this commandment; it is a half-truth but not the whole truth. Our eyes indeed shall be opened and we shall know good and evil but not as God knows good and evil. We will learn good and evil experientially through suffering and death. That belongs to the long, long story of our humanity, learning, if we learn at all, through suffering and separation from our homeland of spirit but also learning from God’s questions to us.
There is all the difference in the world between the question of the serpent and questions of God. The serpent’s question seeks to undermine or limit the truth that is sought. It is not about learning so much as it is about pride and pretension. We pretend always to think that we know better than God, that we can think and act without regard for God whose truth is the ground of our being and knowing. Such is our folly and state of contradiction. God’s questions on the other hand awaken us to self-consciousness and to truth; questions in other words that seek to know rather than to undermine knowledge and truth.
The four questions of God that follow reverberate and re-echo down throughout the Scriptures and the history of our humanity. “Where are you?” God asks Adam. It is not as if God does not know! Rather the question draws out the first form of self-consciousness in Adam. “I heard the sound of thee in the garden and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” God replies with two questions which call us to account. “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” itself a question about being self-aware in ways that belong to our distinctiveness from the rest of creation, and “hast thou eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” If creation is good as a whole and in its parts, then the commandment equally is good. The questions call us to account. Adam’s response is truthful but not fully truthful. He simply recounts what the woman has said to him and what happened but without any sense of his complicity in the action. God’s fourth question is to Eve. “What is this that thou hast done?” Again, it is precisely about our being called to account, to an awareness of our free action but in contradiction and separation from what we had been given to know. Eve responds truthfully; “the serpent beguiled me and I ate.” Her response shows an awareness of the difference between the serpent’s question and the questions of God. To be beguiled is to be deceived or tricked by half-truths masquerading as the whole truth.
This beautiful mythological story conveys deep truth and wisdom. What is sometimes overlooked is how these questions reappear over and over again in the pageant of Scripture and in the story of human redemption. In the very next chapter of Genesis, God asks Cain, “where is Abel your brother?”, an echo of God’s first question to Adam. Again, it is not as if God does not know. Again it is a question which seeks to awaken us to ourselves. Cain’s sophistical response and rhetorical question illustrates the same kind of deceit as the serpent, at once a lie, “I do not know” and a further sense of separation, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” We are divided and at enmity among ourselves. God’s second question to Cain echoes his question to Eve. “What have you done? Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”
In my view there is a wonderful simplicity and a kind of gentleness about God’s questions. Later in the Book of Job, God will speak out of the whirlwind to Job in his sufferings to call him to account. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy?” It echoes God’s questions in Genesis in recalling us to the goodness of creation and to the pageant of redemption. In Job’s case it is about recognizing that the good order of God’s creation is prior and the greater condition for the Law; again, an awakening to a larger and a fuller understanding of God’s will and purpose for our humanity. The Psalmist perhaps sums up the meaning of these questions in another question; “What is man that thou art mindful of him? And the Son of man that thou visitest him?” (Ps. 8.5).
Luke in the introduction to the parable of the Good Samaritan gives us Jesus’ response to the cynical and sceptical lawyer. “What is written in the Law? How readest thou?” Again, questions which call us to account and to truth. In this case, the lawyer is compelled by the truth itself to state the love of God and the love of neighbour to which Jesus says, “thou hast answered right. This do and thou shalt live.” The lawyer equivocates, another kind of half-truth, with a rhetorical question that denies the truth which he has already spoken. “And who is my neighbour?” This launches the parable at the conclusion of which Jesus asks him, “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour to him that fell among the thieves?” I love that phrase, “thinkest thou”. We are called to account, to a kind of self-conscious awareness about our responsibility and freedom about truth.
Do these questions which reverberate through the witness of the Scriptures have an answer? Yes, but only in the same way as the questions themselves, namely as a way of convicting our consciences. What else are the seven last words of Christ from the Cross? They begin and end with an address to the Father. They begin with the word of forgiveness: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do?” So gentle and yet so powerfully, this word convicts us of the half-truths and limits of our human knowing and doing. They end with an image of redemption and restoration. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” Jesus says, the gathering all things back to God. And in the fourth word, Jesus voices the radical meaning of sin and evil in his cry of dereliction, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” But it is a cry to God and thus belongs to our return to him. He gives voice to the truth and full meaning of sin.
And how? Simply and profoundly by what Jesus clearly says here that he wants us to know. He is the forgiveness of sins. Forgiveness is our restoration, not simply to wholeness of body but to the radical truth of ourselves in God’s love and mercy, the very conditions and qualities of our life in Christ. It is what Paul commends to us and what Jesus would have us learn about his truth in us.
“Be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 19, 2024