We have meditated many times on the Lost Tribe of Gad, which Jesus visits in our Gospel lesson this morning. God the Father has sent the Son, the great Proto-Apostle, to gather the Lost Tribes of Israel. The Lord Jesus has selected twelve kings to rule these lost jurisdictions (Mt 19:28, Lu 22:30), the aggregation of God's Kingdom on earth.
How can a tribe be lost to God? Is not the favor of God to be trusted? Such a question falls into the category of "Eternal Security," a doctrine derived from the writings of Augustine of Hippo, and adopted by most Protestants but not the Eastern and Western Catholic Churches. Both Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches recognize that salvation is attained, by the grace of God, through synergy (Greek) or cooperation (Latin). Yes, God wills us live near to Him and in accord with His commands, but our gift of sovereign freedom has the decisive last word.
The historical backdrop for this Divine Apostolate initiated with God's birth among us is a socio-religious civil war — fought between those cooperating with God's ways and His plan revealed at Mt. Sinai and those inventing a new religion patterned on precedents from neighboring countries.
The Judean exiles to Mesopotamia during the so-called "Babylonian captivity" have returned. They do not speak Hebrew but rather Mesopotamian Aramaic. They do not practice the ancient Hebrew religion, but practice a new, Mesopotamian religion featuring animal sacrifice. They have revised the Sacred Scriptures to conform to their new cult. They have built a new temple in Jerusalem supervised by Mesopotamian overlords who have financed the project. They style themselves the true people of God having undergone "a second Exodus," they say. Their Prophet Ezra declares marriage to women of the Hebrew party to be null and void. "Put these women away!" he commands. "And their children!" Ezra will be the midwife in the birth of a new religion, one pleasing to the powerful captors of Judah, to be called Judah-ism.
They continue King Josiah's campaign on the eve of the exile to destroy and suppress all vestiges of the old religion. They destroy the faithful Temple on Mt. Gerizim a century before Jesus' birth. They downplay the religion of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and exalt the figure of Moses, for he received the faith directly from God and will serve as the authority for a cult featuring animal sacrifice. The partisans of this new regime are the power-brokers of Judah. Those who disagree are marginalized.
Faithful Hebrew families flee this rebellion against God in droves, this War on Heaven now playing out on the earth. Many move their families to Elephantine, an island in Egypt, where they erect a temple faithful to the religion of the Patriarchs. But the Mesopotamian king, Darius the Great, hears of it and demands that they offer animal sacrifice as the centerpiece of their religious practices lest they and their temple be destroyed.
Presumably Jesus had selected Judas Iscariot to rule Judah, which will unfold as a microcosm of the rebellion, for he will betray the Son of God just as his tribe had betrayed God's Kingdom. Now understanding all spiritual life through the prism of animal sacrifice, the Judeans decide to sacrifice Jesus, which their High Priest Caiaphas proposes explicitly (Jn 11:50).
What shall we say of the tribe of Judah? Is it not utterly lost? A whole society has been re-programmed — speaking a new language, espousing new values, adopting new customs, and rupturing relations with the God of their Fathers.
Look around! Do we not recognize this same process of transformation and rupture in our own lifeworld? And is it not commonly said (explicitly or implicitly) "What have You to do with us, Jesus, Son of God?" Indeed, to embrace Him as the Son of God is to risk rejection and worse.
The perdition of Judah is one kind of apostasy: intentional, engineered with precision, including a carefully planned program of social change. Jesus sees it plainly. His Disciples, all descending from the Northern Kingdom of Israel (excepting Judas Iscariot), abhor it. In vigorous protest Jesus overturns tables stacked high with animals ticketed for sacrifice. He says He will "destroy this temple" (Jn 2:19).
Today, Jesus visits another lost tribe, the Lost Tribe of Gad, which represents a second kind of apostasy. We find no new ideology, no new language, no carefully engineered social program to indoctrinate youth or re-program adults. There is no splendid temple being built by powerful outside interests. Gad does not aspire to institute a new religion. It merely drifts away from godly life through apathy, laziness, and a loss of zeal for God's ways and statutes.
As He arrives to its shores, Jesus immediately encounters a people enslaved to sin. They dwell in the valley of the shadow of death amongst tombs. They are bound in chains. Demons run rampant in a field of victory. So numerous are they, even within the scope of a single life, that their name is "legion, for we are many." The hoggish customs of the Gadarenes have drifted so far from godly life that they tend large herds of swine are tended to supply the people with pork, which any Hebrew would abhor.
Think of our own world overflowing with opioids, pervasive pornography, and social acceptance of hook-up culture and adultery. Gad is not so hard picture.
We might ask, "But is this the state of all people in Gad!" Certainly this is the state of life presented to us. Moreover, do not all the people reject God as He approaches with His life of orderliness, healing, and offer of reconciliation? Do not all the Gadarenes drive the Son of God back to His boat, and away from their shores?
Two kinds of lost tribes: one tribe has gone "exotic" — importing customs and religion from powerful Babylon and later more powerful Persia in the region of Mesopotamia. An air of superiority hangs about it, which we can gauge from the reverence accorded the Three Magi, also found in St. Matthew's Gospel. The "wise men from the East (Mt 2:1)" are Persians, Zoroastrians, as far as we can tell.
The second kind of lost tribe we know very well, for it is all around us. It is what happens when we "let go," when we no longer strive. 40 million people left their jobs during the Great Resignation. This past January alone 4.3 million people quit with no sign of slowing down according to the U.S. Department of Labor. They have let go .... let go of bettering themselves, let go of ideals associated with family, morals, and the worship of God. Sales of alcohol have sky-rocketed and everywhere we see pressures to legalize recreational drugs.
What arises from a collapse like this — when the men and women who once embraced their roles as mature mothers and fathers retreat into the adolescence of wild living and anything-goes personal conduct? The outcome is rage in their children, including their adult children. How many do we see in rehab clinics or in AA/NA recounting the legions of demons that controlled their lives, reducing them to shameful acts? Far worse are those who are still in it. The smell of death hangs about them, whom chains cannot restrain.
A tragic point made in the Gospels, whether depicting the intractability of Judah or the apathy of Gad, is that even God Himself cannot effect change in their lives. The grace of God is always already present as Jesus Himself is present amongst the lost tribes. But something else is required, for God's plan anticipates synergy, a holy cooperation seen in the grateful receiving of His gift.
But we can become Heavenly within the small, but splendid, sphere of our little lives. I say small, but, in fact, by virtue of the Divinity planted within us, we are infinite in our essence and Divine dimensions. And this is the task of synergy: To embrace that inner Divinity.
I do not, of course, mean "new age" freestyling. I most certainly do not mean "living free" in the sense of tattooed, drugged, and wild living. I mean real freedom, to no longer be a slave to one's passions, to become the master of our bodies giving the soul (nous) its rightful dignity and leadership.
The way ahead is well-known. The teachings of Jesus heard throughout Judah and on the shores of Gad are the same ones that we hear today. The miracles that are related in the pages of the Holy Gospels occur in our lives, too. Angels are still seen today. Miraculous healings are familiar to most people. God's ways and commands are well documented. All that the Judeans and Gadarenes were shown has also been shown to us. We might even say, these things are commonly seen. What is rare, however, is the man or woman who responds, who gratefully receives God's gift.
How odd this is! For who would choose drifting through a disordered (and frequently diseased) life over the Kingdom of Heaven. Is this not evidence of Judean delusion or of demonic possession in Gad? We are the limiting factor.
Change must begin with us, by the grace of God. Fantasy entertainment is an obvious symptom of our need for a redeeming power from on-high. But no superhero could rise to the power and splendor of that incommensurable "super hero," the God-man.
He bids us follow Him. My spiritual son of many years past recently told me that Jesus had two verbs: come and go (a formulation he heard from Billy Graham). Come!" He says. He calls that we might know Him. Knowing Him, we come to love Him. Loving Him, we follow Him. We teaches us all that we need to know. And then He sends us. He sends out into a lost world to do the things that He had done.
The people to whom He sends us will ask, "What does this mean?!"
And
we will answer,
"The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near!
The acceptable time is upon you!
Believe the good news.
Trust God.
And become all that He has made you to be.
For this is the purpose and the point of all the Creation."
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.