A world lays before God in paralysis. A lethargy has taken hold. Apathy weighs down the spirit. Lively relationship with God begins to die. The sheep, Jesus says, have strayed and now have become lost. God sends His Son to travel the length and breadth of the historical sheepfolds of Israel to gather the sheep and bring them home.
In this morning's Gospel lesson, we see Jesus doing exactly this. How do we know? (I said, "the length and breadth of the land.") He has scribed a great circle around the tribes, encompassing the whole, "from Dan as far as Beersheba" (1 Kings 4:25), as the ancient Hebrews would say. This whole is signified with a diptych: in this case, two scenes hinged together depicting opposite versions of the same subject matter.
The first scene — call it the scene on the left — was a little tableau we saw last week: the Good Shepherd attempting to gather the lost sheep of Gad. The scene on the right, which we contemplate this week, portrays the Lord of Life venerated by those all around Him. These are the lost sheep wishing to be found.
The framing device is simple. He marks it clearly, even commanding it, by reversing His position with respect to the Sea of Galilee:
| He gave a command to depart to the other side. (Mt 8:18) |
He departs from the northernmost reaches of Galilee's coast to its southern most reaches: to the other side. There He steps off the boat on to the shores of Gad.
Having been driven out of Gad, "He got into a boat [and] crossed over" (Mt 9:1). From the perspective of a map, He has reversed His position, from furthest south to furthest north.
He has sought the twelve tribes of the Patriarchs:
| "I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Mt 15:24) |
Notice that Jesus does not say "lost tribes," a phrase that does not appear in Holy Scripture. For the people Israel have mostly become a vast diaspora within their land as well as beyond it.
The Gospels depict only one tribe that has retained a sharp consciousness of its identity and its boundaries: Judah, which looks down on the rest as being inferiors. Indeed, they have so differentiated themselves from the other tribes that they are no longer Hebrew, but rather adherents of a new religion: Judah-ism.
We see in this diaspora the fulfillment of the prophecy spoken by Jeremiah:
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"My people have been lost sheep.
Their shepherds have led them astray; They have turned them away on the mountains. They have gone from mountain to hill; They have forgotten their resting place." (Jer 50:6) |
You Sisters will recall the Haitian proverb, "Deye mon gen mon" / "Beyond the mountains, more mountains." That is the sense of this, a sense of hopelessness.
By Jesus' time, the historical Northern and Southern Kingdoms have devolved into a kind of aimlessness, for their ties to the ancient religion have attenuated. Solomon's Temple has been razed to the ground. The holy altars and pillars constructed by the Patriarchs have been mostly destroyed. And outside invaders from the Babylonians to the Persians to the Greeks to the Romans have undermined their culture in general to the point, in Jesus's time, that young men reverse their circumcisions and adopt Greco-Roman clothing styles.
Judah alone remains cohesive. But the religion the Judeans practice is centered on animal sacrifice, itself a foreign import. You see, in one way or another, the people have become lost sheep.
Meantime, as we considered last week, the Lord God is rejected nearly everywhere, bequeathing to the ages a tragic archetype: the great archetype that has come to define our own time and place: the rejection of God .... which is a theological definition of Hell.
Small wonder, this world should be so thickly populated with demons. For the void that is left when God is rejected always fills with competing spiritual energies. And all spirits that are not God by definition are demonic.
Surrounding all of this is another layer or sphere — a trans-national consciousness that had been unfolding for centuries. First, the aspiration of Alexander to make one global people out of many disparate nations speaking and writing one language (Greek), being trained and formed in one education (Paideia), and bowing before one emperor. The success of this aspiration can be gauged by a Greek-speaking lifeworld from the borders of Arabia to Rome itself. Indeed, as the great classicist Werner Jaeger pointed out sixty years ago, Jesus and His Disciples all speak Greek, for they never cite the Hebrew Bible when they quote Scripture, but rather the Greek translation, the LXX.
By Jesus's time, this aspiration was going to a new level as the Roman Empire was expanding to Britain in the West, to Germany in the North, to Persia in the East, and into Northern Africa to the South. Standing at the center of all is God, "Whose Kingdom shall have no end" as we say each day in our Creed.
Emerging from the Jesus story is another kind of trans-national consciousness .... though it is more than that, really a consciousness transcending nations and the world altogether. Jesus tells Pilate,
| "My Kingdom is not of this world" (Jn 18:36) |
We find this Kingdom expressed in our Gospel lesson this morning. The Lord has just departed the region of Gad. The Gadarenes have rejected Him outright with a mob bidding Him return to His boat and away from their coasts on the far southeast shore of the Sea of Galilee. By contrast, scarcely before he can set foot on the far north shore, He is met with faithful devotees:
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When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic,
"Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you." (Mt 9:2) |
Jesus singles out their faithfulness, their belief, their love. We do not infer that the whole region shares this mind and heart. Of nearby Bethsaida in the Tribe of Naphtali (where Capernaum is located) and of nearby Chorazin in the Tribe of Manasseh, Jesus (only two chapters hence) says,
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"Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works which were done in you
had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. (Mt 11:21) |
The point is that even foreign cities, outside of historical Israel and Judah, are more faithful than these former tribes.
The party awaiting Jesus does not represent any tribe. The point is, they represent only devotion to the Son of God. We may fairly say — indeed, Jesus has said — that they have no part in the perdition that surrounds them. They are faithful; in this they are citizens of Jesus' transcendent Kingdom. And their sins are forgiven. "Which sins?" we ask. The sin of being alienated from God.
We must understand that when we live in a culture alienated from God, and we "go along in order to get along," we have sunk into a profound sin .... of a variety nearly impossible to extricate ourselves from. You see, the Kingdom of God is a fluid situation. When we love God, when we abide by His statutes, we "are One" with Him (Jn 17:11), One with His marvelous Kingdom. When we consent to a culture that has departed from God, we are not. We have once again, in that instant, become lost in a land of the lost.
If the lengthy correspondence of the Apostle Paul, (which is about half the New Testament) can be distilled to one essence, it is this: to love Jesus, the Only-begotten Son of God, is to be inseparably part of His Kingdom. Nothing else is required but to love God, which implies our faithfulness, our devotion, and our adherence to His safeguards for our lives. We are forgiven for our perdition. We are washed and cleansed in baptism. We are born into new life, Heavenly life.
No other tribal or national membership matters. Will national identity matter when we die? Will tribal or "blood ties" count for anything? The only thing that will matter is our family resemblance which God has set upon us at birth. The great question will be What have we done with that royal countenance? Have we disfigured it? As we read in our Troparion this morning, "What have I done to my spotless baptismal garment? Have I defiled it?!" Have we dimmed (or even put out) the light that once shone so brightly from within us? .... a radiance not of our doing, but of God's doing.
To be sure, a vast trans-national consciousness expands below us. It is peopled with countless demons and lost souls. By the grace of God, a trans-national consciousness expands above us as well. It is the imperishable Kingdom of Heaven. Neither empire will request our passport. Neither will issue visas. Neither will analyze our DNA for family connection. Only one test will matter. What is the state of your soul? What are the affections of your heart? Where does your mind constantly tend?
If we should find ourselves in demonic Gad, where the empire below has come to dominate a once faithful tribe above, we must protect our hearts and guard our souls. If we should find ourselves in spiritual udah, where "thought police" roam the streets demanding that we conform lest we be cancelled, we must put a sentry before our lips and a shield before our minds. For our Master has preceded us through these alienated landscapes and teaches us the way through.
He had reached out to the Gadarenes who preferred demonic life. He had reached out to the Judean Pharisees trying to win them over.
In this morning's Gospel, we behold a diptych. Its opposition suggests the whole scope, the length and breadth, of the wandering sheep of Israel. Where shall the Good Shepherd herd them down out of the mountains? Which sheepfolds does He plan?
But, you see, their boundaries will not be as they were. For their original destination had been God from the beginning. Jesus bids them "Look up!" He says, "The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near!" And displays before them such power that they are able to see God:
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"But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins" —
Then He said to the paralytic, "Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house." And he arose and departed to his house. Now when the multitudes saw it, they marveled and glorified God, who had given such power to men. (Mt 9:6-8) |
In Jesus, they behold godlike power given even to the sons of men — to turn away from the enervating paralysis of this world, to get up off of our couches, to turn away from televisions and computers, to walk on our two feet, and to see God.
This is the power God has given to us. This is how He rouses us from our deadly slumbers — His power, in us, exercised in freedom.
Let us rise from our pallets and feel this power.
Let us wield this power.
For the Lord of Life calls to us.
He forgives us.
And the acceptable time is now.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.