Exodus

Our Gospel lesson today is brief. The Man of Eden has come. His message is equally brief, fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah:

This prophecy is attested nearly word-for-word in all four Gospels, a rarity. The wilderness is the place of purity, the domain where we encounter God. So is the desert. The cities of Cain are opposite. The city is the place of estrangement from God. The straight highway in the desert is the direct and unpolluted route from the cities to the domain of God's purity. The Greek word underlying straight is

This is the source for word ethos, or ethics.

Of course, there is the simple meaning of straight, as in "straight-edge," but a primary sense is its moral meaning: "a path of thought, speech, or action that is forthright, open, direct."

You see, the devil is called "the deuce." He is double, the counterfeit, the deceiver, the father of lies. But God is One. And goodness is forthright, open, direct.

The word eutheías is used only four times in the New Testament attesting this particularity and each time echoing Isaiah: to make straight a highway (Mk 1:3, Mt 3:3, Lu 3:4) and to make the crooked ways straight (Acts 13:10). This last passage helps us grasp the concept:

The blindness here is both visible and invisible. It is manifest in the failure of his eyes, and it is manifest in the darkness which pervades his soul. It is this moral sense which defines the essence of St. John the Forerunner: he is not crooked but, rather, straight down to the dimensions of his soul: plainly-spoken, upright, untainted. We read in St. John's Gospel:

What exactly did the Forerunner mean with these words? He tells us himself:

St. Matthew adds, "For this was he is who was spoken of by the prophet"   (Mt 3:3).

The Forerunner's shorter and more direct version has two parts. The second part is epic-scale, explaining the purpose of all four Gospels, for here is the good news, which the word gospel signifies: the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near.

What?! Here, into our tawdry and tattered world, the Kingdom of God has come?! Why, this is most wonderful news! God's Kingdom!

The first part (Repent) arises naturally from the second — what anyone would do with the approach of a great king: "Prepare!" Indeed, Isaiah prophet says, "Prepare the way of the LORD." So we envision a highway, but we also contemplate the "ways of God" — His manner, His outlook, the Way He is, the Way He sees things.

Significantly, this was Christianity's original name: the Way. The way to Heaven, a way of being, which are one and the same.

In ancient times, the vocation of a forerunner or herald (we use the phrase "herald angels") was to go out before the king, announcing his approach, so the people could prepare. They prepared their villages, their homes, and themselves for this great event.

In the case of heralds and a worldly prince, we are aware that the day after these visitors depart, things will go back to the way they were before. Perhaps we envision street sweepers .... and then things settle back down to normal.

By contrast, Isaiah suggests a preparation that is lasting, that we become like the Great Prince. We are going out to His domain, the desert. And we are to prepare for the the Way of the Lord. This is no shining of shoes only to become scuffed again. This is no hair cut only to become unkempt again. This is the deepest-down shining and grooming, which is a fundamental change in ourselves. For God never departs. He is everywhere. He sees everything. The encounter with the Living and True God signifies the turning point of our lives, not just a memorable event. A failure to requite the love God would be the greatest of calamities. Forget the past! From here is only His Beauty and Grace and Divine Love.

But let us return to St. John's Gospel. In the very next passage, following his interview with the priests and Levites sent by the Jews, the Forerunner says,

The Lamb of God. John's disciples and the Apostles understood this phrase to mean "the Pure One." Pure, of course, means no pollution of any kind. He is the white and unblemished Lamb. He does not lust for power or public honor. He is no glutton nor a drunkard. He does not envy, nor is He deformed by jealousy. Sexual appetites have no dominion over Him. He is not a weak man, but a strong one. And He is pure.

This is central to understanding what is meant by "taking away the sin of the world." For this sea change in the human lifeworld — no sin — has two aspects, visible and invisible. The invisible part is that His Incarnation — the Creator entering our lifeworld as an organism, as a creature — so shocks the Creation that it flips the telos of the human race from death to life. Before, due to our Fall from Grace, all humans, however good, were fated to accept disease and death as their finality. But now the trajectory and end-point of life has become eternal life: eternal life with God or eternal life estranged from God.

The visible part is the good life Jesus models for us and teaches us about, which is the decisive crossroads in each life. Are we with God or against God? Do I exaggerate? Look all around you. Is this not the case in every life you see? For God? Or against God? Could there be anything in between?

We meet people whose goodness is radiant. To be around them is to be uplifted, is to float along on a cloud of grace. Power and influence hold no interest. Popularity contests are beneath their attention. They do not care about worldly honors. And strong drink or drugs? They see no attraction in becoming numb now and stupid later. They are repelled at the thought of casual sex. And they find pornography degrading. But the thought of God's purity and love? Why, this makes them come fully alive. Here they have found peace. They live in the company of God. And His Ways are becoming their ways.

Jesus takes away the sin of the world through this purity. After all, how could sinful life continue if we were all freed from demeaning and degrading thoughts?

Our Gospel lesson is simple. John has been imprisoned. So the Lord Jesus will now carry forward his essential message:

Often we call Jesus our "Savior." We say that He was sent to save the world. Truly, He is, and He does. But this word save means different things to different people. For many, the idea of a repairman is contemplated. Jesus is the repairman that will fix what is wrong in our homes. He will renovate and renew what was broken and disordered. But this idea places a high premium on our homes and on the world in general.

This view fixates on the Lamb of God as payment for the world's reparations. Do you see how objectified this is? This idea has nothing to do with us. It pushes the idea of renovation and renewal out onto the Lamb for repairs and then out onto a wrathful Father, Who demands payment for these renovations. The whole idea on the face of it is grotesque .... and most un-Godlike. Moreover, we are not in this equation. We are no more than bystanders.

But this objectified view runs diametrically counter to the message we have received from Isaiah, from John the Forerunner, and finally from the Lord Jesus, Himself. The second-century Father, St. Irenaeus, contemplated these very questions.

That is, the sacrifice we offer in all places will be our purity. The mindful, holy, and living sacrifice we offer is ourselves. As the Psalmist has written,

These are the acceptable sacrifices to God: our souls, untainted, unpolluted, unblemished. And this is the meaning of the imperative verb, Repent, the very word which is the essence and kernel of the Forerunner's message. This is the meaning of our Gospel lesson today.

The Greek original, as we have contemplated many times, is

meaning be transformed. This is the reason God has sent His Son. We read in St. Luke's Gospel,

.... to transformation, to metanoia.

The Son of God has come. His great mission is to draw a boundary across the world. He has bounded off an infinitely large Kingdom of Goodness. Every one of us was born with this goodness deeply etched upon our characters. Left alone and only with other good children, we would have been fine. Sadly, this was not the case for so many of us.

Those of us who have betrayed this goodness may be sure that he or she will encounter God, Who calls us back to this Kingdom. We will hear His voice, and we will know it. For He is the Good Shepherd, and the Kingdom is His Sheepfold.

The Son of God has not been sent to save the world not in the sense of real estate, but in the deeper sense of that phrase: royal domain (real), the royal domain of our souls, which demons try to conquer and which angels strive to protect. This is the only world He cares about.

The Advent of God is not at all about saving the world per se, but the human lives who make up the world. (We call it the Body of Christ, which St. Paul referred to today in our Epistle lesson.) The Advent of God is not at all about saving the world, but to lead us away from worldliness, away from the world, whose sovereign is the Prince of the Air and the Father of Lies. Perhaps a better word than save is rescue.

The Advent of God, it turns out, is the greatest exodus we encounter in the Holy Scriptures. The Book of Exodus serves as its antetype, its foreshadowing. In that story, the people are led away from the fleshpots of Egypt. They are taken into the purity of the desert. Their destination is a land of milk and honey signifying purity. The Law given on Mount Sinai is to draw a line across the earth, to mark off a people set apart for God.

With the Advent of God, we contemplate a vast migration, a shepherding of every soul away from the world and towards His Kingdom of Goodness. And the Second Giving of the Law on the Mount of Beatitudes is to reveal the Law of Heaven, to reveal the Law of this marvelous Kingdom. In this world, we are to be strangers in a strange land. We are to move on from the landscape of alienation.

Needless to say, the concept of the world as a "fixer-upper" is ludicrous. Rather, the Christian concept is to "let it burn to the ground" idea. Burn down your former world! As Jesus has said,

This is the essence of transformation: let us burn off the former things. As we contemplated last Thursday, Christians descended into baptismal waters completely free of their clothing, so that they might be washed clean, every part of them, with nothing hidden or held back. They longed to be completely free of every thread of their formers lives, which were carried off to be burned. "Let us be washed clean," they declared. "Let us be clothed in white. Let us be anointed with a royal anointing. And let us receive the Light of the World as our own." In Orthodoxy we literally turn and spit on the Prince of the World and everything he signifies.

A greatest fault is to love the world. Wrote St. Isaac the Syrian,

These same sentiments pervade the letters of St. John the Theologian. Consider these stark words:

The Great Shepherd has come to mark off His domain. On one side is God and godliness; on the other is alienation from God. To which do I belong? To which do you belong?

The rest of the Gospels are about this topic. St. John the Baptist said of the Lord Jesus

A great boundary. Pastures where sheep may safely graze are opened before us. But will we enter in? Or will we continue to feed on garbage? At no time in American history has the difference been so vivid, so palpable. And is not this the gift of our era? Yes, this tawdry world in which we now live .... we find deplorable. But is not this the gift of our time? The choice for God has never been so clear. The significance of God has never been so obvious. All of this is now so easy to understand. May we all never fail in this all-important and final understanding.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.   Amen.