God's Kind

Our Lord God Jesus has been pressed into service for centuries as a spokesman for liberal causes. The names are familiar: Unitarianism, Broad Church Anglicanism, and social justice movements within the Roman and Anglican Commmunions. Now, these forces in our society do not necessarily believe in God, but they have set great store by these social causes. The kindly teacher Jesus is a leading reason today why mothers and grandmothers, once fierce protectors of their families and exacting masters concerning personal conduct, have abandoned these sacred offices to become just faces in the woke crowd.

So let us reflect on our Gospel text and contemplate its meaning. For it is on account of passages like this that Jesus is seen as the quintessential apostle of kindness and the Four Gospels as the world's classic text concerning kindness:

But here is a surprise. The word kindness or kind, in the sense of gentle and compassionate, appears only once in the four Gospels: Luke 6:35, which is our text for reflection today.

And on this occasion (depicted in Luke 6:35) Jesus is not speaking to the world (for example teaching in the synagogue) but upon God's Holy Mountain (delivering the Sermon on the Mount) revealing the ways of Heaven which can never square with the world. I have called these the Proverbs of Heaven.

For example, Jesus councils us to give away our worldly goods, not merely to our family and friends but to even a thief who steals from us. Of the robber who takes our coat, Jesus enjoins us to strip down to nakedness and give him our tunic as well. This is advice that would quickly erase us from the world. And that is the point: to be removed from the world, entirely stripped of all vestiges of worldly things, that we might be cleansed and prepared for the Kingdom of God.

Wasn't that the point of the baptism of St. John the Forerunner? Isn't this the point of baptism today? You know, in the Early Church candidates to baptize we stripped down to nakedness and their clothes carried off to burned. Let not a single thread from that kind of life touch your purified and transformed person. And then you were cleansed in a clear pool with the idea that were to be drowned to emerge into a renew life. A robe of white awaited you, never worn by anyone, to signify this new kind of life. And the bishop stood by the fragrant and holy unguents to anoint you and mark you as one of God's own. Forbid the thought that you should turn back to the world! After all, isn't this what we agree to when enter vows for Illumination? We actually spit on Satan's name and declare ourselves done forever with that kind of life.

To understand the passage before us, we must begin with the obvious context which Jesus has set for us. The Sermon on the Mount, where we encounter God on a mountaintop receiving His Holy Councils, obviously invites comparison (or contrast) with another encounter with God, on another mountain summit, in the Sinai wilderness. And if we have missed this connection, Jesus makes it explicit:

Two mountains. Two depictions of God. What is the difference between Moses' depiction of God the Law-giver and the sharp contrast Jesus draws with what He has placed before us? This is crucial. For until we answer this question, we will not understand Jesus' Incarnation: why He has come and what His purposes are.

The difference between the Mount described by Moses and the Mount described by Ss. Luke and Matthew is the fundamental difference between Heaven and earth.

The Laws which Moses communicates to the people are worldly laws, just as the religion for which he was made spokesman (in the sixth century B.C.) was a civil religion. The purpose of these laws is to regulate life on earth. It is unimaginable that in Heaven people must be restrained from murder, robbery, and promiscuity. Unimaginable! The purpose of the Laws of Moses are to regulate the way we live in the world.

In the Mosaic version, God is aloof, distant, set apart by safeguards against the world. Why, even to touch His Holy Mountain without Divine acceptance is to suffer death instantly:

Talk about a distant God!

From these forbidding heights, the God of Moses speaks down to an unruly world, even as the people Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai fall upon each other in riotous orgies. To be sure, life in the world and life in Heaven are as different as night and day.

Meantime, The Lord Jesus is God. He is neither distant nor aloof. He is directly before us He is with us. And He describes His Father as kindly and merciful, not be feared or dreaded. His Father is that certain King Who prepared a wedding feast for His Son and invited everybody, even the least among us. All may enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The one proviso, however, is that we be heavenly.

Remember the man lacking a wedding feast garment (Mt 22:11-13)? His thoughts were not heavenly thoughts. And we warned in this Liturgy today not to enter into Communion with God having the wrong thoughts. For to admit unheavenly people into the Kingdom of Heaven would mean that Heaven could no longer be Heaven.

But this is not late-breaking news. Jesus' Forerunners' vocation was to prepare us for this transformation: from worldiness to heavenliness. Metanoeite!, he said. Be transformed! Then, he began a purification movement so profound and so widespread that St. Peter characterized it as a second Noah's Flood.

Jesu' first word inaugurating His ministry was also Metanoeite!. And in parable after parable, He illustrated the transformation we must make from worldliness to heavenliness. In the parables of the Prodigal Son, of the Good Samaritan, of Lazarus and the Rich Man, of the Merciful King and Unforgiving Servant, of the Penitent Publican and the Proud Pharisee, well, they go on and on, He illustrates the fundamental change in character that we all must make. And He heals and exorcizes and comforts to contrast the dark path of disease and death with the path of light and wholeness and life to which He calls us. This is the purpose of His roaming ministry: to call people away from the world into a new kind of life, which He calls the "Kingdom of God" or the "Kingdom of Heaven" — phrases no one had ever heard before.

Today, He stands on the Mountain of God instructing us in the Ways of Heaven. They are indeed very different from the ways of the world. And He enjoins us to do one more thing: we must follow Him.

Follow Him! But how do we follow Him?

We know that imitating Jesus is the very stuff of our transition, of our theosis. But how do we do it? How in the world do we imitate God? Do we puff ourselves up to fill the space between God and our limited selves? That would be opposite of what He calls us to do. This is the error made by the Proud Pharisee.

The mystery of this is revealed in plumbing the depths of His condescension. After all, that is the only God we see or know, the only God we could see or know: the God Who condescends. Anything else is beyond our capacity of perception. St. John Chyrsostom defines this with precision:

He is no more nor less that "the capacity of the one who seeks to contemplate Him." Well, this would mean that there are many Gods (at our level of seeing and hearing). The God my twin brother perceives is starkly different from the God that I perceive. But dare not intrude .... because God is speaking to Him. And I do not wish to correct God.

The Greek word the Holy Father uses is sygkatavasis (from the verb συγκαταβαίνω) meaning "to reduce oneself," "to stoop down," even "to assume the most lowly character." This does not resemble our going to a foreign country, for example — learning its language, eating its foods, and dressing in its customary wardrobe? No. For God to transform Himself into any human terms He must necessarily debase Himself. There is nothing exalting in becoming human. For every direction from Heaven is a long step down. Among the meanings of the verb, συγκαταβαίνω the Cambridge Greek Lexicon offers this: "to degrade oneself in associating with the lower classes." This is the essence of God's kenósis, His self-emptying (Phil 2:7) and its distillation of this debasement for all ages: the Cross, the ignominious Cross is the essence of God's debasement in human terms. In fact, upon the Cross are projected all the desires around Him.

In several passages, He clarifies our following Him with a few extra words:

That is, the highest state of the human soul is achieved directly proportional to the degree that we have stripped ourselves of worldly distinctions. You know, the Cross must appear in public everywhere, so we have Jesus wearing a loin cloth. As a historical fact, to complete one's humiliation, the condemned was always crucified nude.

We must utterly humiliate ourselves in the eyes of the world to attain the highest state of the human soul. And I have no doubt that at MIT, at Bell Laboratories, even at Yale, I have been been the butt of many jokes and the object of derision. "What a fool!" To give away a large financial estate, to walk away from a respected position, to enter a life of material insecurity, certainly a fool in worldly terms. Do I perceive myself to have been crucified? No, I perceive myself to have been exalted.

When we, like Him, have emptied ourselves of the world, and nobody defers to us, when we can meet every man, no matter how disadvantaged, as an equal, truly as an equal, it is only then that we finally begin to have traction in our journey to His marvelous Kingdom.

Jesus tells one sincere man who has begun his transformation of heart,

Our lowest opinion represents God's highest estimate of the human person. And if we should look down upon the debased Christ, I should say "the anonymous Christ," despising His lowliness, then that is a measure of how little we have emptied ourselves of the world.

Reaching upward to act as if we were God can only lead to empty folly. If we want to participate in God's nobility, then we must reach downward. For it is God's downward reach that has made debasement and crucifixion a source of redemption. When we lend our noble part, infused with God's power and love, to someone who is truly suffering, to someone who is truly marginalized, then we have entered into the holy. It is these two things together, not our nobility alone (which is limited) nor their suffering alone (which is without hope) but the two together in a sacrifice made holy by God's love, this is heavenly.

And this is the essence of the paradox of God. We are fond of saying. "God so loved the world." But the world is plainly the implacable enemy of God (Jn 15:18). He loved the world in its sufferings. He loved the world in His compassion. He mysteriously, like the Father Who He is, will stand at a roadside, taking in all our enormities, all our abominations, and all of our neglect of His long-suffering Person, and He will wait. He will wait with His great and noble heart. For that is Who He is.

And He calls us who love Him to follow Him, to take up this cross, to bear this burden, so that we might become His kind, for that is what it means to be heavenly.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.