Sunday 4th NovTRINITY XXII
Fr David Cherry
Isaiah 1 : 10 – 18 ; II Thessalonians 1 : 1 – 12 ; Luke 19 : 1 – 10
“This day salvation has come to this house.”
This God stands in my shoes, inhabiting the place of shame, looking up to me; wanting to be admitted.
There is an imagination in the Bible and still continuing among
religionists, an "apocalyptic imagination" that all things will
eventually come to an end in a final conflagration, a great
conflict. It is found in many places and in today’s epistle
to the Thessalonians too: a God “who will repay with
affliction those who afflict you” . The apocalyptic imagination
points to a day of reckoning, a day of judgement and doom “when
Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire,
inflicting vengeance upon those who do not know God, and upon those who
do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.”
I wonder how many eye-brows went up when we heard that. Oh really! Is that what we’re supposed to believe?
Well, I don’t know about you, but I mostly feel quite outside
this apocalyptic imagination. It’s certainly not very
English or Anglican. My heart doesn’t thrill at the thought
of Jesus decimating crowds of non-believers and rescuing me and a few
from a final assault.
While such texts are an advance on their pagan precursors, they show a
people, even St Paul, coming to terms with this imagination in the
light of what has been made known in Jesus. He is still coming to the new
realization of the way in which Jesus has subverted it.
They are texts ‘in labour’ and need to be held alongside
the deeds and signs of Jesus himself.
The apocalyptic imagination depends on having victims – we are right; they, the other, is wrong.
These Sundays leading up to the Feast of Christ the King; and in Advent
we are invited to consider the Kingdom of God; to see what Jesus’
judgement is like and how he subverted the apocalyptic imagination of
his time.
One important point is that judgement is not just at the end of
time. Judgement is now : “This day salvation has come
to this house.”
And judgement is about and by love and for
salvation. ‘For the Son of Man is come to seek and to
save that which was lost.’ God’s mission is to bring
you and me into the fullness of our humanity. Judgement is the
realisation of how I have been; and it is about being given an
ability to imagine how I could be.
How to face the God of love, who created you out of love and for love;
the God who longs for peace in our hearts and peace between
nations? It is such love which makes for a dreadful day of
judgement. And what makes it dreadful is the love before which
you feel ashamed as you discover that what you thought you wanted and
sought with everything at your disposal has been ultimately
destructive. Aha! I now see.
Such a dreadful day is to be faced at some point by the rulers of Burma
and world leaders of East and West fuelled by their own apocalyptic
imaginings.
In the gospel Jesus is passing through Jericho. Zaccheaus is
despised for he has colluded with the oppressing Romans in exploiting
his fellow Jews. He is looked down on, not only for his crimes,
but because he is short. He has spent a life-time trying to be
someone important, and despite his desire for dignity, climbs a tree
like an urchin to look down on Jesus.
And Jesus comes to stand where he is used to standing. Jesus is
looking up to him. And this is important. The undoing of
Zaccheaus from his evil ways, his judgement, is so different from the
apocalyptic imagination of dispensationalists and millenarians.
It is now and it is love; a love which means he can see the truth of
what he has become and who he might be.
This judgement is of a God who stands in the place which I cannot bear
to be in. This God stands in my shoes, inhabiting the place of
shame, looking up to me; wanting to be admitted.
And it is scandalous to the scapegoating society of his time.
Zaccheaus, after all, wrong though he has been, has also been very
useful. He has enabled others to hate him and so find unanimity
among themselves.
There has been a depressing article in the Tablet by Alistair McGrath
(former principal of Wycliffe Hall in Oxford) about how Protestants and
Catholics are finding common ground, common cause by the
‘threat’ of secularism.
But Jesus is going home with Zaccheaus; and this is their judgement
too. “And when they saw it, they all murmured, saying, That
he was gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner.”
We celebrate a gospel which is about judgement, a judgement which
brings us into a kingdom of love and peace; that Jerusalem we will sing
of in the offertory hymn.
Here, God is one with us and because he is one with us : This day salvation has come to this house. Amen