"Every Kingdom"

Jesus addresses this charge three chapters later:

Meanwhile, demons make regular appearances in the Gospels independent of any truth-claims or counter-claims made of them, as in the present lesson:

That is, while a debate rages in first-century Israel concerning divine lifeworlds — for example, whether or not there exist angels, demons, life-after-death, or Heaven (Act 23:7) — the readers of the Gospels are first-hand witnesses to the reality of these things. We see an archangel standing before Zechariah at the right side of the altar of incense .... and angels in many places. Demons, similarly, are everywhere and seem to have power to inhabit every living creature who is willing. Both lifeforms possess a high degree of divine knowledge. Indeed, along with the angels, the demons are witnesses concerning the most ancient knowledge that Jesus mysteriously is the "Son of the Most High God" (Mk 5:7), which attests to the God-Father, God-the-Son, and the reality of Heaven. You see, in our courts these witnesses would enjoy a very high dignity: eye-witnesses (the highest degree), expert witnesses, and character witnesses.

Jesus is like manner testifies to the angels (who, remember, are reject by the Zion Temple authority):

That is, they are eye-witnesses.

Significantly, this last excerpt from the Gospel of Matthew is followed by the whole point of the Incarnation of the Christ:

Let us pause here and notice that suddenly we ourselves are in possession of marvelous hidden knowledge. We learn here that God, Who made us, is a loving and solicitous God. (How unlike the god of Deuteronomy!) He has sent His Son, Who mysteriously is not other than the Father but is the Self-Same God (Jn 17:20). He contemplates all human creatures, which He has made in His own Image and Likeness, as being His. Many of them (we believe, most of them) are lost. This "lostness" is a deep subject. But for now, let us say that "lostness" and "foundness" have to do with being in relationship with God. To be in relationship with God-Who-Is-Love (1Jn 4:8) is have life, even eternal life. And to reject relationship with God equates to death, even eternal death. Are not the Gospels a record of the chronic rejection of God. Here, on eve of catastrophe, the chronic reject of the Savior. Are the Sadducess and Pharisees not any different from that most lost of all tribes, Gad?

In our lostness we ask, "But what about life without God?" ..... we who are accustomed to having options. In asking this, we fail to grasp that God Is Everything. There is nothing beyond God. And this nothing is called Perdition, that is, lostness.

When people say that they are "saved," this means that they share in God's love relationship. Salvation is neither more nor less than this. The Greek word standing behind salvation (sotería) means that the path ahead has been cleared. There is no impediment to this God Who Loves us. This is why belief that God-Is-God is the great crossroads of life, intertwined with the fabric of life itself, far deeper than any other subject or object. The failure to believe that God-Is-God consigns one to Perdition, which is the absence of God and Life. Jesus tells a centurion, who is neither Jew nor Hebrew, that his belief that Jesus Is God has opened the Kingdom of Heaven to him where he will dine with Abraham (Mt 8:10-11), (who is the eternal type of the believer). So saith St. Paul.

As we have explored in many reflections, the occasion for the birth of Jesus is precisely this lostness. We center on the people Israel because God chose to reveal Himself to Abram of Ur of the Chaldees. And Abram (later Abraham) believed. This is everything: "I AM GOD" ..... "I believe." Abraham believed in the God Who spoke to him, Who condescended to watch over Abraham's life in minute detail, Who delivered him in dire circumstances, Who in fact was Abraham's Lifeworld and Thoughtworld.

This God is our religion and also our Lifeworld and Thoughtworld. He is quite literally, and He tells us this, our Beginning and our End (Rev 1:8).

But Abraham's descendants became lost in the sense that they strayed as a husband or a wife strays. This is ruin! For to requite God's love is a mighty and all-encompassing thing. It is not one of the things that we do. It is everything that we do. God's love is higher and finer and broader and deeper than any love we could know. To experience the heights of human love can only be through those He has sent to us, who are themselves deeply involved in this Divine Love. Faithfulness, therefore, is the highest condition of the human soul. And the spiritual discipline par excellence in this Divine Love is Holy Marriage, which is a type of God's love for us. Can the disciples fast while the Bridegroom is with them? We might say that God provided Holy Marriage, one of the few sacraments, that we might learn of this kind of love.

It follows that betrayal, the willful rupture of that faithfulness, is the greatest wrong we could commit and the furthest distance from God's love.

This distance and lostness sets the scene for the Incarnation.

We focused on Hosea last week. In that book God asks, "Do you know what it is like being married to Israel? It is like being marriage to a prostitute. Jeremiah says, Israel like a she-ass in heat roaming the deserts with her nostril to the wind seeking the scent of a man. And God commands Hosea to marry the most promiscuous of women, Gomer, so he will know God's tortured mind. This distance and lostness sets the scene for the Incarnation.

The Ten Tribes of Israel, gathered in the Northern Kingdom, stray. They become enamored of the Assyrian gods. They are absorbed into Assyrian life and perish (the verb form of Perdition). As with all things human, a remnant cherishing the ways of the Patriarchs survived.

About a century-and-a-half later, the Southern Kingdom composed of the Tribes of Judah and Benjamin, also become lost in a similar situation. They are reprogrammed (we would say today) to cultivate the anti-lifeworld of the Babylonian gods and, in particular, Marduk. (Doesn't this point ahead to Revelation and Babylon?) And they have become inured to a distant and dangerous god who requires blood-sacrifice as depicted in Deuteronomy (for a key element of this reprogramming is to revise the Hebrew Scriptures as Ezra did). Again, a remnant (about two-thirds of the population of Judah) did not undergo this reprogramming and remained attached to the spiritual lifeworld of the Patriarchs giving rise to a diverse population having many Hebrew beliefs attested by Philo and Josephus.

Zeal for their cult (which was called Judah-ism) would lead them to the brink of annihilation and extinction. This approaching cataclysm prompts the arrival of Jesus (.... I don't mean from Nazarth. I mean from Heaven)> The Ten Tribes have been lost. A surviving splinter of, the Tribe of Gad, is so inured to their lostness that they drive God out of their territory. The last two tribes have been under the spell of Babylonian religion for six centuries and have greatly deepened that commitment in the past century and a half (under the Maccabees). From God's perspective this represents the loss of a two-thousand-year marriage, for Babylonian beliefs are precisely the abomination from which He called Abram and Sarai in the first place.

Jesus is born during the last, dark days ..... not only of Judah-ism but of all Judah, for in 70 A.D. Roman armies will reduce this entire lifeworld to a rubble field. This is the scene God enters: where demons run rampant together with their lesser divine orders, for example, where Beelzebub holds sway as ruler. But Jesus serene focus never strays. His way is always to sweep pandemonium aside and to say,

As I say, God's task is always, at every time, in every era, to countenance all of His human creatures as His sons and daughters. Is He not the God of all the Creation? Does Simeon not prophesy from Jesus birth that He will be the salvation "of all peoples" (Lu 2:31). Does Jesus not send His Apostles to the ends of the earth (Acts 13:47)? And their collected teachings will be a book whose title is The Lord's Teaching Through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations. This is their self-identification: the embrace of all humankind.

But what is He to do amidst this unrelenting chaos? It is a dust storm of extreme violence and perverse striving. And He knows the hearts of these "tenants" on His land. They are apt to conspire and plot and kill the Heir (Mt 21:38). But He is the Warrior Whose Age-old Foe is Chaos. From His hovering over the void before time began ticking unto the present moment, this is the primordial and eternal warp and woof of the universe. Light and Life set against darkness and hopeless confusion. Nothing is more basic than this. This is God's periodic table.

And one more thing. He is the Father Who loves. Apathy is unknown to Him. He cannot turn His back. So He ventures out into the midst of havoc and madness, where demons run rampant in a field of victory, in the Person of His Son. Here we have the whole story of Scripture. God's periodic table and the whole story of Scripture, stated as even as the Psalter opens.

Stern stuff? But which, I ask, is more stern? Would you rather endure flinty reproval or everlasting separation from God-Who-Is-Life?

Each year we wave palms to commemorate the arrival of the King to Zion. This is the moment of decision. Who do we say that He Is? If He be God, we must conform our lives to Him, for there is no better way in all things than His.

We deceive ourselves in our dual focus — above, Heaven; below, earth ..... as if there is a place away from God. All is one. There is no reality other than God. His Goodness is the whole extent of the Creation. All else is rebellion against Goodness, whose multifarious forms we see around us, called perversion and depravity. This is not a question of multiple "cultures" nor of "cultural differences."

The good news is that the Divine Plan contemplates all people. Try to imagine the most lost and sullied woman you have ever met. Why, she is the sweetheart of God. Try to imagine the most rebellious and violent man you know. God has not forgotten Him or has given up on him. He contemplates all peoples (as we just read): "the kings of all the earth" and "the nations" stretching out in every direction as the Psalm 2 (written a thousand years before Jesus' birth) assures us. No one is forgotten. And our God does not rest. His great love overflows every boundary until the last lost lamb has been found. Truly, "Heaven cannot hold Him / nor earth contain." This is all of Scripture. Not the story of a faithful people (we grieve to say) but the story of our faithful God.

Today, He receives two blind men representing all humankind. They cry out, "Son of David" invoking the Christ and the author of Psalm 2. Like them, we cannot see where we are going. We do not know who we really are. We are confused concerning the story of God. (Not that's an understatement!) But if we believe, we who have not seen, our soundness of sight will be restored, for He is the Way ahead, the Truth in all things, and the Life everlasting. And we too might rejoice being made whole and going forward "spread[ing] the news about Him in all that country" (Mt 9:30).

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