Gnostic America

The Parable of the Good Samaritan acts out Jesus’ two simple teachings, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It proposes an interesting hypothetical. What if you lived in a world set up according to the principles you espouse, how would you fare?

The parable is set up by a lawyer who wants to test Jesus. Keep in mind a lawyer is simply a teacher of the law. But much like lawyers today – it must be a universal phenomenon about law as such (the Sophists were the Greek version of the phenomenon) – he sees the law as an arena for parlor tricks, how to advance ones position while keeping the letter of the rules. Lawyers live in a world of “What does ‘is’ mean?” and “What’s the penumbra of a right?”

So the lawyer comes up to Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus turns the question back on him, asking him how he reads the law. The lawyer answers with, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says he answered correctly. If he does this, he will live.

The man then wants to justify himself. We’ve learned that the one who goes home justified is not the one who points out all the great things he’s done by God’s grace, but the one who begs, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!” The proper response to “Love your neighbor as yourself” is to die to yesterday’s sinful self and rise to a new self, forgiven and ready to love neighbors.

But not the lawyer. “Who’s my neighbor?” Ah yes, now the lawyer in him comes out. What does “is” mean? This has always been the weakness of the law. Laws are wonderful, but the words making up the law change in their meaning, often on purpose by those who would corrupt its meaning. “Marriage is between a man and a woman.” Well, let’s just redefine what “man” is and what “woman” is. Or, what if three people identify as “man”? Or, we’ll change what marriage itself means. On and on we can go with this, which pretty much describes leftism.

Jesus doesn’t bite. He turns the tables on the lawyer with the parable he tells. “Who’s my neighbor?” asks the lawyer. What he really means is, “So, if I have to love my neighbor, then what are the limits of this rule? What is the minimum I have to do to follow this? And does that include non-Jews?”

So Jesus sets up another universe for the lawyer, painting him a picture for him to explore his ideas. What if the lawyer were in a world ruled by his way of thinking? Let’s say a man got seriously injured. He’s lying half-dead on the side of the road. That phrase “half-dead” is extremely important for our setup – it’s essential for the punch line. Because according to Jewish law – precisely the law the lawyer lived by – if you had contact with a dead body, you were unclean.

That explains why the first two men in the parable, the priest and the Levite, passed by on the other side. They didn’t want to become unclean. In that sense, they were being faithful to the law. They were being good lawyers. But they were leaving the man seriously injured.

It’s not until an unclean Samaritan comes does the man get healed and well taken care of. The Samaritan is willing to risk becoming unclean in order to help the man.

Now, notice Jesus’ question to the lawyer. “So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?” With this question, Jesus places the lawyer in the parable. The lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus gives a series of characters and asks back, “Who was the neighbor to the injured one?” The lawyer is the injured man! Jesus proposes a hypothetical, how would you fare in the world you create by your understanding of the law? And the lawyer finds out who his neighbor is. It’s not the law people. It’s the one who had mercy.

It’s not about justifying yourself through fulfillment of the law. It’s about being dealt with mercifully, and doing likewise to others. What does that do to the law. Does that nullify it? Not at all. There is a way in the law to have contact with dead bodies and still come out clean at the end.

Here’s the law: “whoever touches anything made unclean by a corpse, …the person who has touched any such thing shall be unclean until evening, and shall not eat the holy offerings unless he washes his body with water.”

So, Jesus sets up a new way of being, a new universe clashing with the old one. It’s a world where people are willing to become unclean in pursuit of the well being of others, who are washed with water before eating the gifts of the altar. If we accept the premise that the cross was Jesus’ baptism, or rather the fulfillment of His Jordan baptism, then we see that Christ was the one who became unclean so that He might heal us.

We, after all, are half dead. Alive, but under a curse of death: “dead in trespasses and sins,” as St. Paul writes. And Jesus became our curse, for cursed is anything that hangs on a tree, so that we might become clean.

Being merciful is what the Lord wants us to do. That’s how the law is properly fulfilled, not looking at it as, “What can I get away with?” But rather, “In what ways does my neighbor need my mercy?”

A final point needs to be made about the neighbor. The parable is all about proximity. The Latin word for “neighbor,” after all, is the basis of our word vicinity. Who’s near by? Second, that proximity is bodily. It was because the man’s body looked half dead that the Levite and priest distanced their proximity from the body. “Neighbor” is something that only makes sense in bodies.

Let’s riff on this a bit as far as Gnosticism goes. Because Gnosticism sees flesh and materiality as deceptive, corrupt, and evil, it cannot teach “love your neighbor.” What is neighbor, but a cosmic mistake? Neighbor is nothing more than some two-dimensional symbol comprised of projections from your inner psycho-drama. Dad represents the patriarchy. The police officer is “the man.” A guy in a suit represents evil capitalism. Or, a youthful person of color living an alternative lifestyle represents being woke. Who these people actually are be damned. Neighbor be damned. Rather, everything gets abstracted and understood in cosmic terms.

Jesus directs us to the neighbor, to the one in our proximity. He doesn’t direct us to “humanity,” but to humans near us. And love of neighbor has nothing to do with well-intentioned programs to change the structures and systems you think will benefit “humanity.” No, Jesus directs us to that guy hurt right over there. Do that, says Jesus, and you will live.

Because that’s what Jesus does with us. In a sense, Jesus did nothing for “humanity.” The world goes on as fallen as it did prior to His coming. But Jesus does everything for His neighbors, for the ones proximate to Him. As St. James writes, “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.”

Then He commanded them that they should tell no one; but the more He commanded them, the more widely they proclaimed it.

What a gang, eh? So full of excitement and passion about Jesus’ deeds, they couldn’t be held back by “the Man.” And isn’t that what missions are? Being so full of excitement and passion that you can’t keep your testimony inside? And look at you, you slug, as you keep all that good news inside. You should be more like the people in the text, incapable of keeping such good news inside you.

I’ve heard this text taught this way too many times. The problem is, “the Man” is Jesus, and when He commands something, He tends to mean it. “Mean it” meaning, it has meaning; there’s a reason for why He says the things He says. In fact, the text suggests Jesus told them more than once, “Don’t tell anyone what you have seen!” And the more He told them – no, commanded it – the more they proclaimed it.

The Lord has harsh words for such as these, especially in Jeremiah: “I have not sent them, commanded them, nor spoken to them; they prophesy to you a false vision, divination, a worthless thing, and the deceit of their heart.” Or again, “I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran. I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied.”

Keep in mind, “prophesied” is essentially the same as “proclaimed” or “testified to,” per Revelation 19: 10, “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” It’s not strong exegesis to string random texts together to make a point, but in a sense, we can do it here at least in a heuristic sense. To proclaim a Jesus who heals the deaf is a “false vision” or “a worthless thing” or even “a deceit of the heart.”

What is false about it? What is worthless about it? What is deceptive about it? “Deception” means a half truth, or a hidden truth; and “worthless” means empty, and that’s exactly what the proclamation of the disobedient “prophets” in the Gospel was.

Jesus knew a Gospel message that only proclaimed your best life now presented an ineffective Jesus, a Jesus only for the now, a Jesus who essentially was a good doctor. It was half true: yes, Jesus will make all things new, but in this world, that newness is only enjoyed by a handful of people, as a sign to reveal His divinity, not as a program for general earthly wellness. Yes, Jesus can heal the deaf, but the deaf will still die; such a message that ends with a Jesus who heals the deaf is thus ultimately worthless. And yes, Jesus has all authority to fix people on earth, but to abstract this truth as the Gospel formula for the Church today is false.

So, could Jesus have just gone around the world, healing everyone of their diseases and problems? Yes, but in God’s wisdom the ultimate disease would not have been healed, and could only have been healed once Jesus died on the cross and rose again.

For, in Mark’s Gospel especially, the only time Jesus does something, after which He is proclaimed the Son of God and the one proclaiming this is not rebuked, is when He dies. He dies, and the centurion proclaims what others proclaimed throughout the Gospel of Mark, “You are the Son of God!” But Jesus doesn’t forbid this testimony, because that testimony is not false, deceptive, or worthless. That message is the sum and substance of the Gospel. We preach “Christ crucified.”

The Son of God must die. The Son of God must die because that is the curse Adam received and all men inherited. What moved the centurion to see rightly what others saw only in half-truth fulfillment? The Gospel of Mark tells us the centurion confessed this after Jesus said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

So, a centurion sees a man crying out in a loud voice (I need to amend what I wrote recently that perhaps Jesus spoke these words quietly, intimately to those nearby) that God has forsaken him, and his conclusion is that truly this man is the son of God, or “a” son of God, as there’s no definite article in the Greek. (When the demon proclaimed Jesus the son of God, and Jesus forbade the demon, the definite article is included.)

Did the centurion stumble on a sublime, existential truth about man, those made in God’s image? To be “of God” is to suffer and die? This world order must pass away before the new one can begin? Whether he recognized these truths or not, this in fact is the truth. As Revelation puts it, “Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. …Then He who sat on the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ ”

This world, and all its children, must pass away before the new one can begin. And Jesus is the “firstborn among many brethren” as Romans puts it. The deaf man’s healing – with its baptismal spit, with heaven’s opened womb – is certainly a type of the restoration of creation, but it’s not, in itself, anything more than a type. Which is why Jesus didn’t want this message proclaimed.

People do a disservice to the Gospel when they proclaim an insufficiently-cosmic restoration: “Following biblical principles improved my finances…Jesus shows how we should make the world a better place by caring for others…Jesus teaches your best life now.”

No, a Gospel that doesn’t end with the greatest representative of this world order hanging dead on a cross, laying the foundation for a new creation to arise, is false, deceptive, and worthless. “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.” Or as it’s put in the Gospel of John, “He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

Only death to this world is a Gospel worthy of proclamation. That’s a difficult truth for many to embrace. We’d rather run around boasting about all the great things God has done for us in this world, like the Pharisee in last week’s Gospel. But the only sanctioned message is the cross, death to this world, looking forward to the life to come.

As St. Paul writes, “For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.” That is the Gospel worthy of proclamation.

Then, looking up to heaven, He sighed, and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.”

We have not exhausted everything from this little passage. Last devotion we meditated on the use of the Aramaic. There’s an irony going on that Jesus uses a word closed to our ears, but open to the deaf man. But Mark adds the “that is” and modern translators translate that into English. Without the latter two, we are deaf to Jesus’ words. Which is to say, the opening of our ears occurs by the Holy Spirit’s Pentecostal work, of multiplying the Gospel proclamation through many tongues. The modern translator is as much, if not more, the hand of the Holy Spirit for us than St. Mark or even Jesus, the historical Jesus that is.

As Jesus said, “greater works than these he will do, because I go to My Father. …I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever – the Spirit of truth, …I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.” This substantiates my point from last devotion. “I will come to you.” The Jesus who speaks through Matthew, Mark, Luke, John is, yes, the historical Jesus, but it’s the historical Jesus ascended on high and still living in the Church, which is also a historical entity.

All this is to say, the opening of our ears is by the words of ministers first, apostles second, and Jesus third, if we pull back the layers going back in time. Jesus says words in Aramaic we cannot hear. Apostles speak Jesus’ words in Greek that we translate. Ministers today preach the words in English we understand and hear. The opening of our ears is the ordained ministry, which again, means nothing but that the living Jesus is completely behind their ministry.

Now, switching gears, we have to look at a detail in the Gospel. Jesus wasn’t looking at the deaf man when He commanded, “Ephphatha,” that is “dianoichtheti,” that is “be opened.”  Look at the text: “Then, looking up to heaven, He sighed, and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’ ”

Where was He directing His gaze? Heaven! It’s not like He was speaking into the man’s ears and yelling, “Be opened!” He was looking to heaven.

You can see where this is going! But let’s put some meat on this.

In Luke’s Gospel, the same verb for “be opened” is used when Jesus was with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and with the disciples later that evening. He “opened up” the Scriptures to them. Furthermore, for the two disciples, when Jesus broke bread, their eyes “opened up” just before Him disappearing from them.

That understanding of “be opened” nicely parallels what Jesus was doing with the deaf man. He was opening His ears to hear the Gospel. But there’s another interesting use of “be opened” related more to that to which Jesus was directing His words, the heavens. In both Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of Jesus’ baptism, we hear that the heavens opened up. The Greek word is not exactly the same, but close – the prefix “dia” isn’t added as it is in the miracle account, so it’s effectively the same word (Greek does that a lot).

When Jesus was baptized, heaven opened up. Or as the event is interpreted in John: “you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” Jesus’ baptism is the opening up of heaven. Why? Because there He and John fulfilled all righteousness. But why in baptism? Because even as the old creation emerged out of the waters, and the type of the new creation emerged out of the waters of the flood, so will the new creation emerge out of the waters. Jesus is the fulfillment of the new creation; He fills all things; His resurrection is the first day of the new creation.

His baptism is like the beginning, the “let there be light” of the new creation, the foundation for all the other creation effects, its restoration. For at that moment the light dawned. As it is written, “And upon those who sat in the region and shadow of death Light has dawned.”

What is true for the eyes is also true for the ears. The deaf man on behalf of all of us is deaf to heaven’s voice. Not so at Jesus’ baptism. “Then a voice came from heaven, ‘You are My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ ”

Here, Jesus is the Second Adam, the restored son of God, the forefather of a new race. He who sinned against God is now pleasing to God. All that remains is for a new generation to arise from these new loins. The generation arising from old Adam’s loins, well, of them we hear over and over again in the genealogy, “…and he died.” The new generation will live forever.

But they have to be born of the Second Adam…born again…born from above. “ ‘The first man Adam became a living being.’ The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven.”

And that’s why Jesus looks to the heavens, sighing, and saying “be opened.” Heaven needs to open its womb and give birth. Yes, it’s in pain – the sighing, the cross. But opened it will be. The man is born again. The man joins in Jesus’ baptism, as Jesus shares His eternal waters with him – His spittle. For, all of us are drying wells. But Jesus’ spit will never dry up. What is spit? 98% water. It qualifies for baptismal elements by any standard – how many byproducts are in tap water? How much non-water was in the Jordan?

Jesus was sharing His baptism with the deaf man, sharing the opened heavens with the deaf man, embracing the man in His baptism with His spit. Recently we pondered if Jesus was spitting at the devil. Well, both interpretations can stand. The waters of baptism are also a rebuff at the sinful world and Pharaoh’s armies, the devil’s world. But arising from those same waters is a new creation, born from above, an “above” that is now opened to us, so that down the ladder might come the life-giving Spirit in Christ, and up the ladder might go our ascended persons, also in Christ.

Then, looking up to heaven, He sighed, and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.”

Several times the Aramaic words of Jesus are recorded in the Gospel of Mark. “Abba” [“Father”]; “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabbachthani” [“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”]; “Talitha, cumi,” [“Little girl, I say to you, arise.”]; and here in our Gospel for this week, “Ephphatha,” which means “be opened.” It’s a Mark thing; no other Gospel records Jesus’ Aramaic voice.

Mark is the action-packed thriller of the Gospels, less focused on Jesus’ preaching than the others, while having more vivid details the others don’t have. He, for instance, will record that the grass was green at the feeding of the five thousand. Or in the above cases, Mark records what Jesus said in the original Aramaic. Mark’s Gospel more than the others takes us back in time to the historical Jesus, connecting us intimately with Him.

Note also that the moments recorded in Aramaic have an intimacy to them. In both the healing of the deaf man and the little girl, He separates the one He will heal from the others. We’re in a private setting. Or, you can’t get much more intimate than being with Jesus when He was praying that the cup be removed from Him.

We should contemplate for a few moments on the fact that Aramaic, while being the language Jesus would have used in a daily context, is not the language the Gospels are recorded in. We get a Greek-speaking Savior in the Gospels. That’s not historically accurate, but it’s cosmically as well as theologically accurate – Jesus is a living Savior speaking the universal language.

We need to remember the Gospels, while rooted in Christ’s historical words and deeds, are not historical text books or newspaper articles. They are Gospels, written not by evangelists long after the fact trying to remember what happened or what Jesus said, but written by evangelists saturated by the Holy Spirit, commissioned by a Christ Who is very much alive and very much active at the time they were writing them.

A modern way to look at the situation is to say, “See, now, how can we trust these evangelists? They were reflecting on things thirty to forty years old, writing in a language Jesus didn’t speak in, and reacting to political events occurring far later. Of course they’d get some things wrong.” Would any court trust a witness trying to remember thirty years back?

So, then, the apologists’ task is to prove that, no, the Gospels are accurate, and we can trust them. They took notes. They had multiple witnesses who cross-checked each other. And so on and so forth.

No, no, no. This all accepts the premise of the modernists. And it ignores that Jesus was still alive and active, operating by the Holy Spirit, when they sat down to pen the Gospels.

What is this to say? It’s to say all sorts of things. It’s to say that Jesus spoke Greek, maybe not in His original setting, but in His second go at it, which mirrored the first. It’s to say that there’s not some major conflict when in recording Jesus’ words to the Pharisees about His casting out demons, in one account Jesus uses the expression “the finger of God” and in another “the Spirit of God.” The modernists says, “So which is it? Which evangelist is lying?” It’s not lying if Jesus, by the Holy Spirit through Luke in 65 AD says “finger of God” but through Matthew in 60 AD says “Spirit of God.” To be somewhat profane, but in a heuristic sense, Jesus can edit His own words if He in His authoritative position at God’s right hand deems Luke’s account should have subtleties different than that of Matthew!

This isn’t to say that the Gospels are not historical accounts and rooted in Jesus historical acts and deeds. It’s simply to remind us that they primarily are Gospel proclamations. There are four of them to convey four different messages, all making up a beautiful whole. The Gospels are divine, meaning there is a human element rooted in history, but also a divine element rooted in the eternal.

This somewhat takes us back to a point in the Gospel for this week itself. If Jesus is fulfilling the Jeremiah 31 prophecy about writing a new covenant on hearts and minds – using God’s finger to do so, from engraving on stone to writing on hearts and minds – then the message of the Gospel is not ultimately about letters and languages. I say “ultimately” because it most certainly is about letters and languages insofar as the message of the Gospel is a fully human message grounded in a human Lord living in human history. But “ultimately,” the flesh profits nothing and the spirit gives life.

Which is to say, again, there is a divinity going on in the Gospel that introduces eternal elements into the human words and language. Today, millions of people are filled by the Holy Spirit through the English language, without a whit of knowledge about Aramaic, Greek, or ancient customs. And that English, as a “mere” translation, isn’t deficient in the least. Why? Because the Gospel is a ministry of the Spirit written on hearts and minds, not a ministry of the letter, requiring knowledge solely of those letters.

Consider, there are three languages proposed in this week’s Gospel with the phrase “be opened” that Jesus spoke over the deaf man. There’s the Aramaic “ephphatha.” There’s Greek “dianoichtheti.” And there’s the English “be opened.” Each one is imbued with divinity, even if one is the historically accurate rendering. It’s the modernist attempt to divorce the latter from the former that leads to all sorts of problems.

One solution to the seeming incongruity between the historical setting and current application include hunting for transcendent archetypes or allegorizing. This was the approach of the ancient fathers, as well as that of those with a more literary or psychological bent, like Jordan Peterson. The idea is to lift the mundane details out of history and seek those transcendent truths hovering above and beyond the text.

Another solution is the scholarly approach, so often the temptation even by conservative Christians, who believe you can only get a true understanding of the text when you understand it in its cultural milieu, or when you pore of the original text – praying you’re using the right manuscript! – and mine all the little subtleties you can get by analyzing the word in the context of how Homer used it. This methodology necessitates that everything we have today is deficient, because it’s in English and fundamentally anachronistic. It also suggests that true knowledge of the Gospel can only be claimed not by receivers of the creedal and sacramental tradition, but by certain elite scholars who have a specialized understanding of what was really going on behind the text.

This cuts out the divinity and the reality of Christ’s living authority in the Church today. It also makes us partially deaf. Isn’t that what it is? Because we don’t know Greek, because we don’t fully understand the original cultural context, we by necessity have only a partial and insufficient hearing of the text.

And this is just wrong. The Holy Spirit is as powerful working today through English as He was when Jesus spoke “ephphatha” over the man’s ears. That’s the divinity at work, opening our ears to hear what “the spirit says to the churches.” It’s written on hearts and minds, by the finger of God, not in words engraved in stone and frozen in time.

Jesus spoke a word in Aramaic as conveyed to us in a Greek text and taught or preached to us in English, or any number of other languages. Jesus opens the ears of mutually exclusive cultures to hear the same word. It’s truly the divinity at work.

 

And He took him aside from the multitude, and put His fingers in his ears, and He spat and touched his tongue.

Three times Jesus used His spittle in a healing miracle, twice with a blind man, once with a deaf man. Two instances are in the Gospel of Mark. In our instance this week, it merely says Jesus spit, without a clear indication what the target was. In the Mark’s account of Jesus healing the blind man, Jesus spit on the man’s eyes. John’s account is when Jesus made clay with His spit and applied it to the man’s eyes.

Spitting is an action of contempt. There’s an interesting account in the book of Numbers where Aaron and Miriam got uppity over Moses’ mixed marriage to an Ethiopian – evidently doing so carried things too far in their eyes, so they suggest God might better speak through either of them. God says, “no.” And then gives Miriam leprosy (she wants to glory in the lighter skin, I guess, and Got lets her have it). Moses begs mercy for her, and the Lord says, “If her father spits in her face, she’d be shamed for seven days. What she has done merits at least that amount of shame.”

In another account, if a man dies and leaves a widow, his brother should take her in so his brother’s name may continue. If the brother refuses to do so, the widow and the brother meet at the gates, she takes his sandal, spits in his face, and says, “So shall it be done to the man who will not build up his brother’s house.”

Spitting is clearly an action of contempt. So why is Jesus spitting at the blind and deaf?

Let’s begin with this prophecy from Isaiah: “Behold, your God will come with vengeance, With the recompense of God; He will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, And the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.”

Note the unstopping of deaf ears is the consequence of God coming with vengeance. Why vengeance? Who’s God going after? As with all prophecies, there are layers of meaning, from the immediate context of Israel’s exile to the grand context of the fallen cosmos. God’s going after Israel’s enemies, but also the cosmos’ great enemy, the powers of evil.

God holds our enemies in contempt. Now look at this passage from the Gospel of Mark, when Jesus cast out the demon from the man’s son: “Deaf and dumb spirit, I command you, come out of him and enter him no more!”

The demon – the power of evil – is called “deaf and dumb.” If it’s the case that another demon was at work behind the deaf man in our Gospel for this week, this gives us a clue why Jesus is spitting. He’s spitting at that which He holds in contempt, our enemies. He’s taking vengeance on our enemies, just as Isaiah prophesied.

But a question surfaces, rooted in the Lord’s words to Moses, when Moses tried to weasel out of being God’s messenger by saying he couldn’t talk. The Lord said, “Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing, or the blind? Have not I, the LORD? Now therefore, go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall say.”

If the Lord made the mute and deaf man, why is He avenging that which He has made? This is not an irrelevant question. Let’s pose it another way. If the Lord made the homosexual, why does He avenge that sin, as St. Paul teaches, “Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God.”

Has not God made all such as these? We all live in a fallen world. We’re all born with various disease, imperfections, and handicaps. Why does the Lord avenge what He has made? Why does the Lord spit at His own creation?

Obviously, because it’s fallen. Without going down the rabbit hole of who’s ultimately responsible for the fall, the bottom line is God holds a fallen world in contempt, whether it got there by accident or by design. He spits at it. And sometimes that “it” is us! That is, the devil in us. The devil spit back at Jesus, at His crucifixion, which shows us we’re in the middle of a grand cosmic battle. But the Lord Jesus wins in the end; He has authority over the demons.

And how wonderful for us, no matter what demons beguile us. Not all deaf were healed at baptism, when exorcisms happened, but baptism sets us on a course for total healing in the life of the world to come. In the meantime, we pray Psalm 38, a wonderful Psalm bringing many of these themes together. A few highlights:

“O LORD, do not rebuke me in Your wrath, Nor chasten me in Your hot displeasure! …There is no soundness in my flesh Because of Your anger, Nor any health in my bones Because of my sin. For my iniquities have gone over my head; Like a heavy burden they are too heavy for me. …I am feeble and severely broken; I groan because of the turmoil of my heart. Lord, all my desire is before You; …But I, like a deaf man, do not hear; And I am like a mute who does not open his mouth. Thus I am like a man who does not hear, And in whose mouth is no response. …For I am ready to fall, And my sorrow is continually before me. For I will declare my iniquity; I will be in anguish over my sin. …Do not forsake me, O LORD; O my God, be not far from me! Make haste to help me, O Lord, my salvation!”

This is the prayer of the broken man seeking salvation from the Lord. The broken man looks forward to the Lord’s contempt for his sinful self. He looks forward to the day when the Lord sends His angels to “gather out of His kingdom all things that offend,” including those fallen aspects of our own selves.

Yes, God makes the deaf and the mute, but recall that Satan is an instrument of the Lord’s anger (compare I Chronicles 21: 1 and II Samuel 24: 1). There’s a primary work of God – to have mercy – and an alien work of God – to have wrath. Sometimes one spits at the other.

And Jesus always wins that spitting contest. In the early church baptismal liturgy, one of the rites was to face the west and spit. The idea was, Jesus was coming from the east – “as lightning comes from the east to the west” – so toward the west must be His enemy, the devil. As part of the ritual of exorcism, the candidate for baptism would spit in the devil’s face.

Jesus always wins that spitting contest. Throughout our life, He may spit at us again and again. It’s His chastening. It’s His work in us to drive away our demons, or maybe, as in St. Paul’s case, not. But the day will come – for the deaf and blind of this world not as blessed as those in Jesus’ day; for all of us who struggle against evils of all sorts – when the Lord will indeed remove all that offends, and causes us to sin. It’s the baptismal promise.

As another Isaiah prophecy says, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, And the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then the lame shall leap like a deer, And the tongue of the dumb sing. For waters shall burst forth in the wilderness, And streams in the desert.”

Spit from the Lord is like a baptism, the flood waters burying the corruption, the Red Sea drowning our enemies. May the Lord always spit at us!

 

And He took him aside from the multitude, and put His fingers in his ears, and He spat and touched his tongue.

Here is a nice instance where the Gospel for this week parallels a theme from the epistle. The epistle from Second Corinthians speaks of two ministries. First there was the “ministry of death, written and engraved on stones,” and then there was the “ministry of the Spirit.” What’s the difference between the two? Simply put, as St. Paul does, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”

Those letters were written by God’s fingers, engraved in the stones which became the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. From Exodus: “He gave Moses two tablets of the Testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God.”

That covenant came with terror, from “a mountain that may [not] be touched and that burned with fire, and to blackness and darkness and tempest, and the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words, so that those who heard it begged that the word should not be spoken to them anymore.” It was truly a ministry of death.”

But through the prophet Jeremiah the Lord promised a new covenant. “Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah – not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

With the new covenant, the Lord will do writing again. He’ll use His finger again. But this time He’s not writing on stone, but in minds and hearts. This writing will be through the forgiveness of sins.

This is what St. Paul calls the ministry of the Spirit. And indeed, it is with the Holy Spirit that the forgiveness of the new covenant comes: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.” The Holy Spirit bears the forgiveness of all sins, for the least of them to the greatest of them. For this reason, all sins are forgiven but those against Him. “[A]ll sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”

That last verse, Jesus teaches in the context of casting out demons. He gets in that controversy with the Pharisees about whether He casts them out by Beelzebub or not. Notice how Matthew and Luke differ in their account of Jesus’ words.

From Matthew: “But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you.”

From Luke: “But if I cast out demons with the finger of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you.”

The finger of God is the Holy Spirit. The finger of God is the ministry of the Spirit. What was used to engrave stone in the Old Testament is now an instrument of the Holy Spirit.

What changed? We don’t go the semi-Gnostic route and claim there’s an entirely new mode of God’s being. To wit: “In the Old Testament God was mean and judgmental, but now He’s kind and tolerant.” Wrong answer.

What then changed? Simple. The finger took flesh and dwelt among us. In the Old Testament, the naked presence of that finger, if we can stretch the symbolism a bit, caused rock to fly from its presence. It was a destructive force. Where it went, rock went elsewhere, and engraved stone was left behind. Pharaoh recognized the ultimate destructiveness of that naked finger, as did King Belshazzar when that naked finger was joined by the rest of the hand, writing on the wall.

The ministry of the Spirit is a different ministry. It tabernacles the authority and power of God in flesh and blood. Veiled in flesh, but yet completely present in each particle of that flesh, God is present among us in Christ Jesus, no longer to bring death, but to bring life.

Jesus sticks His finger in the deaf man’s ears. He’s writing something new, not with words of the Law but with an action of grace and mercy. He’s driving away the demons that held those ears and mouth under the curse, for where God is present, the demons cannot be. He’s forgiving the man’s sin. It’s the ministry of the Spirit.

Something similar is taught when Jesus writes on the ground in the episode when the religious leaders brought to Him a woman caught in adultery and asked what should be done. They informed Him what the engraved text said, “Such should be stoned.” But what does Jesus say? The finger of God in the past stated one thing; what does the incarnate finger of God say? Then Jesus bends down and writes in the dirt. We’re not given what He wrote, because just as the Jeremiah prophecy said, the new covenant is not something of the letter. It’s something of the spirit, written on hearts and minds, and conveyed through forgiveness. Which is exactly what Jesus gives the woman, absolution.

The finger of God became flesh and dwelt among us; it is the Spirit of God at work giving the forgiveness of sins.

Here’s another instance where popular piety falls short of what the Gospel teaches. Popular piety speaks of spirituality in opposition to the body. Spirituality is thought to be something transcendent, something negating, something defined by what it is not. In fact that’s the Old Testament understanding. God was hidden, manifest in His negating effects like the engraved gap left in stone after He was through.

Jesus introduces something wonderful and new. Spirituality is mundane, earthly, near, and fleshy. It is fingers stuck in our ears, to open them and fill our hearts and minds with knowledge of the forgiveness of sins, in fulfillment of the Jeremiah prophecy, along with that ultimate fulfillment, where the New Covenant in His blood is given out for the forgiveness of sins.

 

And He took him aside from the multitude, …

We commented in last devotion how, when the Lord separates something, He’s giving it life. This goes back to the first creation, when He separated the light from the darkness and gave each names.

This is a significant point in understanding the critique against Gnosticism. Separation is something that can only happen when there is divisible substance, or matter. I like the word “substance” better because than can include spirit, including God Himself (“of one substance with the Father”). Things of substance arising from the ultimate Substance (God) has parallels to the Logos being the source of all creation, all the things comprising the logoi. They are named, even as God is named.

The Ten Commandments are premised on this truth. God is substance, separate and unique from all others who would be claimed god – you shall have none other god than He. He has a name. He has a day. There are protected, substantial properties with clear boundaries – parents, our bodies, our property.

It is because of substantial things we have language. Without the divisibleness of substance, there could be no language. We learn this also from the creation account. “God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.” Words arise from the Word, as substances arise from Substance.

God’s separating of one thing from another is His sanctifying, even His glorifying. He’s separating something and giving it a calling: this is what this thing does, what it is, its glory.

As St. Paul says, “All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of animals, another of fish, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differs from another star in glory.”

With the fall, a new dynamic set in place. People began glorying in the collapse of substance into nothingness: “the glory of man as the flower of the grass. The grass withers, And its flower falls away…” They saw glory in themselves and their own words: “He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory.” It’s a false glory.

Not a single living thing today will likely be here, what, a thousand or two years from now? And that’s factoring in Redwood trees and the like. No animate living being will live beyond a few hundred years. The glory of the creation is to collapse into nothingness. Most modern philosophies attempt to build their systems on, or despite, this sad fact.

Christ’s Church is something other. Christ’s Church is called out of this collapse. Christ’s Church is the pearl not cast before the swine of the collapsing, unholy, unclean world order.

Why did the Lord take aside the deaf man from the multitude?

At one level, Jesus is setting the tone of what Church is. It is ecclesia, a Greek word meaning “called out.” We care called out of the world, out of the collapsing morass. Jesus is always calling out His people from the multitudes, is He not? “Come out of her, my people,” He says, “lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues.” This from the book of Revelation, calling to His Church in the midst of Babylon.

To be called out is to be healed and given life, just as at the beginning, and just as Christ did with the deaf man. Church is the place of healing, where His Word heals our rebellious hearts, putting to death our Self and its words, laying the foundation for something that doesn’t wither away like grass, but is eternal and comes from God. “He that has ears to hear, let him hear” is an exorcism spoken on every ear, not just the physically deaf ones.

At another level, Jesus is playing out what is known as the “messianic secret” when He takes the deaf man aside from the multitude. He will heal the man; He will give a peak at His divine ability to create; but He will not cast pearls before swine.

What are swine in this context? It’s the “Your Best Life Now” crowd and its theology, the crowd trampling over to Jesus wanting to make Him king after He fed them (see John 6). It’s that element that seeks in Jesus an answer to their worldly problems, and who has no use for Him once they learn that to follow Him means taking up the cross.

Jesus knew the swine in people’s hearts, rooting around for the comforts of this world. He knew if they all saw Him heal the man, they’d want to freeze Him in that moment of His ministry, keeping Him from the cross. But a Christ without a cross is only a good doctor. Everything still ends up withering and collapsing. No, in the cross we glory, because only in the cross is the old world of Adam finally put to death, so that a new world can arise from the open tomb, in Christ.

Jesus in His mercy granted a few blind and deaf people to get peaks of His divine power, so we could see Who He truly is, but He certainly didn’t heal every blind and deaf person. He will, in the resurrection, but this side of the resurrection, all we get are foretastes. This is the messianic secret, as stated above.

In a sense, the Church is still a messianic secret. What happens in the Church is a mystery to those on the outside. We don’t cast these pearls before the swine. To those open to its message – the worthy – we preach, baptize, and invite into the sanctuary. To those on the outside – those not worthy – we allow the Word itself to drive them away, and leave it at that, shaking off our feet what they are destined to become, dust.

But typically when the Church loses its “other” and “separated” character, desperately seeking to find affinity with the world, yes, it allows the swine in, and the swine do what they are destined to do: “they trample [the pearls] under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.”

Jesus takes us aside from the multitude, to heal us. It’s what the Church is. He’s doing such things for a reason. He’s calling us out from the collapsing morass. He’s keeping us from the swine. He’s preserving us for the life He’s creating in us.

 

This week’s Gospel is the last of only three Sunday Gospels from St. Mark in the historic lectionary. Mark gives us the Easter Gospel, the feeding of the 4,000, and this week, the healing of the deaf man. His Gospel is also an option on Ascension Day. This incidentally is the only recording of Jesus healing a deaf man. There are passages saying He will heal the deaf in both Matthew and Luke, but only in Mark do we actually get two accounts of Jesus healing the deaf.

Mark’s Gospels are like protein bars, quick meals, packed with nutrition, energy, and punch. You can’t do much better than the resurrection and ascension Gospels as far as Who Jesus is for us; the feeding of the 4,000 establishes what Jesus does for His Church sacramentally; this week’s Gospel has just about every doctrine in it, a true opening of our ears to hear the fullness of His Word. Word, sacrament, resurrection, ascension. All in Mark’s succinct way of putting things.

A theological tome could be written on just about every line in this week’s Gospel. But we’ll do a fly by. And of course, we’ll get into the weeds this week.

The Gospel begins with the deaf and mute man brought to Jesus. You can’t get simpler than that. There’s a problem with humanity; we go to the solution. Seek, and we shall find. And find they do, in Jesus. Jesus is the solution to humanity’s problem.

They begged Jesus to put His hand on the deaf man. We are all beggars, said Martin Luther. As in last week’s Gospel, where the tax collector who beat his breast and prayed, “Lord, have mercy,” so this week we get a hint at a good ending to the story: beggars before the Lord are taken care of. Stories that begin, “Lord, have mercy,” always end well. How wonderful the “story” of the liturgy early on establishes that narrative foundation; how sad so many churches so no value in the Kyrie.

They begged Jesus to touch the man. They knew the touch of Jesus was the touch of God. And what a profound commentary on the importance of flesh and blood touch, something the Gnostics will never understand. But it’s something those on deployment understand. Video calling is good, but something is missing when the flesh and blood is not there. Or again, when someone dies, sure we can loftily talk about how “his memory lives on.” But we would rather have the flesh and blood person there than the memory. God understands this. He made us in flesh and blood, and when He wanted to be with us, He didn’t send a spirit, a memory, an imaginary friend, or a phantasm. He came in flesh and blood. Likewise, after we beg for Jesus to help us in the liturgy, we beg for the presence of His flesh and blood, for Him to be present. And touch us He does, when He gives us His flesh and blood to eat and drink.

Jesus takes the man from the multitude. When God separates things, life is about to happen. We see that in the beginning, on each day of creation. “God divided the light from the darkness.” Then the waters from the waters, then the land from the waters. He divided man from the ground, and woman from the man. Life happens. The Holy Spirit is a divider, a separator, Someone Who gives individual existence to things and peoples and animals through matter, breaking life into it. The deaf man’s ears and tongue had become inert, as good as lifeless rock, meaningless things on the head. Jesus is about to change that. The church is similar. From “ecclesia,” which comes from the Greek, “to call out,” we have been separated from the world by baptism, given life, and sanctified with a unique, holy, individual existence, called to do the one thing no one else in the world does, confess the Triune God and the Incarnate Lord.

Jesus sticks His fingers in the man’s ears. Those fingers are God’s fingers. God’s fingers have a history. Last appearance God’s fingers wrote letters in stone, or judgment on a wall. Last appearance His fingers were ministers of death, says St. Paul in this week’s epistle. For the Law, that old covenant, though it teaches liberty, still only lays the foundation for our judgment, because we fall short of it – we’d rather be slaves. But, the Old Testament promises, there will be a new writing, a new covenant. What of this new covenant? “I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; …I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” This was fulfilled when Jesus instituted the “New Testament in My blood,” which gives the forgiveness of sins, and writes on our hearts and minds a new law, the law of love, forgiveness, and mercy. Exactly what He shows the deaf and mute man. (And what Jesus taught the adulterous woman when He stuck that finger in the ground and wrote.)

Jesus spits. Was He spitting at the devil, as an early baptismal rite suggested? Perhaps He was sharing His mouth with the mute man. It’s what Jesus does. He is the perfected man. He is the second Adam. He lives to share with us His parts. He gives us His life. In fact, that is the ministry of the Holy Spirit St. Paul alludes to in His epistle. The Holy Spirit, teaches Jesus,
“will take of what is Mine and declare it to you.” What Jesus has, that works, will be given to us, who don’t work, by declaration of the Holy Spirit. “O Lord, open thou my lips. And my mouth shall declare your praise.” He does it. Jesus gives us the mouth that’s doing it – His mouth.

Jesus looks up to heaven and sighs. He’s God but He’s also human. He’s in a spacial place shared with humans, separate from God, down here looking up. He sighs because He shares with us our sorrows. For this reason the author to the Hebrews can write that Jesus sympathizes with us in our sorrows.

Jesus prays the deaf man’s ears to be opened, and they are. The Father always hears the prayers of His Son, who prays on behalf of all of us and lays the foundation for our own prayers to be heard and answered: “our Father…”

Jesus commands everyone to say nothing, but the more He tells them not to speak, the more they do so. How sweet, right? And that’s how we should be, right? We should just be so excited about the Gospel that you can’t shut us up, right?

No. We should listen to Jesus and obey. The Gospel wasn’t fulfilled and complete. They were going out and spreading what amounted to a deceptive Gospel: “Here’s a man who can take care of all your worldly problems. He can give you your best life now!” No, we preach Christ and Him crucified. There is only one time in the Gospel of Mark where people proclaim Him the Son of God, and He doesn’t silence them, and that’s when the centurion confessed Him to be hte Son of God after He died. The Lord never forbids the proclamation of Christ crucified.

Jesus does all things well. That is true. He does all things well. And He does all things well for us.

“…everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

This is arguably among the few signature, all-encompassing themes of the entire Bible. As all the Bible centers on Jesus Christ, it outlines what we might call His narrative outline: He was humbled and became exalted, fulfilling in Himself so much of the story of the Old Testament.

The theme comes up most prominently first in Deuteronomy, where Moses teaches Israel that their wandering in the wilderness was to humble them, so that He might exalt them in the Promised Land.

Perhaps the most typical and fullest instance of it is in Hannah’s prayer, when she said, “The LORD makes poor and makes rich; He brings low and lifts up. He raises the poor from the dust And lifts the beggar from the ash heap, To set them among princes And make them inherit the throne of glory.”

Jesus teaches the same subject several times, each with a bit of different flavor.

In Matthew’s Gospel, the focus seems to be more on the apostles in their role as teacher: “But you, do not be called ‘Rabbi’; for One is your Teacher, the Christ, and you are all brethren. Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven. And do not be called teachers; for One is your Teacher, the Christ. But he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

The idea is, as teachers, the apostles should not lord it over others. Unlike the Gnostics, among whom a “Leader” or “Teacher” was truly a unique vessel of new, other-worldly teaching – so they would be exalted as sui generi (of their own kind) – the apostles were only humble bearers of the one Teacher, Jesus. Jesus isn’t saying it’s wrong to call pastor teacher or father – even as St. Paul referred to himself as a father of his hearers and the apostles had the role of teacher – bu that they shouldn’t presume to exalt themselves as “the Teacher” or “the Father.” They were only humble servants of One who already held these titles.

In the epistles, we get some unique flavors of the humble/exalted theme. St. Peter talks of humbling ourselves to one another, for instance, the younger people to the elders, but all to one another. This goes hand in hand with “humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.” Note how the “for He cares for you” parallels the “He went home justified.” The Father cares about our weaknesses, our struggles, our sufferings. When we cast such things upon Him, humbling ourselves, He will certainly answer.

St. James teaches the theme as well in emotional terms: “Lament and mourn and weep! Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.” In the state of such mournfulness, he write, we “draw near to God” even as “He will draw near” to us. How true, that we find God most often in the darkness of our baptismal judgment, as the Psalm says, “He made darkness His secret place; His canopy around Him was dark waters And thick clouds of the skies.”

In St. Luke’s Gospel, from which our Gospel for this week comes, Jesus uses the same expression as He does in Matthew, but in a completely different context. Where Matthew focuses more on the apostle as a teacher, Luke focuses more on disciples in general. In Luke Jesus teaches a humility that seeks the lowest place, not the highest, that seeks the lowest of people, not the great ones, so “when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you; for you shall be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

And that brings us to this week’s Gospel, which defines humility as beating the breast and praying the Kyrie.

Humility all around, from beginning to end. It’s the way of the Bible, because it’s the way of Jesus Christ, Who Himself was humbled, joining all the humble, but ended up exalted, showing what awaits all who humble themselves before the Lord.

As we look at those humbled, what do we see? We see a people wandering in a desert; a barren woman; the poor, maimed, lame, and blind; and sinners. Sometimes the Lord humbles us; sometimes we are to humble ourselves. Whatever the case, every breath of the Scriptures teach that being at the humble point is where we ought to be, so as to be lifted up. As it was for the one who cried out, “Into thy hands, O Lord, I commit my spirit,” so it is for us. Kyrie is the pathway heaven.

“And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified…”

If there was a question answered in this week’s Gospel, it is this: who gets to heaven justified? The punch line, after all, is “this man went down to his house justified.” Again dealing in binaries, as Jesus often does (no grey areas with Him), Jesus sets up the one who went home justified against the backdrop of the one who exalted himself, the Pharisee.

Jesus starts up the parable, of course, dealing with another question: what about these Pharisees who trust in themselves because they are righteous and despise others? But He ends on a positive note, describing not only not how to act, but how to act.

And how should we act? “And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ ”

Let’s parse that.

We begin with how the publican stands afar off. There is a spacial dimension to this week’s parable that cannot be overlooked. Sufis are Islamic Gnostics, and there is a Sufi tale about a man who goes out to seek God, only to traverse miles of terrain and come to a place where he realizes God is in himself. How nice. The God of this parable is not such a God. He comes in a temple, is hidden behind a curtain, and is approached in a certain way, through priests, sacrifices, and properly followed rituals.

And that’s not just some Old Testament way of doing religion that more enlightened times transcend. No, it lays down the foundation for Jesus. If it took some four books of the Torah – the Torah! – to articulate proper worship, as much should we meditate and contemplate on the details and mysteries of the person of Christ, who is the new testament temple and fulfills every detail of the Torah. A theology that glosses over Old Testament details and acts as if they mean nothing now is a theology that also ignores the importance and mysteries of who Christ is, turning Him into a mere archetype, or cosmic messenger, or guru-like teacher. No, we have to get into the nuts and bolts of Jesus, precisely because He’s founded on the Torah’s detailed account of the temple.

And one of those details is the spacial dimension. If He is God in flesh, then He is God in location, outlined and bordered off from other things away from us. To get to God isn’t to go into ourselves because God is everywhere. It’s to go to Jesus.

Jesus is the temple, and He, as that temple described in the parable, is large enough to include the begging and the justifying. Jesus is both beggar and justified. He sighs and cries on our behalf, along with the publican. He is also justified on our behalf, ascending to God’s right hand on our behalf as our righteousness. And He sends the Holy Spirit to share with us both the begging (the Holy Spirit crying “Abba Father” in us) and the justification (the Holy Spirit confessing “Jesus is Lord” in us).

All this happens in the Church, the Holy Spirit’s creation, created where people cry “Lord have mercy” and are justified. What is it to be justified? It’s to be reckoned righteous not on account of one’s own righteousness – that is the righteousness of the Pharisee – but on account of God’s righteousness, that is, His forgiveness, love, and mercy. We’re justified not because we do something, but because God forgives us our sins, causing us to become righteous, justified, before Him.

This too centers on Christ, who ascended to the Father and is our righteousness and sanctification before the Father. This status is administered to us by the Holy Spirit through ministers, in the liturgy. After the Holy Spirit prays in us the publican’s prayer, the Kyrie, the confession, the Lord’s Prayer, we most certainly stand in God’s presence, at His very table, and are reckoned with Christ as His holy, treasured family, His dear children. This is justification.

And there is no purgatory on the way to the altar.

The Pharisee in the parable represents the very doctrine of justification Martin Luther was against in the Reformation. It was taught that we are not justified the way the tax collector was, by first humbling ourselves to the zero point, confessing our sins, and begging for mercy, and then receiving the declaration of Jesus that it was he who went home justified. Rather, it was taught that we are justified after God’s grace works with us to make us good people. What sort of people? The sort of people who do not exhort, commit adultery, or steal, but who fast and tithe.

And what sort of worship arises from both views? The latter view necessarily results in a worship which says something to the effect of, “God, I thank you that you’ve made me so good by your grace. Whatever I am I am by Your grace. Thanks for that!”

The former view results in a different kind of worship. Our involvement in the worship is always supplicatory. We are the beggars needing help. We presume nothing. Meanwhile, we confess God to be everything, our everything, our only source of hope to be anything.

Interesting, but the liturgy – which looks very much like it did in pre-Reformation – has always looked like that second way of worshiping. Unfortunately, the teaching of the Church has not always matched up with what happens liturgically. Liturgically we are the tax collector, begging for mercy and then being justified. No purgatory, just forgiveness and table fellowship, just dying, rising, and joining Christ at the feast. But somehow these doctrines crept in, and a new doctrine of justification crept in that created an incongruity between what happened liturgically and what was believed to happen theologically – you don’t die and go with Christ; you first have to sizzle in purgatory so you can be purified.

Martin Luther embraced what Jesus taught about justification. The beggar went home justified. No wonder Luther’s last words were, “We are beggars, this is true.” Beggars go home justified.