Rev. Daniel E. Somers, Dcn+
Saint Andrew's Church
Sermon
October 28, 2018
One of Us – God's Love
We proclaim every Sunday that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again. Ask yourselves: if he came again in our lifetimes, would we recognize him? Would we see him? What would it take for us, like Bartemaeus in today's gospel from Mark, to see?
Poor Bartemaeus! He cries out for mercy, begging for his sustenance. What is the response from those accompanying Jesus? They “sternly ordered him to be quiet.” That's a polite way of saying he was told to shut his mouth. Thankfully, he persists. “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus hears him, summons him. Bartemaeus is no longer a piece of trash. “My teacher, let me see again.” He is in essence pleading, “Let me be free.”
Bartemaeus recognized Jesus. Would you like that pop song, “One of Us”, from about twenty years ago see him only as “a stranger on the bus just trying to make his way home”? It is a tune from an otherwise seemingly inconsequential hit, but one that has haunted me, intrigued me ever since. As a warden at St. Bernard's in Bernardsville – yes, Mark and Henry, I too was once a warden – about that time, the rector invited me to deliver a stewardship sermon. As I struggled with its composition, a vision of a robed man appeared. I was certain that it was Jesus. Whether the sermon or that year's stewardship campaign were successful is open to question. What was not uncertain was the identity of the figure.
This brings me to Fyodor Dosteovsky, a renowned Russian author of the mid to late nineteenth century. I know you're scratching your head. What does this author conceivably have to do with a blind beggar, a pop song, and a Jesus sighting by a layman ascending a pulpit for the first time, let alone a sermon about stewardship? Bear with me.
Dosteovsky, in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, included a chapter entitled, “The Grand Inquisitor”. It is a dark parable set in sixteenth-century Seville, Spain. “The devil,” he writes, “did not slumber.” “Just then there appeared in the north of Germany a terrible new heresy. 'A huge star like to a torch (that is to a church)' fell on the sources of the waters and they became bitter.” In other words, Martin Luther and the Reformation that he spawned had reared its head. The Counter Reformation, of which the Spanish Inquisition was a part, followed.
In about 1562, over one hundred such heretics were put death in one day, consigned to the flames of a huge auto-de-fe ordered by the Grand Inquisitor. Queen “Bloody” Mary Tudor of England was employing the same tactic to combat the heresy, as were other monarchs and potentates throughout Europe. Among those in attendance were the royal family, the cardinals, “the most charming ladies of the court and the whole population of Seville.”
A day later, he – Jesus – comes not in all his heavenly glory at the end of time as prophesized in the Book of Revelation, but rather as a mere human. “He came softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, everyone recognized Him.” They are irresistibly drawn to Him. They surround Him. The flock about Him. They follow Him. “The sun of love burns in His heart … and stirs their hearts with responsive love.” In incidents redolent of gospels, power issues from the touch of His garments – remember the woman with the chronic bleeding? A dead girl in an open coffin is brought to Him and placed before His feet. Once more his lips pronounce, “Maiden arise!” She does. An old man, blind from childhood, cries out to be cured. The scales, as with Bartemaeus, fall from his eyes.
At this moment, the Grand Inquisitor, the cardinal himself, comes upon the scene. We are today on the eve of Halloween, a big event here in Lambertville. There is hardly a more ghoulish figure in all of literature than this cardinal. “He is an old man of ninety, tall and erect with a withered face and sunken eyes from which there is still a gleam of light.” He is accompanied by his gloomy assistants, slaves, and his “holy guard”. His face darkens, his thick gray brows knit, and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He holds out his finger and Jesus is taken. Where? To the cardinal's dank, dark dungeon under his palace. The crowd is cowed and offers no resistance.
Later that night, the cardinal appears in Jesus' cell and commands Him to be silent. “Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hast said of old. … Why art Thou come to hinder us? … All has been given by Thee to the Pope. There is no need for Thee to come now at all.” The cardinal goes on, “you came 1,500 years ago to set mankind free. They have now set their freedom happily at our feet.”
The freedom that Jesus bought when He resisted the temptations of the devil in the wilderness has not brought happiness to the masses. The cardinal and his ilk are prepared to assume the burden of that freedom to choose between good and evil in exchange for mankind's submission. Dosteovsky is writing in the nineteenth century, but the words could have been that of Lenin in the twentieth.
The cardinal had been an ardent Christian, but ultimately concluded that Christianity was madness. To his mind, the only sensible, rational course is to accede to the devil's temptations, so summarily rejected by Jesus Himself fifteen centuries earlier. The cardinal has chosen the counsel of the wise, diabolic spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, accepting lying and deception, deceiving mankind as to where it is being led, like passive, timid children. This deception is done in the name of Christ Himself. We witness the corrosiveness of lying almost daily in our own time.
What was Jesus' response as He listened to the cardinal's extraordinary, chilling confession and judgment, “For if anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou” – in the bowels of the palace's dungeon? “Dixi”, says the cardinal, “I have spoken.” Jesus was about to be consigned to a second, excruciating human death for being Himself. When I read this parable initially some years ago, I asked myself, what author could contemplate a second execution of God incarnate? I should have known better.
Jesus gets up and kisses the Grand Inquisitor softly on his aged, bloodless lips. The old man had hoped that Jesus would say something, “however bitter and terrible.” That kiss was, however, His only answer. The encounter epitomizes the struggle of good and evil found in the human soul. God and Satan are fighting, the battlefield is the human heart of each man and woman. The sinister cardinal blames Jesus that the battle is being fought at all, but such is the power of God's love. The inquisitor opens the cell door, tells Jesus to leave. “Go, and come no more … come not at all, never, never!” The prisoner went away. Satan's triumph is only temporary.
The kiss glowed in the old cardinal's heart. What has God's kiss done to you and what can you do in return? Awareness, deep awareness of the abundant and undeserved goodness of God, is the only thing that can elicit of the faithful abounding generosity. Guilt doesn't do it. Slick stewardship messages don't do it. Shame doesn't do it. Charts don't do it. Letters don't do it, although you'll receive one from me. Sermons don't do it, even though you'll hear one or two or three from me on the subject. But awareness, deep awareness of abundant and undeserved goodness of God – his unbounded love – that will do it.
Do you think that the Grand Inquisitor felt that love? Did he pledge? I doubt it. Do you think that he was overcome by that love, that he just possibly might have withdrawn from that horrid, sordid pact with the devil, that his certainty about the appropriate relationship of man to the divine was forever altered?
Jesus is still out and about in our communities and our lives, that stranger on the bus, ever ready to pass God's love to us. Unfortunately, as the events of the past week too amply demonstrate, so is evil. Over the next few weeks, you will hear from fellow parishioners about what God and this house of worship and this worshiping community have done for them and those dear to them.
As you consider your pledge for the coming year, think about what Jesus' largesse and sacrifice have done for you. There is much work to be done in the vineyard. Your help is needed and no doubt will be amply rewarded in this age and the age to come. As Bartemaeus was told in today's gospel, your faith will enable you to see, just as Jesus' kiss enabled the wizened, compromised inquisitor to see and understand.
In the name of God the Creator, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
