Today’s Gospel is from Luke, and it is part of a long section of material known as the journey to Jerusalem (9.51-19.44). This journey is not meant to be understood as being a straight line of travel between points A and B, as if one were flying non-stop from New York to Boston. It is, however, better understood as a zig-zag walk/pilgrimage toward destiny, somewhat similar to a sailboat, for example, tacking in the ocean breeze. Also, much of the material in this particular section is unique to the Evangelist, composed in a style wherein Luke stresses teaching over miracle: here, differences between Jesus and traditional Jewish religious thought and practice are elucidated in two interwoven themes of the narrative; 1) the unfaithfulness of Israel, and 2) the “new way” (18.1-8) of discipleship Christ reveals.
When, therefore, Christ this morning says, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” (10.18), what does he mean in the context of Luke’s Gospel narrative of the journey to Jerusalem and his two themes of obedience and discipleship? Let me try to answer that question.
Christ’s words are upon first, as well as upon subsequent reading, I think, an obscure and peculiar declaration; one of those Scriptural remarks that is more mystery than clarity. But, the mystery Luke sets on the lips of Jesus in this one sentence is very important, essential for us today, nearly two millennia after it was first written. Let me as well try to address that importance.
First of all, the words, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” are apocalyptic in nature. That is to say, they refer to a mystical vision or foretelling of the end time, the final age and the long awaited victory of the kingdom of God, a coming into being of something radically new, a divine re-creation, whose advent concludes human history with ultimate judgment over the nations and peoples of the earth. This apocalypse is symbolized/depicted in Scripture repeatedly in images of refining fire; in today’s utterance, for example, that fire being the flash of lightning, whose accompanying peal of thunder sounds Satan’s fall and defeat in judgment. And, secondly, Christ’s words are a reference/foreshadowing, of his impending Cross and Passion. In either case, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” is, therefore, a reference to the ultimate destiny hidden in today’s journey, a destiny that is the destiny of this our planet home and our own destiny as well as that of the Christ, that destiny being the end and apocalyptic event that is paradoxically re-beginning (ref. to e e cummings) or entrance into life in the kingdom of heaven, the purpose for which we were made, the purpose for which the Messiah was born, suffered for us, and died forsaken outside the walls of the story’s penultimate destination, the Holy City, Jerusalem.
In other words, Jesus in today’s Gospel is not announcing the imminent death of Satan, he is instead proclaiming the end of Satan’s transcendence, the unmasking of the devil’s great lie, cast over the kingdom and destiny of humankind. Luke expects us to see that Satan is behind the fear, violence, and death that hold all creatures of the kingdom of this world captive. And in the Gospel chronicle, it is also fear, violence, and death that are essential to the blueprint of the Cross and Passion, Jesus being the innocent victim, the scapegoat, of false accusation, the one who bears the fear, violence, and death that we cannot bear to shoulder but put upon him. “His blood be on us and on our children” records the Evangelist Matthew (27.25), words which are forensic witness, a reminder of our participation in a lynching where we sacrificed an innocent man and set a guilty man (Barabbas) free.
I want at this point to offer a suggestion that I think can open the reading and understanding of Scripture for you. Where you read the word Satan or sin, substitute the words fear, violence, and death. It will give the text more life and meaning, moving you beyond the limitation of seeing Satan as simply an evil character in a drama and sin as simply bad behavior; each of which are examples of simplistic reductions. Let us, therefore, read what Jesus says in today’s Gospel with this substitution in mind: “I beheld fear, violence, and death as lightning fall from heaven.” I think this gives us a better sense of what is being said, that humanity is not immune from evil but that the power of evil has now been judged and overthrown by the Cross and Passion of the one who was made the victim of fear, violence, and death; our victim. The Cross and Passion of Christ proclaim not only Jesus’ destiny as redeemer and judge of this world but the destiny of this planet, its nations and peoples, as being brought into an apocalyptic or end time where Satan (fear, violence, and death) is unmasked for the captivating lie sin is. At the cross, where the world ends in the perfect sacrifice Christ is, and where new life begins, we, as Christians believe, a new order, a new destiny is revealed in which surrender, mercy, and forgiveness, the life and witness of Christ, his miraculous nature and unity he shares with his Father, become the new way to and in an eternal kingdom of God that is already here and is being revealed in our lifetime amidst a world of troubling history in which we live.
The importance of this is that surrender, mercy, and forgiveness are a power that a captive world cannot bestow. It is the power of the kingdom of heaven come amongst us. It is the power of resurrection. And, it is the heart of discipleship. It is also our Christian hope and joy, paradoxically and wonderfully a gift of innocent blood, Christ’s life for our life, our lives now hid with him and sharing in his final destiny, a destiny to a new creation we could not secure or will into being without God’s intervention into human history and hearts where it is received purely as gift.
Now, if I may speak candidly and directly, we, here at Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, have some recent experience in today’s message of Jesus; both of faithful obedience and his new way of living. We know the terrible cost of false accusation and the attempt to scapegoat, to unjustly condemn. If the Son of God is not immune from this dynamic, we should not fool ourselves either as to our immunity from it or to our direct or covert participation in perpetrating it as well. Fear, violence, and death as an expression of sin are a contagious spirit that can attack or possess any one, because that is the nature of flesh, and the way the kingdom of this world is organized in which we define ourselves over and against one another. But, more importantly, we are told this morning that it is a possession of falsehood that ultimately cannot triumph, cannot proclaim truth, because in Christ, a power greater has come into being that has already subverted Satan/sin and seeks to possess each and all in a mystical victory that will not let us ever go, a power that reorders our thinking, our acting, and our willingness in this world to live an eternal way and destiny that we share joyously with our Lord and God, in whom there is no fear, no violence, no death! This may be good news, but it does not make our life or the discipleship with the Lord we seek to follow in daily life, easy. Discipleship/obedience to Our God in and through surrender, mercy, and forgiveness is the most difficult thing we can do. And, like birds and bees, we all do it, each in his/her own way, always imperfectly yet each and all with God’s help, what the Church calls grace or resurrection power.
It is this experience of the Resurrection that caught up the apostles and the early Church; an intimate and compelling conversion in which Christ was alive in surrender, mercy, and forgiveness; that eternal life, not to be confused with living forever, could be found here and now, even where fear, violence, and death may cost us life lost in living (ref. to T S Eliot).
I am saying that surrender, mercy, and forgiveness are what our Lord commands. And this is very different from religious formulae and dogma. “The pure reaching of the Gospel…” [writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer in A Testament to Freedom (p. 155), “is not a religious concern, but a desire to execute the will of God for a new creation. In the Church, the Holy Spirit and obedience take the place of ‘the religious’” (as quoted in A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 253). In other words, to live a surrendered, merciful, and forgiving life, what the Church terms the love of God, is to live in the Resurrecting power of the Spirit and to be obedient to God’s will of love. It is, also, if Bonhoeffer is correct, to actively work for a new heaven and a new earth, an apocalyptic partnership or co-operation with the Almighty in the little and not so little people, places, things, and events of daily life.
But, fear, violence, and death are cunning, baffling, deceptive, and powerful forces for each and all of us, especially if they live in those recesses of our lives and hearts where we are unaware or willful or if they are projected, propagated and enforced in our human institutions where falsehood can often be legitimized in fearful, violent, and deadly ideologies. Perhaps in a world where this is sometimes and often tragically so, a little heavenly Donner und Blitzen, thunder and lightning, can be good for us, awakening us and reminding us that when we have fallen into the lie that sin is, we need to be honest, admit our wrong to another human being, and make direct amends where we can, except when to do so would harm or injure others, for repentance is God’s commandment too; repentance being the return again and again amidst the lightning and thunder of sin’s defeat in surrender to the mercy and forgiveness of God’s love, where the outstretched arms of the Lord always await us in faithfulness and power of new life, because ours is a Lord who always grants us another beginning on that zig-zagging lifetime pilgrimage to our heavenly home and destiny so that we may become more and more the people we are meant and created to be.
Sometimes, we forget all this. I do. The world, its nations and institutions, and the Church seem at times to forget it as well. Flesh and the kingdom of this world are like that; easily deceived, distracted, and vulnerable. Perhaps much of the confusion, unrest, and insanity about the planet and in the church and in our hearts is answered in the lightning and thunder of today’s Gospel pronouncement; the sight and sound of a new time and promise, a new way, which is present amidst an old world and lie which are passing away, a world in which Satan is still falling, falling, falling.
In the lightning and thunder of the Cross, which proclaims the love of God in surrender, mercy and forgiveness, see and hear that Christ commends us to live with him in a new freedom, where pain and sorrow are no more, where retribution and resentment have no power, simply because Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ in Truth comes again, and again, and again to open the hearts and lives of men and women like ourselves to everlasting life on this our daily walk with him to a heavenly Jerusalem. Thanks be to God!
