“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give unto your bosom.”
I proposed some questions for us to have in mind as we go deeper into our study of participation, which is that state of grace we have entered into through baptism and the Church: What can human beings become by nature? & What can we become by participation? What can we know by nature? & What can we know by participation? And lastly what can human beings achieve by nature? & What can we achieve by participation? Some answers are found in the baptismal liturgy when the priest addresses the parish: “I beseech you to call upon God the Father, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that of his bounteous mercy he will grant to this Child that which by nature he cannot have; that he may be baptized with Water and the Holy Ghost, and received into Christ’s Holy Church and made a living member of the Same.” That is to say, that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, our new birth, our grafting into Christ’s human nature, as living members, are examples of what we cannot have by nature, that is one will never merely grow by nature into this state of being. It was required that we be grafted in and born again as God’s own Child. Now as we will see, our Lord’s commandments in the Gospel for Trinity IV are entirely divine characteristics — he is describing how God is in the world. How God relates to his creation and in particular to this part of his creation that sprang from Adam. In short he is describing the way God’s Children imitate him as we cooperate with the grace bestowed upon us through our Baptism into Jesus, thus our imitation of the Father may be looked upon as evidences of our deification.
Before we look at this text I want to make a few more preliminary statements about John the Baptist since today is his Feast day and he is an example of the high reach of humanity with regard to holiness and nobleness in life that may reach by nature and apart from participation in Christ. John the Baptist was a holy man, he was not regenerated, he was not grafted into Christ humanity, he was not a member of the Bride, he was the Friend of the Bridegroom. The Church has always seen in John Baptist human nobility at its greatest. And that of course was through the special grace of God. When he was in the womb of his mother Elizabeth, Mary visited and upon entering her cousin’s home, John did leap in Elizabeth’s womb, an event the Fathers believed was an act of pure joy and even more than joy, a jubilation that moved Mary to cry out in song, “My soul doth magnify the Lord!” What I want you to see is that this particular revelation came through John the Baptist. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, John received revelation and calling and equipping from God. John the Baptist, guided by the Holy Spirit, reached back into that great treasury of value and meaning that we call the Old Testament and he retrieved a Pearl of Great Price that was for him his life’s project. John knew himself to be the Friend of the Bridegroom; his was a singular vocation, never to be repeated: to listen for the voice of the Bridegroom, to watch over the Bride and to initiate her preparation for her Betrothed. The Forerunner, the Friend, then blossomed into fulness of Old Testament Holiness, and like an Old Testament saint who carried about himself the fragrance of fields of wheat and sheep, John’s sweet fragrance, is not his own but the Bridegroom’s. His joy was fulfilled when he heard the voice of the Bridegroom drawing near. The Baptist cries out from the Wilderness, and he is the dying of the Old Man. The Baptist cries out in the Wilderness and in him the Old Testament has reached its finality. Types and shadows have ended.
The Eastern Orthodox Churches call him the Terrestrial Angel, the Earth Angel, whose whole life is filled up and perfected as the Friend of the Bridegroom. Jesus testifies of John that no man born of a woman is greater than John the Baptist, and yet Jesus also says that John is less than the least in the Kingdom of God. Why? Because, as I have said, John was not baptized into Christ, he was not know the joy and power of participation in the humanity of our Lord. Now lets move to the advantage of the Children of the Kingdom.
As I said earlier, our Lord’s teaching in the Gospel for Trinity IV is about how the Children of God are to behave and it is no surprise then that Jesus says he is describing how God is in the world. Since we are God’s offsprings we ought to behave as our Father is, how the Father acts toward his creation. God’s Children imitate God as we cooperate with the grace with which we were infused at our Baptism into Jesus.
Jesus taught his disciples that a complete reorientation toward God, toward one’s neighbor, and toward one’s self, toward all creation was necessary to see the Kingdom of God. Luke takes up this reorientation as a major theme of his Gospel and like a good writer, rather than telling, he shows what that reorientation looks like. Of course we cannot give Luke all the credit; he was after all quoting Jesus.
Also note it is a whole community, a holy community that instantiates the reoriented reality, not merely individuals; the new community exhibits a distinctive character that distinguishes it from the phony piety of the Pharisees, but it also distinguishes the Children of God from natural greatness and the genuinely piety of John the Baptist.
The new community, which is the Church of Christ, the congregation of God’s offsprings has no higher loyalty that Jesus Christ. He is the center of our life, the Church is his Bride, his interpretation of the Old Testament, his interpretation of Israel’s mission, his interpretation of John Baptist’s mission, what he loves is what we want to love, his ultimate concerns have become our ultimate concerns. By the grace of Holy Baptism we have been born again and graphed into Christ’s life so that now we share in his redeemed humanity and his life-giving divinity. The teaching that we have laid before us today is meant for us. It is not the way nations are run, although nations may and certainly ought to exhibit the virtues of the children of God in their laws and policies. But the Sermon on the Plain and the Sermon on the Mount are meant for Jesus’ Family; it is the way his siblings ought, and in fact by virtue of the grace of God, can live within the Family of God and in the world as well.
“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give unto your bosom.”
Jesus delivered four exhortations on judgment to his disciples. Love and mercy are meant to be the standard for life in the Body of Christ – yes, this is the way we will behave outside the Church, but this is a distinctive characteristic of Church life for the Children of God. These are the very word of Jesus Christ:
“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.”
Then Jesus begins to unfold for his disciples exactly how to imitate the Father’s mercy:
“Do Not judge and You Will Not Be Judged”
Mercy will not hold a brother or sister fixed and nailed in a state of condemnation. Jesus is not forbidding his disciples to make appropriate ethical evaluations. He is not suggesting that we simply ignore sin as though that will make it all better. What Jesus is absolutely forbidding in our common life is judgment concerning a person’s finality, as well as judgments that presumes we do not also need forgiveness. Nor do Christians continually exact shame and guilt through an unrelenting condemnation of a person who has fallen. Jesus insists that we be steady and dependable in seeking to understand, to be slow to damn a person, and quick to forgive the repentant. He forbids the false piety of the Pharisees whose very hostility toward the sinner was thought to be righteousness itself.
“Do Not Condemn and You Will Not Be Condemned”
Do you think Jesus really means this? Could he really mean that God will treat us the way we treat others? That there is something in man or woman who lives without condemning others that corresponds to the man or woman who knows himself or herself to be absolved and set free by the God who is God. To know for one’s self that the God who is God is a gracious God, predisposes one to live graciously in the world. Jesus’ disciples will be gracious because they have experienced the grace of God. Because Jesus’ disciples have experienced the mercy of God, they will be moved by mercy toward others. And the same is the case for forgiveness:
“Forgive and You Will Be Forgiven”
St. Paul summed this way of life up in Ephesians 4:31-32:
“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”
Christ is not telling us that we should pretend that a person is innocent when he or she is guilty. But what he is saying is that we, as his disciples, are not to hold an action permanently against another disciple. Once a person has sought forgiveness and amended his or her life then the matter has opened up for us the opportunity to imitate the Father, to encourage that person and to be his or her friend. And finally our Lord speaks to generosity:
“Give and You Will Be Given To”
Generosity is a mark of Christian character and it is the thread that holds all these imperatives together for to practice generosity is to practice divinity. Really these are all expression of the same way a life, a way of life that imitates the mercy and generosity of God the Father toward all of us. Christ offers forgiveness to the world that he loves. And his call to forgiveness is a call to love one another as he has loved us. Luke emphasis falls on how we treat one another. We are to love one another, to live graciously toward one another, and when the opportunity arises we are to forgive one another. Christ calls us to not be preoccupied with the spiritual condition of the other person, but rather to be attentive to our own conformity to the love and generosity of Christ. In fact, Christ calls us to love and generosity, to self-sacrificing love. The disciple of Christ is to be exceptional in love and generosity and as I have said, our life of love and generosity is to overflow from the Church into the world even though the world is likely to misinterpret such love. From the world’s standpoint such love, such generosity, such humility is weakness or it is a trick, a power play in disguise. But we are not of the world, we are the Israel of God, the Bride of Christ, the Children of the God who is God and our complete loyalty is to Jesus Christ, the Lover of our Soul.
“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give unto your bosom.”