BILLTESKA

Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.

Hard-heartedness is obdurate sin. It comes from fear of death. Today’s Epistle is a scriptural warrant for the Eastern Orthodox view of the Fall, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. In Jesus, God shared our flesh and blood "so that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death."

The fear of death causes us to defend ourselves by building walls ~ all kinds of impenetrable, insuperable walls that give us the illusion of safety. They shut us off from one another and from God. The great irony is that the more effective they are, the more death’s prisoner we are. And the only immunity to death is found in tearing them down. Life comes to us only in the collapse of our defensive walls, in the softening of our hearts.

This theme is found on almost every page of the Gospel. Hard-heartedness is the solidification of the unwillingness to lose one’s life; it is the biblical metaphor for the walled-in state of slavery to death.

There are many ways to harden the heart. One is by sheathing it in the stone of certitude, especially religious certitude. As we recalled Richard Hooker’s saying last week: "Two things there be that greatly trouble this present age; the one that Rome cannot, the other that Geneva will not err." Hooker’s remark, scrawled in the margin of his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, complain of the deadliness of the passion for certainty. The conviction of the rightness of one’s beliefs is the source of a great deal of wickedness and cruelty, and a very common form of hard-heartedness.

Today, the Gospel gives an account of Jesus’ teaching on a particularly ugly kind of hard-heartedness: the kind that enlists the Divine Majesty in the oppression of the weak. The matter of divorce and remarriage is an excellent example of how this is done, and of the hypocrisy of hard-hearted literalism. The law permitting divorce, Jesus says, was given by Moses as a concession to human hard-heartedness. A man who tired of his wife could simply throw her out, at which point she was at the mercy of her relatives, she became a “public woman,” or she died. It was to affirm the dignity and humanity of women that Jesus compared remarriage after divorce to adultery. The letter of the law permitted it, but in His time, it was almost always oppressive.

Scriptural literalism and hard-heartedness go together. Today, literalism forgets what lay beneath Jesus’ teaching, and would impose it as a universal law in a very different context. In our own time, strict obedience to the letter of the scripture would actually violate the spirit of Jesus’ command. But literalism cannot understand that, because it is hard-hearted. If this clear teaching is to be abandoned, then the illusory religious certitude would collapse, and that would be intolerable.

I think this kind of desperate ~ and desperately misguided ~ hard-heartedness is behind much of “what greatly troubles this present age,” our own age of the Iraq calamity, of the removal of all restraint on greed, of the pathological fear of free women and gay people, of the metastasis of our prisons, of our love of the death penalty and torture, and of the newly-legal presidential gulag and death-squads. The Latin American murderers of a generation ago at least had some shame: they denied they were doing it, and never codified their assassinations as Congress did last week! But Yankee leaders are more hard-hearted than they were, because they actually believe that they are righteous. And the general population is terrified, and the more frightened we become, the more hard-hearted.

But real righteousness is not hard-hearted. It depends not on religious certainty or the letter of scripture. The just are those whose hearts of stone God has replaced with hearts of flesh ~ hearts undefended against ravishment by the Holy Spirit, Who alone gives life, vulnerable hearts that can be wounded and wounded repeatedly, hearts whose very wounds open them to penetration by joy and to ultimate union with the Beloved.