Saturday, May 17, 2014
Pentecost 2 Proper 5B June 10, 2012 ~ New Garments
Pentecost II
June 10, 2012
Christ Church, Bayfield
I was afraid, because I was naked…
…if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from
God, a house not made with hands…
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
The
Gospel today tells us of Jesus' combat with evil, life against death, expressed
metaphorically as a combat with an evil spirit. Jesus has come to undo the
works of the devil, the evil one, the mystery of iniquity, whatever it was that
happened to Adam and Eve in that first story. Jesus work is not entirely out of
the blue, either. God had been working for endless ages to bring humanity to
the point at which Jesus could do His work.
Let's
think of the Redemption as a process. Not an instantaneous event, but a continuous
series of events. Let's also recognize that this process is what is important
about the story of the Fall. We hear about the beginning of that process of
Redemption in today’s first reading. Notice the first thing that Adam says when
God asks him why he was hiding "I was afraid… I was afraid because I was
naked." God asks him how he knew that he was naked and then, without
waiting for an answer, deduces that Adam and Eve must have eaten of the forbidden
fruit. But why would the knowledge of good and evil make you ashamed to be
naked in front of God and to be afraid? There's something underneath the
surface meaning of this. What is this nakedness that Adam and Eve suddenly realized
was their condition? How is it related to the knowledge of good and evil?
First
of all, it may help to remember that "knowledge" means a lot more
than simply recognition. Knowledge of good and evil isn't simply the ability to
tell the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, and it's not just
about disobedience to divine command. Knowledge of good and evil means a
thoroughgoing awareness of them, and an intimate relationship with good and
evil. The human beings had come to the conscious awareness that there was such
a thing as good and evil in the world, and as God had told Adam and Eve, that
kind of consciousness goes hand-in-hand with the awareness that they were
mortal, the certainty that they were going to die: on the day you eat… you
shall surely die — you will be sure that you will die. But look what happens next, as the story
continues in a part we didn't read today.
The Lord God
made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
In
other words God immediately sets to work to make provision for our nakedness,
our vulnerability, our awareness of death, and our fear of it, by providing
Garments not made with hands. God
still loves us. And this isn't the end of the story but just the beginning of
the process of redemption. Maybe what we
traditionally call "the Fall” was really a necessary part of becoming
human, of creation becoming conscious of itself, of living into the image of
God. No less an authority Than St. Augustine of Hippo seem to think so. He
called the Fall "happy"! O
Felix Culpa, “O happy fault, that merited such a Redeemer.” This Redemption
in the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the New Adam, was the
culmination of a process of divine activity that began when God fashioned
clothes of animal skin for the naked Adam and Eve: when God set about to take
away the terror that went along with the awareness of mortality, of fashioning
what St. Paul called a house not made with hands.
The
“Day” in which we live – our era of consciousness – is still the day of certain
death. But we meet here today, on Sunday, the first day of the week, the first
day of creation, to celebrate the mystical truth that God has changed this Day
of death — the era in which we “will surely
die” — into the day of Resurrection — The Eighth Day of the Week. The EIGHTH
Day of Creation. Now, an ordinary week has seven days, and then the next week
starts over again, in endless cycles. To speak of an Eighth Day of the week is
a paradoxical. And that is the point. The Eighth Day of the Week is a time
outside of time. The day whereon eternity and time overlap.
This
season after Pentecost, the season in which we live, in which the Holy Spirit
fills the world, refers not only to our annual liturgical cycle, but also our
historical era – the time after Pentecost, in which we are called to proclaim
to the ends of the cosmos the Good News that the Reign of God has replaced the
reign of death. In the words of one of our Eucharistic prayers, this Eighth Day
of Creation, this season after Pentecost, is the time in which we are called
"to complete His work of Redemption, and to bring to fulfillment the
sanctification of all."
The
six days of creation correspond — remarkably closely one might add — to the eras
of billions of years from the Big Bang (“let there be light”) until now. The seventh
day, the holy Sabbath, upon which God rested from His labors, corresponds to Holy
Saturday in which the Godman, having bound the “Strong Man” by His Victory on
Calvary, took a little siesta in the House of the strongman — death — whom He
had bound and whose house He had despoiled. Then on Sunday, creation woke up
new. The holy women who “came to the Tomb very early on the first day of the week, before the sun
had risen, while it was yet dark”, encountered at that empty Tomb, not the dawn
of the first day of the week, but the Dawn of what the ancient Fathers and
Mothers of the Church called the Eighth Day of Creation, our Day in which God is
bringing to fulfillment the sanctification of all.
The
good news of this Dawn is too good to be true. Maybe that's the significance of
exorcism — why exorcism was so prominent in the Gospel accounts of Jesus'
ministry. It is not so much individual liberation from demonic possession, in
the sense of that old movie, as it is undoing the mysterious forces that seem
to impel us all to embrace our consciousness of death as the ultimate reality:
in other words, to worship death if it were God. Jesus cast out our fear
because we are naked, our inability to hope that this "day in which we
surely die" is also — at the very same time — the Eighth Day of Creation,
the Day of Resurrection. Satan means “adversary”, the prosecuting attorney, the
little voice inside every single one of us that tells us that death is the end
of our story and that everything else is hokum — wishful thinking. This is what
Jesus – Perfect Love – casts out. Jesus cast out our anxiety: the fear we know
because we are naked.
So,
our Day is no longer only the Day in which we will surely die, it is also the
Day of Resurrection, in which — O Happy
Fault! — our last state is better than our first: we are actually better off
than before the Fall, because death no longer has dominion over us. Our
awareness of the certainty of our own death is overcome by the new awareness
that we will live forever. We need no longer fear because we are naked. Our
fear has been cast out by the incarnate Love of God, Who sews for us new
garments, not made by hands.
