BACK TO REALITY - LIFE SINCE 9/11
by Bishop David Chislett SSC

Senseless violence, destruction and calculated loss of human life. Whichever way you look at them, the events of Tuesday 11th September bring us back to reality. They cause us to question our values and our motives, together with the values and motives of others.

In armchair comfort we have viewed the world's misery on our television screens so often that we are anaesthetised to the horrors many people experience every day. To our shame, images of starving children and dying babies have lost their power to move us. For decades now we have not even raised an eyebrow at footage of violence in Northern Ireland and the Holy Land. And how imperceptibly have tens of thousands perished as victims of terrorism in the Middle East while we got on with our lives or at least poured the next drink.

But 11th September changed all that. The suicide bombing of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon was a planned attack, taking seven thousand lives at once. It startled us. Waves of grief and disbelief have broken over the whole world. Australians were among those who perished on that day, and one of our parish families is bereaved as a result.

A REALISTIC VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
How could such a terrible thing happen?

In fact, we ought to be surprised that we are surprised! If we are really honest, we will admit that the evil we see manifest in human history and in current events is the very evil with which we struggle deep in our own hearts. Some of us are better at concealing this evil than others; some of us manage to delude ourselves into believing that we have just about conquered our weaknesses, our pride, our selfishness, and our lack of concern for others to the point where we even feel justified in the time and energy we spend judging the people around us.

We forget the words of the prophet Jeremiah who observes that the human heart - your heart as well as mine - "is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt" (Jeremiah 17:1).

We know that Jeremiah speaks the truth. Yet we also know that having been created "in God's image" (Genesis 1:26), we dream of better things. We have a longing for truth, love, freedom and beauty. We experience at the heart of our being an instinctive yearning for transcendence. Furthermore, we are sometimes motivated to extraordinary acts of sacrifice born of a genuine desire for justice and peace.

This is the nobility of human nature, which, though demonstrably flawed (in Christian language we call this "original sin"), seems to have a capacity for godliness. Hence men and women of every culture and place wander aimlessly with a haunting sense of incompleteness until they learn how to get into a right relationship with God.

The mystery of humanity made in the image of God, with traces of that image remaining, though marred by sin, is captured by Fr Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy who ministered to the troops in World War 1 and was known as "Woodbine Willie":

"I'm a man, and man's a mixture,
Right up from 'is very birth,
There's part of 'im comes from 'eaven,
And part of 'im comes from earth.
There's summat as draws 'im upwards,
And summat as drags 'im duhn,
And the consekence is that 'e wobbles
Twixt muck and a golden crown."

Whether we like to admit it or not, this "summat as drags 'im down" is our ancient and deep seated rebellion against God, born of pride and the kind of self-sufficiency that causes us to assert (and almost believe) that we can run our lives and our world perfectly well on our own.

We don't have to be very clever to see that eventually, having pushed God and his love away from us, we end up in a spiritual wasteland, our lives and communities destroyed as we progressively give in to our baser desires and more selfish instincts.

THE COMING OF JESUS
Yet God in his unending love for us has done something about our predicament. He sent his Son Jesus into this world with the same human nature as ours, to become vulnerable, to be tempted, to experience our weakness, to bridge the gap that had opened up between us and himself, in short, to restore our relationship with the Father and heal our nature of the wounds it had suffered from our inherited rebelliousness.

Jesus, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Lord of glory, came into this world, which we had managed to turn into the gutter of the universe. He came as one of us. He shared our life. He trod our paths. He touched ordinary people like you and me with his healing love and forgiveness, giving us a new sense of purpose and meaning. In the end he was raised up on the Cross, suspended between heaven and earth as the ultimate sign of love, his arms outstretched as if to embrace eternally all the suffering and wounded children of God.

For two thousand years, the greatest minds of our culture have tried to plumb the depths of meaning found in the New Testament's teaching on the Cross. There is the idea that the Cross was a battleground where Jesus defeated the powers of evil. Or the notion that the death of Jesus is a ransom which frees us from our sins. Or the death of Jesus on the Cross as the great revelation of God's love that overwhelms our hearts into responding to him. Then there is the Cross as an example of patient and undeserved suffering for us to follow.

The truth is that each of these different ways of understanding the Cross can be found in the New Testament. They belong together.

JESUS - OUR SUBSTITUTE
But there's another way we can look at the Cross - many would say the main way. This is the early Church's teaching that Jesus died as our substitute, accepting the punishment due to us for our disastrous rebellion against God.

This ancient teaching is embedded in the Canon of our Prayer Book Mass which describes the death of Jesus as ". . . a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world" , echoing the teaching of S. Paul, who said that "for our sake he [the Father] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (Romans 2:21).

In his book God is not Angry, the English Dominican scholar, Fr. Ian Petit takes us into the depth of this mystery. Having shown us how we as guilty sinners have removed ourselves from the relationship with God for which we were created, he explains what God in his amazing love has done to set us free:

"Jesus did not simply pretend to be incapable of being in God's presence; rather, he took our sins on himself at the crucifixion and actually experienced banishment . . . Putting it in blunt language, Jesus consented to stand in front of his beloved Father besmirched with our sins and receive from him our sentence. The consequence of sin is more than physical death; it is a wounding that separates us from the Father."

In Mysterium Paschale, the Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar takes this theme even further when he says:

"Jesus does not only accept the . . . mortal destiny of Adam, He also, quite expressly, carries the sins of the human race and, with those sins, the 'second death' of God-abandonment."

von Balthasar goes on to say that this "is not an anonymous destiny that he obeys, but the person of the Father."

The horror of September 11 and the horror of so many other atrocities that have happened in recent history are mirrored in the horror of the Cross. In the words of the old hymn, the Cross is the "trysting place where heaven's love and heaven's justice meet".

This is an affront to that old fashioned liberal theology which plays down the supernatural, and uses the Christian faith as a collection of metaphors to strengthen us as we try to make the earth into a heaven by our own efforts - the kind of whimpish theology that now seems to be the official belief of Anglicanism in many places. It was this theology that H. Richard Niebuhr caricatured when he wrote:

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross."

THAT'S GOD ON THE CROSS
From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is more realistic about human nature, more aware of the horrific dimensions of sin, and more cognisant of the mysterious demand for justice that seems to be written into the fabric of our being. It tells us that Joseph was to name Mary's son Jesus, because he would "save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:21). In Egypt, the Passover lamb had borne people's sins. But now, according to S. John's Gospel, Jesus is "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (Jn 1:29).

Rick Ritchie puts it like this:

"When I was younger, a Roman Catholic friend and I were paging through my family Bible, a Bible that contained Rembrandt's Biblical paintings. When we reached the painting of the crucifixion my friend said, "That's God," pointing to Jesus. I, thinking myself to be better taught, said "No, that's his Son." My Roman Catholic friend had been taught the heart of the matter better than I. He knew that God saves. What little I knew did involve the Father sending his Son on our behalf, but I did not grasp that it was God the Son who was sent.

"Even when I later became aware that Jesus was God, this point did not sink in quickly. It might have if my pastors and Sunday school teachers had shown us Rembrandt pictures or crucifixes and said "That is God." It takes so little. I hope my readers take the time to tell their children and Sunday school students that God is the one on the Cross."

On Holy Saturday 1999, I picked up the Weekend Australian and read with interest the collection of quotes by well-known Australian Church leaders purporting to tell us what Easter was all about. Some were almost OK. Others missed the mark. The only one to really hit the nail on the head was Archbishop George Pell, who said that Easter was:

". . . a promise that love will have the last word, that goodness will prevail, and the scales of justice will balance out across eternity".

Love and justice. We cry out for love. And in Jesus we discover that we are loved with an everlasting love. But we also cry out for justice - as we know from the way the vast majority of people feel following the terrorist attacks.

The Christian Faith assures us that because of what Jesus endured on the Cross there is atonement for the foulest sin, the most destructive deed. "O trysting place where heaven's love and heaven's justice meet".

von Balthasar shows just how central this theme is in the New Testament:

"The injustice is not cleared away by half-measures and compromises, but by drastic measures which make a clean sweep of it, so that all the world's injustice is consumed by the total wrath of God, that the total righteousness of God may be accessible to the sinner. That is the Gospel according to Paul who sees the fulfilment of the directional meaning of the entire Old Testament in the Cross and Resurrection of Christ . . . God, as the man Christ, takes upon himself the totality of 'Adam's' guilt (Romans 5:15-21) in order that, as the 'bodily' incorporation of sin and enmity (2 Corinthians 5:21, Ephesians 2:14), he might be 'handed over' (Romans 8:3), and as the Life of God, which died in God-forsakenness (Romans 4:25) and was buried, to be divinely 'raised for our justification' (Romans 4:25). That is not myth, but the central biblical message and, where Christ's Cross is concerned, it must not be rendered innocuous as though the Crucified, in undisturbed union with God, had prayed the Psalms and died in the peace of God."

RESPONDING TO WHAT GOD HAS DONE
Of course, it is for us to appropriate for ourselves by faith and baptism the wonderful freedom from guilt that Jesus purchased for us. It is for us to make sure that we continue living by faith in the reality of divine forgiveness each day of our lives.

Imagine that a distant relative you didn't even know left you an inheritance of five million dollars. Unless somebody seeks you out and tells you about this amazing gift it would make absolutely no difference to you - you might well continue to live in poverty. Imagine having access to that amount of wealth and not knowing it. That's what the preaching of the Gospel is for - to make sure that everyone everywhere knows what God has given to us through the Cross.

Once we have heard about our inheritance we have to go to the solicitor's office, prove our identity and claim what is ours. In other words, we take whatever steps are necessary in order to actively "receive" it.

"Receiving" or "claiming" God's gift means to live in the knowledge and assurance of what he did for us on the Cross of Calvary. We call it "living by faith". The problem is that many people - and Church people at that! - don't seem to know that this gift is already theirs, just waiting to be claimed. They imagine it is something to be "earned". So, whatever else they might believe about the Christian Faith, their day to day lives are not much different to the lives of those who believe nothing.

We respond to God's love in Jesus by deciding to trust him with our lives. We receive his free gift of forgiveness, and then live in new and creative relationships with him and with our Christian brothers and sisters. We meet together to encourage one another to live the life of faith, to praise and worship our God, and to receive his love through the sacraments he has appointed.

This was beautifully expressed by Father James Murray who, in a sermon preached at the First Communion of newly confirmed teenagers some years ago, related the substitutionary death of Jesus to his presence in the Blessed Sacrament of Holy Communion:

"I do not think you will ever forget this day, the first time you received the Blessed Sacrament. Your eyes will see the pure white Bread we call the Host.' It is called the 'Host' because Jesus was the whole world's Victim. 'Hostia' in the Latin language means someone who is singled out for punishment: a victim. You will remember how we find the date of our Lord's death. We say it in the Creed - 'He suffered under Pontius Pilate', and Pontius Pilate was the Roman Governor, and he gives us a date for our Lord's death.

"But Jesus was everybody's Victim. He was the Victim of the whole human race . . . As he looked down, he saw his Mother and his friends, but he also heard the cries of hatred against him, and anyone speaking Latin would have said he was the 'Hostia', the hostage, the Victim of everyone's sin.

"He was paying for our salvation. He was paying for mine. He was paying for yours. That is why we say we are sorry when we come, and why we ask for forgiveness.

"But he rose from that awful death, and the first thing he did at the end of the first day of his risen life was to do what we are doing here this morning. He took the pure white bread, gave thanks and broke it, and in an ordinary house in the little town of Emmaus, two of his sad and sorrowful friends recognised him in the way he broke the bread, the way you always will from this first time on."

As we live through the aftermath of the acts of terrorism that stopped us in our tracks on 11th September we certainly have a renewed sense of evil in the world. As I have said, it is the very same evil that lurks in your heart and mine. So, we need to read God's Word prayerfully and reflectively, allowing ourselves to be drawn to the foot of that Cross on Calvary's hill where we can gaze in wonderment at what God in his love has done to deal with evil and to repair our relationship with him.

We may feel powerless to do anything about the evil "out there" (although we should do what is possible); but we can certainly confess our sins and appropriate the forgiveness and restoration that God in his great love has provided for us. We do this ritually in the words of the Mass each Sunday, but we need to renew our "life of faith" every day. Otherwise we will lose sight of Jesus as the one who set us free by paying the penalty for our sins.

When that happens we slip back into seeing Jesus as the one who taught us how to strive for perfection in order to enter heaven. We become so preoccupied with being virtuous that we either become discouraged by our failures or bloated with spiritual pride at our imagined success. Either way, we cease to live in the freedom that only comes through trusting Jesus and what he did on the Cross.

To "live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20) is the only way there is to draw on the abundant life he offers us. It is the only way we can be free deep within from the guilt of our sin - free to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness all the days of our life.

Published in the ALL SAINTS' GAZETTE, November 2001