"In the Company of God"

Let us then with confidence draw near
to ... receive mercy and find grace ...

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Our God's nature is relationship. He is our Father. He has adopted us. In that sense Jesus is our brother as He is also our Sovereign and Lord. Yes, God is Almighty. He is All-knowing and All-seeing. He is Everlasting and Eternal. His powers are far beyond ours .... if we may use the word "powers" by comparison. Yet, He has committed Himself to suspend His absolute dominion where the individual lives of His children are concerned. This is one of many ways in which the spirit of fatherhood is revealed. Like unto a great general, with mighty armies under his command, He is gentle and patient and caretaking in his home. Only his children and wife are able to know this dimension of his soul.

From another perspective, God is unlike the hovering parents of recent decades or the domineering mothers and fathers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, He will not run our lives. His respect for our particular dignities and prerogatives is too great, and His integrity and honor are too complete. What is more, He has bestowed on His children the magnificent gift of freedom, and He will not abridge this gift by wresting control from us. Yes, He has placed a kind of gyroscope within us, which sets off alarms when we veer off-course. But if we wish to remain off-course, He will let us. He will even permit the alarms of conscience, once so loud clear in our youth, to become muted.

This gift of freedom is what makes us what we are, which is nearly gods. To borrow Hamlet's words,

"What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty,
In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel,
In apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.

My bishop reminded me the day before my ordination that not even angels are accorded the honor to mediate in the Real Presence of the Lord at the Altar. Yes, He loves us, each one of us, and this is the secret, which lies at the heart of our Creation, the creation of all things really: His love. Our God's nature is relationship, which is the inexorable, irresistible force that proceeds from love. For love's nature takes over the whole person, driving one forward to give love and receive it. Every heart that has ever beat on this earth knows this, has experienced it. Love is an all-encompassing force that fills the mind and heart and soul with its purposes. And it is this love that is the secret of the Creation: why God created angels and archangels, why He created us, and why He begot Himself in His Son, why the Holy Spirit that proceeds from Him. And it is why God has adopted us as His children. For love will have it no other way.

Even the ancient pagans knew this sacred dimension of adoption. In ancient Rome the ultimate statement of high regard and admiration for a young person was adoption. Whereas we today might decide to mentor a promising young person, a great Roman family would adopt such a person. Adoption means family, and family is the ultimate expression of love.

Like humans, the angels have also received this gift of freedom. For what is love without freedom? What might love be without freedom but a mockery and a charade? — a sham brought about either through subjugation, such as the love for a tyrant, or through designs to exploit, such as the love of a defrauding criminal, a con-woman or con-man. Only freedom might distill that pure, divine essence which is the free gift of love, proceeding out of us like the force of the sea — unstoppable, overwhelming, pristine, and only good. Love is no love without the freedom to give and to receive it.

History records that humans have freely denied God the love due Him. And so have angels, whose denial of love is the cause of evil in the world. Indeed, Pope St. John Paul II defined evil, or Hell, as the denial of God, the life lived forever without God. And life without God descends into bitterness and adamantine hatred, like unto the furious hatred of Lucifer and the other fallen angels. Their Hellish home, Pandemonium (which means "all demons"), is an eternal chaos of hatred, a hatred that restlessly and compulsively seeks victims, a ravening "lion [who] walketh about, seeking whom he may devour" (1 Peter 5:8). The refusal of God's love is the ultimate sin. Many have interpreted Jesus' words concerning the unpardonable sin (Mark 3:28-30) to signify rejection of God. Even frail, human logic will demonstrate that the refusal of God translates into eternal life without Him, which is eternal death.

The rejection of God and His ways is an all-encompassing thing. For alienation from God inevitably means alienation from others. Our love relationships with others is a sign of, and a participation in, the love of God. This is why the Second Great Commandment is like unto the First. Alienated from God, alienated from others, we ultimately find ourselves alienated from ourselves. And we no longer can take our spiritual pleasure and rest dwelling at peace in our souls. We are left to dwell alone in the interior chaos of our own narratives and lies, which is the atmosphere of Hell. Who has not seen this grotesque in the course of common life?

Three times our God, whose very nature and element are shared love, chose to dwell with His people. The first time, humanity was in its youth still living at home, we might say. Eve, perceiving that she was created to be like her Father in certain respects, wanted more of what He had, wanted to be her own god. This is why Pride, Satan's sin, is the first of the Seven Deadly Sins. When Adam sees the eaten apple of her narcissism and consequent refusal of God, He is horrified, yet he is unwilling to lose the companionship of Eve. Seeing that his choice is either obedience to God, which is an office of true love, or a continued companionship with Eve, He rejects God. He rejects the highest love in order to have the lowest, which is to remain in sinful company for the sake of his own pleasure.

When Adam and Eve enter into this new life, apart from God, a new mystery of the human psyche is revealed, which is the compulsion to blame others. First, Adam rejects his own responsibility to Eve: why was she left unprotected from the Evil One? where was Adam in her hour of need? Then, Adam shifts the blames onto Eve: "'the woman gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.'" Finally, he blames God for their sins: "'The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree'" (Gen 3:12).

The second time God dwells in the company of His people, He encounters the same outcome. Rather than gratitude for His great gift of love and obedience to His commandments, which are the fulfillment of His loving care for us, the people He leads through wilderness devolve into rebellion and orgy. And when they find themselves most hard pressed, they blame God in the person of His representative, Moses: "'Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt ... for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.'" As so often happens, blame is exaggerated and points recklessly in every direction.

The third time God dwells with His people, He appears, as never before — as a human: mortal, vulnerable, and in need of protection. His need of love and faithfulness becomes a life-and-death matter ... for Him. Our loyalty to Him, our self-sacrificing love now become paramount. As Isaiah reminds us in our readings today, the awesome power of God has been set aside, and a whole new dynamic takes its place. He Who was Almighty now is weak and lowly:

He had no form or comeliness that we should look at Him,
and no beauty that we should desire Him.
He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as One from Whom men hide their faces
He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.

In this man, we are offered the opportunity of untainted love, selfless love. There is no possibility of subjugation under Him. We are entirely free of self-interest, for who remains to grant us favor? Here in this new situation we enter the company of God in a locus of pure love, of compassion, of unsullied goodness. If God made us in order to grow into a certain nobility in the fullness of freedom, if He made us that we might resemble Himself more and more, then now He has surely placed Himself in mortal danger, has hazarded all in human terms, has even layed down His life, that we might reach deep into ourselves and claim this nobility.

In the end, the range of all human possibility reduces to a single pair of opposite choices: we might lie and betray and blame others when accusation comes to near to us. Or we might stand fast in our integrity, love in our faithfulness, and sacrifice ourselves when a sacrifice is required .... out of our love for Him.

In Jesus of Nazareth, God pours His Infinite and All-powerful Being into the narrow confines of broken humanity. His human heart longs for love and acceptance ... as ours do. "Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken." Yet, He is able to peer out through the cracked clay of the human hovel He willingly entered at His birth but with the perfect eyes of God. He is able to know grief and sorrow and rejection with an exquisite sensitivity that is far beyond our brutish minds ever to know. "Was ever grief like mine?" the Crucified Christ asks on Good Friday. And the answer surely is, "No. Never."

He might yet call glittering hosts of warrior angels to come to His aid, but He does not. Instead, He chooses to dwell with His people — to go where they have gone and, in the end, to die where they will die, in this place of mortality and futile dust. He chooses to die as a homeless, deserted beggar without a grave. And though He has been betrayed over and over and over again since the time that He made us, and though in His broken human heart He can detect that very human impulse to blame, He does not blame. Instead, "He never said a mumblin' word" .... except for one: "I forgive."

And when He dies, even there He chooses relationship, a company of three. This little company represents the essence of all human freedom from God's perspective. For on Jesus' left is one who chooses to reject God unto the end, and therefore eternally. On His right is one who chooses to repent of his selfish and angry mind and to beg God that He might dwell with Him forever. This forever is the undying place of love. It is what God had pictured when first He made us. And it is His dying prayer as He returns to that place where only love might dwell: in goodly company and godly.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.