The Lost Sheep

"What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?
I beseech you, do not torment me."

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

This morning I want to tell you the story of Jesus and His love. As He and the Father are One, then it is also the story of the Father and His never-failing love. "I, I Am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake, and I will not remember your sins" (Isa 43:25) He is wont to cry out.

As we find Jesus in the Gospels this morning He is in the posture of a wandering Aramean. He has done something He rarely does. He has left the boundaries of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Other first-century Jews may see the Levant as a series of Roman Provinces. Still others may simply see Judah, the only tribe still intact in terms of its land, and beyond them the rag-tag peoples to the north whom they deride as scarcely being Jews at all. But the map within Jesus, through which He sees a lasting geography, is the map of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. For the Twelve Tribes of Israel it remains His intention to restore. When He sends the Twelve Disciples, after all, He says

"Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans,
but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And preach
as you go, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand.'" (Mt 10:5-6)

Why now? Why does God send His Son at this particular point in history? The answer to this great question, "Why does the Advent of Christ happen when it happens?" might be answered in several ways. But for our purposes this morning, God's Son enters history because the history of the Jewish lifeworld is about to end. In a few short years, Judea will be utterly destroyed. The Temple will be razed to the ground never to be rebuilt. And all Jews will either be killed or driven to the road of refugee flight. All Jews are about to assume the posture of a wandering Aramean.

To say this in another way, the patient is on his deathbed, and the physician (Mk 2:17) has arrived. The high priest has come to hear the sick man's confession while there is still time.

The Son of the Most High God surely knows what every hospital chaplain learns: that severe illness and a patient at the point of death make the heart wonderfully tender. What is more, the ministry of John the Forerunner was carried out specifically to make all hearts tender. For he had embarked upon the unheard of ministry of conversion through repentance. St. Peter writes that the effect of it was like a Noah's Flood, involving everyone wherever he preached.

Moreover, the Son of God dwells with His people at a pivotal moment, the hinge point between two of the greatest empires in human history. Alexander the Great about three centuries before Jesus' birth had conquered the known world and had Hellenized it. The world spoke Greek, read Greek literature and philosophy (Aristotle had been Alexander's tutor), and were joined in a common worldview. Jesus spoke Greek. The Apostles spoke Greek. St. Paul spoke Greek. Whenever they quote from the Holy Scriptures, it is not from the Hebrew Bible but rather from the Greek translation. The Scriptures treat it as remarkable when St. Paul speaks in Hebrew (Acts 21:40), for it is the exception, not the rule. How in the world would people beyond Judea or Samaria know Hebrew — an obscure Semitic, you might say Arabian, language from the point of view of Asia Minor or Southern Europe. Following the Advent of Christ, the Roman Empire will fill Alexander's world with their Imperium and then expand it. The world has been prepared for evangelization: one language, a system of roads that will open the way to every city, and well-plied trade routes ... and, we might say, well regulated by a constant constabulary, the vast legions of the Roman Empire.

Today, standing at this momentous point, Jesus, the wandering Aramean, encounters a people, the last remnant of the Twelve Tribes, about to be scattered forever to the four winds. They graphically are separated from God. They do not merely lapse into eating pork now and then. They cultivate swine by the thousands. They do not keep God's ways. Nonetheless, they are made in God's image, and they learn what every human learns: that they are incommensurately valuable "real estate" contested by demons and angels, each desiring to claim them, to dwell within them, and to be their guiding spirit.

The Gaderene demoniac, in particular, has been living a life of cruel push-and-pull, thrashing and in chains. His heart is tender. He is ready to be cleansed of his sins, which are signified by a life given over to possession.

Cleansed of his sins. He has given his life over to possession Did I just imply that consenting to sin opens the door to possession or that confession and absolution, in fact, constitute an exorcism of demons? Yes, that is precisely what I am saying. When we open the door to grave sin, we make ourselves available to the demons who tempt us. When we habituate ourselves to grave sin, we become the dwelling place of those same demons. This is the nature of spiritual life: either God dwells in us or demons will. There is no neutral position. And nature abhors a vacuum.

May I say one thing more on this subject? The process of coming to goodness, by the grace of God, and then being restored to goodness whenever it is lost through sin is the Church.

What exactly takes place when Jesus founds the Church?

He breathed on them, and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit.
If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain
the sins of any, they are retained" (Jn 20:22-23)

That is, the entire founding of the Church consists in two things: baptism, which is our receiving of the Holy Spirit, and then re-baptism through confession and absolution. Two. Again and again and again and again ... as may needs be. For to be spotless at the end of our life, whenever it may come, is the point of life, for it equates to the Kingdom of Heaven for us. This is the process known as theosis: to become less and less creatures of clay and more and more creatures of divine Heaven.

What are we to do with St. Luke's depiction of Pentecost? Please consider the reflections, The Beloved Disciple & the Holy Painter and I Am with You as possible ways of understanding this apparent, but not real, contradiction.

Why does Jesus appoint the Apostles and their heirs, their descendants, the bishops, to be the custodian of this very intimate office of absolution from sin? After all, He could have said, "And whenever you fall into sin, pray to Me in private ... " He could have said that. But He did not. The truth about the human heart is this: when we must look a man in the eye and say, "I have not lived the life that others believe I have lived" and then depict in detail the very things you had prayed might never, ever be revealed, this is the path to humiliation and thence to genuine contrition and real regret. Tears will flow on this occasion ... as they would not if the Lord had not given this sacramental office to humans face-to-face with other humans.

As the Advent of Christ arrives to this symbolic culmination point in Aram, God's people are pervasively separated from God. They are dominantly possessed by demons, who (by the way) are the most faithful sentient beings in the Gospels, for they never fail to reverence Jesus as Son of the Most High God. That is, they regularly attest the very thing that God's people will not. A purpose of the Advent of Christ is to recognize God dwelling with us. And this the people will not do.

Significantly, Jesus asks the demoniac his identity: Who are you?! "What is your name?" (Lu 8:30). The reply comes back, "Legion, for we are many."

Now, we today use the word legion in just this way. If someone were to ask me about the wild boars and sows we drive away from our Turmeric fields, I might tell them, "They are legion, beyond counting!" But this passage, first found in St. Mark's Gospel, is the origin of this meaning of the word legion. When Jesus hears this declaration from the demoniac, it means just what it says, "a Roman legion" — 10 cohorts, 5,000 men.

What does Jesus see when he looks at this man? What do we see? First, he is unclothed. Now, that is striking among the modest Jews. Where does he live? Among tombs. Unclothed? Living among the tombs? Is this not a man being prepared, or about to be prepared, for his burial?

He is an occupied territory, occupied by a legion, we learn. He is a man at the point of death, we see. He is in his very person the Lost Sheep of Israel on the eve of their destruction, now alone with God and offering a most sincere heart and soul to be healed and restored to godliness, which is then granted.

What we have before us today is an ideal. Through this little allegory, we are shown the positive outcome of the Advent of Christ. In this man, the Twelve Tribes, at least allegorically, are restored.

And Jesus departs from Aram intending to reveal His divine identity through acts of healing and restoration. God, you see, has come to dwell with His people and bring them home to their own, original Land of Promise. But will they come? Will they kneel down and humbly accept the cleansing power of His exorcism? Will they consent to renew their bonds of love as God's Twelve Tribes and return to God, doing His commandments and walking in His holy ways?

We know how the story will turn out. They will not. Indeed, they will conspire against the Son and Heir, murdering Him and attempting to take the Vineyard for themselves. Like the angels who arrogated to seize Heaven, a dark echo is sounded in Jerusalem. But that is another story for another time and having a different outcome. Today, it is enough to see the restoration of one lost man and to see how the restoration of the Twelve Tribes might have gone.

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