Whenever we hear something that describes God as behaving like a man, we have to remember that this can only be a metaphor. God is not like us, even if we are in some ways a bit like God; so the image of God we are being presented with is meant to make us think, not for us to take literally. You can see and hear me giving this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wph6QIt7YuQ
This is particularly the case if God is being presented to us in a way that contradicts what we are taught about God by Jesus; and our 2nd Reading today (Hebrews 12:5-7.11-13) is such a case. Jesus makes it clear in at least two places in the Gospels that God does not pick out bad people and punish them. Instead, Jesus teaches that God (Matt 5:45) “Causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” and in another place (Luke 13:2-5) he says “Do you think…. those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
So this image of God being like a stern parent, who trains his children by punishing them, cannot, in my view, be read to describe what God is actually like; and if this is the case we have to look at a different way of working out what the writer is getting at. I think we’ll get help here if we look at what most suffering is for. The point is that we all do suffer in one way or another; indeed, feeling pain in our body is part of the way we identify that something is wrong with us so hopefully it can be put right. The Doctor, who is trying to work out what that is, will ask us, “Where precisely is the pain?” It’s also true that we suffer if we do something stupid. We learn to avoid fire by getting too near and burning ourselves. Children learn to be more careful how they run, by tripping over and grazing their knee. Or to give a couple of rather more extreme examples, we all know not to get too near to the edge of a cliff, because if we fall off we may kill ourselves; and most people realise by now that if we carry on burning fossil fuels then we will get catastrophic climate change. So, although God isn’t like a stern parent punishing us, he has certainly created a world where what we do can have serious consequences that we should learn from.
I’m sure you’ve noticed, as I have, that many people nowadays seemed to have banned words like “problems” or “difficulties”, and instead talk now of “challenges” and “learning experiences.” Now although I get irritated by this, perhaps I shouldn’t, because this is surely the same point that the writer of our 2nd Reading is trying to get at. He’s telling people not to spend their time moaning about how tough things are. Instead, they must learn from such things; or to use the modern way of speaking, they must see their troubles as “learning experiences”. It’s worth remembering too from last week’s Reading that he has just given them a whole list of famous people from the past who faced all sorts of difficulties, and still put their faith in God. So he’s telling us not to be such wimps when we face troubles, and indeed he ends up almost shouting at his listeners, to “Hold up your limp arms and steady your trembling knees” And why should we do this? Well, we’ll hear that in our 2nd Reading next Sunday, when he reminds them and us that here at Mass, God is with us. In his words, we “Have come to God himself, the supreme Judge, and been placed with spirits of the saints who have been made perfect; and to Jesus, the mediator who brings a new covenant and a blood for purification which pleads more insistently than Abel’s.”
I sometimes get people saying to me “But why is there so much suffering in the world?”. Now it is true that some suffering seems to have no obvious reason to it, and it is hard to understand such things as learning experiences; but when we think of the suffering I’ve just described – the burnt hand or the grazed knee etc – we need to ask what the world would be like if such things didn’t happen – if I could fall off a cliff and not get hurt when I hit the ground, if I could drop a bomb on a city and no-one would get killed, if I could pollute the world with fossil fuels and the climate wouldn’t change. Thinking of it in this way, we can see why God has created a Universe where there are consequences to be learnt from. But of course, because of this we can also say that, if I harness fire I can create electricity, if I understand gravity I can build a bridge, if I look after the environment then the world will be more beautiful.
I want to finish with a word about our Gospel (Luke 13:22-30) as it reminds us that Jesus also talks about God as if he were a man. Today he gives us an image of God as “The master of the house” who locks the door against some wicked people and will not let them in. You might well say to me “Look, Jesus does teach us that God punishes the wicked. Here’s a prime example.” It’s puzzling isn’t it? In one place Jesus suggests that God loves everyone, and here he appears to say that he doesn’t. To answer this, let’s go back for a moment to the example I gave earlier, for when he tells us of those poor people who suffered when the wall fell on them. He points out that they were not more guilty than anyone else. What he is doing here, and in many other places, is opposing the idea that some people are good and other people are bad. Instead he says “Unless you repent, you too will all perish.” It's what he tells the rich young man, who wants to know what more good things he might do to inherit eternal life? Jesus tells him that actually the only one who is good is God.
Now if we go back to our Gospel, we get a clue to this puzzle from its conclusion; where Jesus says that “There are those now last who will be first, and those now first who will be last.’ I think this gives us a clearer idea of who is being locked out of the kingdom. It’s not people who are bad who are locked out, but people who think they are good. It is the pushy people, those who think they’re Ok and are blind to the consequences who will actually be last. In effect if we are like that, then we’re not punished by God for being wicked, we actually punish ourselves. We’re beginning to take it for granted that for us religious people the wide gate will be open for us, and we try to get in there; and fail to notice that we’re meant to enter through the narrow door of humility. This is the door God has provided, but if we don’t use it, we get locked out.
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