When Soren Kierkegaard was asked, late in his writing career, why he had wasted so much of his time and energies in writing novels and other frivolous works, he had - he always had - an answer ready. Throughout his life as a writer, he claimed, his only intention was to bring people to God. That sounds fairly unlikely. How, people asked, could he claim that he had written a novel about a young man falling in love in order to bring people to God? His answer was this: people live on three different spheres – or stages - of existence: the aesthetic stage (unspiritual and basically shallow) the ethical stage, people who are trying to do the right thing, and the religious or faith stage, those whose whole desire is to give their lives to God. You have to catch people where they are, he said; they won’t respond to something in a different sphere from their own. So he wrote his novels to catch the people in the aesthetic stage; the philosophy to catch them in - or move them on to - the ethical stage, and the religious works to complete the job. Well, maybe. But the idea of catching people where they are is hugely important. It is important because it is what we must do, and more important because it is what God does.
When we read the Old Testament there is always a problem lurking in the background: God's - and Israel's - relationship with the other nations.. and, non-Christians would say, we are as bad. We think we are God's chosen people, we are Right, we have the monopoly of truth.
Why, anyway, should God have to “choose”? Why Abel not Cain, why Shem not Ham or Japheth, why Isaac not Ishmael, why Abraham, why David, why Jacob...why Israel…why Christians?
Er...why anyone?
Why anyone? The astonishing thing, the wonderful thing - and I mean wonder-full - is that God chooses anyone. The more wonder-full thing is that God chooses everyone, every one, each one, all and singular.
You have to take people where they are, and the twin ideas that God chooses each person as if they were the only person in the world and that God does not choose a person because they are righteous but because they are loved, are extremely difficult ones. We find them difficult, and we should be used to them by now. At the beginning of God's dealings with humankind they would have been quite impossible to grasp.
You see that with children; as they discover that either they have the toy or their sister has it, or either they are top of the class or Freddy is. It's him or me. and later this is reinforced over and over again; in school, at university, in the workplace and in social life.
If you are unsuccessful in all this competition, if it's never you who gets the gold star, the bicycle, the first-class degree or the girlfriend, then you are going to conclude that you are a failure, unloved and unlovable, not worthy of being chosen.
But if you are successful you will conclude the opposite. and that is a good start, even if at that point you still assume that your success means another's failure.
In the ordinary life of the world, the usual way to discover your worth is to discover that you have been preferred to another. In God's world it is not like that, but God's thoughts are not our thoughts. It's a wise woman who can experience failure and know that it makes no difference whatsoever to God's love for her, to God's choice of her.
So I come back to my original point: catching people where they are. Perhaps, in order to get across to humankind that they are a beloved and chosen race without doing violence to their free will, God had to - shall we say - rather do violence to his own nature as Love; First he had to get into their heads the idea that there should be anyone who is chosen and beloved by God. First an individual. Then a tribe. Then twelve tribes and then all who adhered to the faith of Israel.
Slowly, slowly, a small part of humankind began to understand just how great was God's love. “You are my people, I am your God.” Had he said straight off “I am everyone's God” it would have sounded like indifference rather than the universal love that it in fact is. It was not until Israel had really got it firmly into their head that they were first in God's heart that God could take the next step; he sent his son. The one who really was first in the Father's heart. To show us all, not just Israel, that incredibly - incredibly - in some way God is not enough to fill God's heart. To show us that in the infinite God an all-consuming love for one does not mean a lesser love for another.
You know, we still haven't grasped it, and the way non-Christians react to us shows that with horrible clarity. How many times will we have to be told that God hates nothing that he has made and does not wish the loss of any person? How many times will we have to be told that God does not choose anyone because they are already somehow worthy of his love? Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be. “I did not choose you because you were the greatest nation but because you were the smallest”. “You are the smallest of all the towns of Israel, Bethlehem Ephrata…” “When we were yet without strength…Christ died for the ungodly…God commendeth his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.”
As Kierkegaard suggests, God takes us where we are. While we were yet sinners Christ died for us; he came not for the righteous but for sinners; he died for the ungodly. He did not say: “First become righteous and then I will do my stuff”.
and now we need to do what God does. Maybe Christianity has taken a step further than Israel. Maybe we do accept that anyone can find salvation. We are right to refer to ourselves as the Catholic church; Christianity should be truly catholic. But we are still in the business of exclusion, and people undoubtedly feel excluded by us. We all have people or classes of people we exclude, even if it's only “people who are still in the aesthetic stage”. But that won't do. If they are “without God in the world” that is not because God has rejected them; but simply because they do not see the world as charged with his grandeur. We may find them unlovely, but God does not. Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.
So let's get this straight. We are indeed God's chosen people. We do indeed have the gift of knowing his only-begotten Son. But that's not because we've Got It Right, or are particularly lovable or particularly clever. We have been given a gift: we know ourselves to be fellow-citizens of the saints and members of the household of God, and the correct response to that gift is twofold: wonder, and the desire to share it. With everyone, every one, each one, all and singular. and we must take them where they are, not demanding more of them than God demanded of us. He died for us while we were yet sinners. can anything we do compare with that? and so let us pray:
Almighty and ever-living God, we most heartily thank thee, that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of thy everlasting kingdom, by the merits of the most precious death and passion of thy dear Son...to whom, with the Father, in the Spirit, be honour and glory in time and eternity. Amen.
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