Eyre Lines

Went to my second service of the day this afternoon, and heard a sermon on Matt. 24:36 -25:12. This was an evangelical Anglican Church, and I expected and got a theologically neo-conservative sermon.

All the individual parts of this reading refer to not knowing the time and place (and this refers back to the apocalyptic vision starting at Matt. 24:1). The message was, therefore, that the time of the return of (variously) the Christ or the Son of Man could not be predicted, and we were urged to be like the wise virgins who kept back some of their lamp oil and were therefore ready for the feast of “the bridegroom” as opposed to the foolish virgins who had used all of theirs; they asked the wise virgins for more and were rejected, as the wise virgins might then not have enough for themselves, and while going out to buy more, the bridegroom arrived, the festivities started and the foolish virgins were locked out. We didn’t want to be like the foolish virgins and not be ready, and therefore condemned to eternal separation from God.

We should be ready not just because the apocalyptic end (“heaven and earth passing away” may come, but also because some of us may die before that time and at that point we will be judged, and if we are not ready, potentially in Hell.

The preacher hastened to say that the message was not primarily of threat, but of the hope given that following Jesus would bring us to the Kingdom of Heaven instead.

And yet… I have no quarrel with the preacher’s last two points (about which I’ll say more later), but there I was, sitting in the back of the pews, with part of my mind constructing alternatives. This is not at all uncommon with me; my regular vicar seems to have sort of got used to me raising a couple of extra points or a slanting interpretation after the service and not to mind me doing that. I wouldn’t normally do more than that, but I’m in the middle of writing a piece about reading, interpreting and studying scripture, and here I have a ready made example. If he sees this, I hope the preacher will forgive me!

OK, the first thing I note is that historical-critical analysis considers that the parable in that passage (and several other nearby ones which the preacher relied on) are quite likely to be the words of Jesus unmodified by the author, but that the apocalyptic surroundings are most likely to have been inserted by the author, and therefore to be indicative not of Jesus’ actual words but of the understanding Matthew had reached of Jesus and his importance at the time of writing of the gospel.  (Historical-critical analysis tends to accept parables and similar statements as the “true voice” of Jesus and ascribe other statements to authorly fleshing out of the story). Assuming for a moment that the significant number of scholars who place the bones of Matthew sometime between 60CE and 100CE are correct, I consider from the evidence of Papias that the earliest possible date was around 95, so we have a small window.

The circumstances then were that in the late 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE, messianic fervour in Israel had been high. The nation hoped to be rescued from Roman domination by a messiah predicted in many places in the Hebrew Scriptures (testified to in Josephus, inter alia). The Temple had been destroyed by the Romans in 70CE and the heart ripped out of Judaism. It is clear from the whole tenor of the gospel of Matthew that the writer was certain that Jesus was the promised messiah and that the messiah as predicted everywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures was a single person (still the position of both Judaism and Christianity, but see my thoughts on this), and also that he would have been aware that Jesus had not fulfilled quite a few of the messianic prophecies (the Jewish attitude to the messianic properties considers, for instance, that the messiah will gather the Jews into Palestine, restore all Jews to full observance of the Law and bring peace to the whole world

It would follow that Jesus needed to come back and complete the job. Enter the kind of apocalyptic vision familiar from earlier Hebrew writing. This is Matthew’s vision, not in Jesus’ thinking according to historical-critical technique, and as with all apocalyptic literature of the time, historical-critical thinking views it as talking of the times you are in and offering a vision of the future from that perspective (as a criticism) rather than as being prophecy. My own view modifies this slightly; I do not wholly rule out the possibility that a statement might actually be prophetic, though there is no way to know if it is true until after the event (some prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures do not in fact come true, often because God is said to change his mind), but even if it is, it must also speak to the times.

So we are primarily talking of Matthew’s own times, not about the future.

But there’s more. Actually the parable is a Kingdom statement, prefaced with “Then the kingdom of heaven shall be compared with…”. Clearly, the wise maidens are going to be in the Kingdom of Heaven, the foolish virgins are not. But when is this? Well, helpfully, this occurs just after the statement “this generation will not pass away till all these things take place”. I think I establish in my Kingdom Sermon of 10 years ago that Jesus was telling us that the Kingdom was already there – within you, among you, there before all present would die. So, in fact, that generation, which was all dead a very long time ago, did not pass away before the arrival of the Kingdom; it was already there, at least for some.

I see my own first peak spiritual experience as having been, effectively, entering into the Kingdom. The full effect was brief, but ever since I have felt that I had “one foot in” the Kingdom. I can therefore witness that one of the features of this was an immediate conviction of a very large number of things I had previously done wrong or was doing wrong – a conviction of sin, if you like. And it crept up on me, as the preacher also quoted, “like a thief in the night”. With it, however, was an equal conviction of being forgiven, accepted, and the will given to resolve to do differently in the future (which I think agrees broadly with the picture given by Ezekiel 18 in the Hebrew Scriptures; repent and turn to God’s ways). This is, I think, grace; it surely wasn’t remotely deserved on the first occasion and hasn’t been subsequently either, when the same process has occurred.

It has been painful, fortunately briefly, and without the force of that immediate feeling of forgiveness the resulting guilt and shame could be sufficient to prevent someone from feeling forgiveness, and feeling and therefore being separated from God. I have heard quite a few people witness to me of feeling like that, despite having otherwise at least the outline of a similar experience, and I have had an extended period in which I felt no contact with God at all and, whatever amends I made, however I tried to improve my spiritual practice and reestablish that contact, could not shake shame and guilt. All I had was faith, frequent repentance and as good an adherence to Jesus’ Great Commandments as I could manage. Supposedly that’s enough, being as prepared as possible, but it hasn’t felt that way. Frankly, it’s felt like Hell, and I’m not at all sure I mean that as a figure of speech.

That is what I know we can be saved from during our lifetimes. After death, I have no idea. My experience also delivers me the conviction that on death I will be one with God (in all persons of the Trinity), and no indication at all that in that I am any way different from other people as regards that. I note, though, that Paul says that Jesus came to save everyone without exception (Rom. 5:18-19). In Col. 1:19-20 is ” For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven”. No exceptions. God is, after all, loving.

I do not know the mechanism (I would like to think of a new opportunity to accept just after death when, after all, we will be seeing not as through a glass darkly but face to face, but have no supporting scripture for that), but the Theologia Germanica says “Nothing burns in Hell save self-will, therefore it has been said “Put off thy self-will, and there will be no Hell” (quoted from F.C. Happold: “Mysticism”). That will do for me; the preacher suggested putting off self-will in favour of following Jesus, and despite arriving from a different direction, so do I.

However, there’s more; if I am right in the above, the foolish virgins will get their opportunity in the future. They’re missing a feast now, not an eternity of no feasts. However, I worry about the “wise virgins”. The preacher interpreted their refusal to share the lamp oil as not being able to get into the Kingdom on someone’s shirt tails. But in the parable, if they’d shared, all ten virgins would have got in to the feast, though they might have ended up more dimly lit.

There the simile may be breaking down. There are things we can share without losing anything ourselves; the gospel, our experiences and above all love. We should not withhold these from others because we may not have enough for ourselves. I could picture Jesus adding after Matt. 25:39 “I was in darkness, and you gave me no light”. A primary part of the Kingdom must be love, and we can think of the parable of the mustard seed in Matt. 13:31-32, a pervasive weed which spreads.

Feel love, show love, share love (you will have no less love as a result) and it will spread, and with it the Kingdom.

Now, I was going to use this as an example for a later post in my Bible Study series, but that might be a bit delayed due to the overload of inspiration which I am currently feeling. Thus I want to clarify what the message behind this actually is.

I think the preacher had exactly the right inspiration (i.e. the guiding of the Spirit) but was seriously hampered in following it by being obliged by various factors to use the standard Penal Substitutionary Atonement model, the seriously modified later understanding of Hell as real and not as metaphorical and similarly many “sheep and goats” type statements, which to me are story-telling forms of rebuke (eminentaly justified) rather than attempts to say that people will be permanently excluded upon death. There are other atonement theories which he could have used (not mine!) and it’s a pity that in order to make the points the Spirit was urging him towards, he had to leave hanging a nasty implication and rather skate over it’s implications. In other words, the preacher had exactly the right idea (probably via inspiration), but some of his theology was giving him problems arguing to that conclusion, and for some reason I don’t know, he felt unable to marshal some other, more compatible theological framework.

I’ve added this largely because a kind lady yesterday listening to me use this as an example (as intended) pointed out that I might have been criticising the preacher. I’m not – he made a wonderful job of it with which I agreed, but working from some really substandard material which he had been supplied with. Love the preacher, hate his theology…