I’m sure that most, if not all of you, will have heard of C.S. Lewis because he is one the best-known and most popular Christian authors, certainly in the English language. And so I’m equally sure that some of you, at least, will have read some of his books. And if you have, you may have read one called The Great Divorce.

For those who haven’t read it, The Great Divorce is an allegorical story about heaven, purgatory and hell. In the story, the narrator is taken, in a dream, to a place called Grey Town where he boards a bus along with a few other people. The bus takes them to a beautiful valley but, on leaving the bus, the narrator realises that everything is rigid and so hard that even walking on the grass is painful. He then sees spirits approaching who try to convince those who’ve come on the bus to go with them to the mountains in the distance. But most of them refuse. One prefers to pick apples from the trees in the valley, so that he can take them back to Grey Town to sell for a profit. Another refuses to go and warns the narrator about going because the same people who control Grey Town also control the valley and the mountains beyond. Another, an artist, refuses to go to a place where his art wouldn’t be appreciated because he wants to preserve his school of painting. Yet another, a bishop, won’t go because he’s become so used to speaking about his faith in abstract, intellectual terms that he can no longer simply say that he believes in God. Some meet the spirits of departed loved ones but are so consumed with bitterness, anger and hatred on account of the past that they simply argue with the spirits instead of going with them. In the end, only one of the bus passengers journeys on to the mountains. A man who carried lust on his shoulders, in the form of a great lizard, very reluctantly allows an angel to kill the lizard which then transforms into a great horse which carries the man away to the mountains. All the other passengers return to the bus and to Grey Town.

The narrator’s guide tells him that the valley is a place that people from Grey Town visit. Some people stay in the valley and then go on to the mountains  where they climb to Heaven. For these people, Grey Town is Purgatory, a place to exist before they travel on to Heaven. But for those who prefer to take the bus back from the valley, Grey Town is Hell. People are not consigned to Hell forever, they’re always free to leave and enter Heaven, but they must want to leave and, sadly, most people are too stubborn and proud to do that. They would rather live in Grey Town, stuck in their old ways and attitudes than show humility, accept their faults, leave them and the past behind, and move on to love God, and each other, in Heaven.  

The Great Divorce is, of course, a work of fiction, but nevertheless, the faults of the people portrayed in it are well-observed. How many people are there,  for example, who put profit before everything else? In fact, we often hear these days that we live in a world that puts profit before people, don’t we? How many people do we know, cynics, who miss out on good things and happiness because they can’t bring themselves to trust others? People who’ve perhaps been betrayed or deceived in the past and now think everyone is out to betray and deceive them? How many people are there in the world and how many do we know who think their way is the best and only way and must be protected at all costs? How many are there in the Church who think like this – my denomination, my tradition, my liturgy, my theology, my interpretation of the Scriptures?  How many people are there in the world, and do we know, who can’t let go of the past? People who are unforgiving and who can’t move on in life because they cling to old resentments and harbour grudges?

There are so many people in the world who act like this and I’m sure we all know people like this. These are often people who miss out on good things and happiness in life because they can’t imagine anything other than the things they know and are familiar with and so they become stuck in the life they know, no matter how unhappy that might make them. They can’t imagine anything new, different or better, and so they can’t move on. Although perhaps it might be better to say won’t move on because I’m not speaking here about people who can’t move on because they have genuine mental health issues, but people who freely choose to act in these ways and who won’t move on. And in this, they’re not unlike the Sadducees in this morning’s Gospel. 

The Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection and to try to prove that there’s no resurrection, they argued from the law of Moses. Their argument can be summed up like this; the woman in question married seven brothers, as the law dictates in these circumstances. But, as there were no children to any of the brothers, none of them would have a special claim on her as his wife, so whose wife would she be if there was a resurrection? Neither Jesus, nor indeed the Pharisees who did believe in the resurrection, could say that she would be the wife of all seven brothers since that would be against the law. Therefore, there can be no resurrection.

But, in answer, Jesus told them the woman would be no one’s wife at the resurrection because resurrection life, the life of heaven, is not the same as earthly life. And given that the Sadducees had quoted Moses in their argument, Jesus answered them from Moses.

Jesus’ proof of the resurrection was that in the story of the burning bush, God said to Moses,

“Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’:

We need to remember that the word we translate as ‘Lord’ is the divine name, ‘Yahweh’ which means ‘I am’. At the time of the burning bush, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had died. But, God had said to Moses, ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, not ‘I was’ their God. So, as Jesus said, God

“…is not God of the dead but of the living…”

so even though Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had died, they must still be alive to God. Therefore, there must be a resurrection. And if we were to read on in the Gospel, we find that, after this answer, no one dared to ask Jesus any more questions.

The Sadducees were devout people; they obeyed the law of Moses; but they were set in their ways. They were so set in their ways that they couldn’t imagine any other way, but their way. They argued against the resurrection by quoting the law, but they couldn’t understand that the law was only a temporary measure. It was good and God given, but it was only for this life and only then until Christ came. The purpose of the law was to keep people close to God, but the law is unnecessary at the resurrection because in heaven, we will be in the very presence of God. And so they were trapped in a way of thinking that stopped them from recognising a better way and stopped them from moving on from where they were to where they needed to be and to where God was calling them to be.

I think that we can often be a bit like those Sadducees. As Christians, we don’t question the resurrection, or at least I hope we don’t, but we can have difficulty in imagining life being different than the way we know and understand it now.

In that we can be very like the characters in The Great Divorce. We can find it very difficult to let go of our old ways, very often because we think our ways are right. Sometimes we can not only think that our ways are right, but that our ways are the only ways that are right and that everybody else’s ways are wrong. In effect, although we might say that we believe that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, we can live and behave as though we ourselves are the way, the truth, and the life. And when we do that, we can’t see a better way. We become trapped in the way of life we have, and know, and understand and can’t and won’t move on, even when there’s a better way right in front of our eyes that God is calling us to. We become trapped in Grey Town. We might get the bus to the valley from time to time, and we might see the mountains of Heaven but, because the way to get there is hard, we can’t wait to jump back on the bus and go back to Grey Town, to what we know and understand and, as uncomfortable as those things may be, that paradoxically, we are comfortable with.

The Great Divorce is a work of fiction, and the idea of Purgatory isn’t a fashionable one these days. But, nevertheless, Lewis’ story does make a valid point and it’s one we need to pay attention to. If we want to get to Heaven, we have to let go of our own ways and take on Christ’s ways. Just as in The Great Divorce, that might not be easy, but it’s what we have to do. It might be a hard and painful road to walk, but it’s one we have to walk because it is the road that leads to Heaven. We’re all invited to go, and to stay, but are we prepared to do what it takes to get there, or are we happier to stay where we are, even if that is Grey Town?

Amen.

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The Propers for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time can be viewed here.

As I’ve spoken to people about their faith over the years that I’ve been going to church, and especially since I’ve been ordained, one of the things that I’ve found people to struggle most with about the Christian faith is the belief in a final judgement, the idea that, at the end of our lives we will be judged, and that God will punish people for their sins and that they might be condemned to an eternity in Hell for the things they’ve done wrong in this life. People find it very difficult to square their Christian belief in the good and loving God whom Jesus spoke about with the idea that such a God, a God who is love, could be so vengeful. And these conversations haven’t just been with lay people either. I remember very well a conversation about this with a group of curates during one of the study groups we had to attend when I was in the diocese of Blackburn.

In fact, this is a very old problem. Those 1st Century Jewish and early Christian groups whom we collectively call ‘Gnostics’ tried to solve this problem by making a distinction between a supreme and loving, but hidden God, and a lesser, judgemental god, whom they sometimes referred to as the demiurge. In their thought, it was the demiurge who was responsible for creation and for the evil in the world. In Christian Gnosticism, it was this god whom we read about in the Old Testament and Jesus, the Son of the supreme, good God, came to earth to bring knowledge of his Father, the true God. Judgement was a separation of the true disciples of Christ, who entered the good God’s kingdom, and the unbeliever, who remained a slave of the demiurge. One of the early Christian sects who promoted these ideas were known as the Marcionites. They rejected the Old Testament completely and their canon, their authorised scriptures, consisted of just eleven books; ten of St Paul’s Letters and a heavily edited version of St Luke’s Gospel. And if you think that sounds very odd, those ideas are still around today. I’ve met modern day Marcionites, people who think that the Church should do away with the Old Testament and all references to it in the New Testament on the grounds that the vengeful god of the Old Testament can’t possibly be the same God whom Jesus spoke about.

Unfortunately for those who think like this though, and for those who have problems with the idea of final judgement more generally, unless we simply ignore it, as the Marcionites did, we can’t get round the fact that Jesus himself spoke many times about judgement.

In St Matthew’s Gospel, for example, Jesus spoke about separating the sheep from the goats. The sheep, those who did the will of the Father, will be welcomed into the Father’s kingdom and into eternal life, whereas the goats, those who did not do the will of the Father, will be sent away to eternal fire and punishment. And in the Nicene Creed, which we say every Sunday and Holy Day in church, do we not profess our belief that Jesus

‘…will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead..?

Unless we’re going to ignore Jesus’ words, and step outside orthodox Christianity, we can’t doubt that we will all be judged on what we’ve done in this life. But how then, can we reconcile these two seemingly irreconcilable things, a loving God who sent his Son into the world to save the world on the one hand, and the idea that some people will be judged not only unfit for salvation, but deserving of eternal punishment on the other? I think the answer perhaps lies in the way we think about judgement.

For us, judgement is very much about reward and punishment; reward for doing good, and punishment for doing wrong or evil. When we think or speak about justice that’s usually what we mean. But in the ancient world, rather than being about reward and punishment for good and evil, judgement was more often about knowing the right thing to do, and justice was about doing the right thing.

The Scriptures tell us the fear of the Lord, respect and reverence for God’s ways, is the beginning of wisdom, and wisdom is closely linked to judgement. Perhaps the most well-known biblical story about wisdom and judgement is the story of Solomon. In the First Book of Kings we read that God appeared to Solomon in a dream and told Solomon that he would give him whatever he asked for. But rather than asking for riches or long life, or any of the things he might have been expected to ask for, Solomon asked for wisdom. And the story we read to demonstrate Solomon’s wisdom is the story of his judgement

between two women who were arguing about which of them was the mother of a baby boy. Solomon judged the case correctly and we’re told that,

‘…all Israel heard of the judgement that the king had rendered, and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him to do justice.’

Wisdom and judgement are closely linked and so when we think about the way Christ will judge us, and the justice God will hand out to us, rather than thinking purely in terms of reward and punishment, perhaps we should be thinking more in terms of what is the right thing to do. What is the right thing to do for a God who wants us to show justice and mercy to each other? And surely, the right thing to do for the God who not only wants us to show justice and mercy to each other but who sent his Son into the world, not to condemn it, but to save it, is to show justice to us by showing us mercy and saving us from eternal punishment.

When I’ve spoken about this to people in the past, they’ve been very happy with this idea of judgement because it seems to solve the problem of how a loving God can be so vengeful and be willing to condemn people to the eternal fires of Hell. It solves this seemingly irreconcilable contradiction by saying that the right thing for a loving God to do is to forgive us. So, when we stand before Christ to be judged, whilst our sins might warrant eternal punishment, Christ will plead his sacrifice on the Cross which takes away our sins, and we’ll be forgiven, acquitted, and welcomed into God’s heavenly kingdom. But there are a couple of problems with that.

If we go completely down this line, it suggests that no one will be condemned, and everyone will be forgiven and enter heaven. But just think for a moment about what that means. In this case who will we find in heaven, Jack the Ripper? Adolf Hitler? I think we’d have a great deal of difficulty with that idea too because our sense of justice would say that can’t be right. And in any case, that would go against Jesus’ own teaching that only those who do the will of the Father will enter his heavenly Kingdom.

But we also have to be very careful with this idea of judgement in another sense too. Whatever sins we may have committed, we’re not Jack the Ripper, still less are we Adolf Hitler. But we are still all sinners, and we can’t excuse our sins by saying that they’re not as bad as the sins of others and using that as a basis to say that we should go to heaven while someone else shouldn’t. Because what is that other than that worst of sins, spiritual pride, the belief that we are more worthy of heaven than other people, perhaps even that sin which some would call an unforgivable sin against the Spirit, the sin of presuming that our acquittal at the time of judgement is a foregone conclusion because we are already saved on account of our own efforts?

How ever good we think we are, we’re still sinners and as such, we’re all going to need the mercy and forgiveness of God when it’s our time to be judged if we’re going to enter the kingdom of heaven. So what can we do?

The first thing we can do, is avoid those sins against the Spirit that Jesus himself said are unforgivable. Proclaiming the words and ways of God to be evil, or to be wrong and perhaps, by extension, deliberately distorting the Word of God for our own ends. Wilfully and deliberately leading others away from God and into sin, especially the young and the vulnerable. For some, sins against the Spirit would include deliberately refusing God’s offer of salvation by turning away from Christ after having been his disciple. Or of presuming that we can achieve, or perhaps have already achieved our own salvation by our own efforts, without the help of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Some would include obstinacy in our sins as a sin against the Spirit too.

But even if we can avoid all these things, we must still see ourselves as sinners and recognise our need of God’s mercy and forgiveness because it’s only when we do see ourselves in this way that we’ll be able to do the things we all need to do if we’re going to be granted the salvation that God has offered us in Jesus Christ. We need to see ourselves as sinners so that we can show repentance for our sins. And that’s the message of the story of Zacchaeus in this morning’s Gospel. After meeting Jesus, Zacchaeus repented of his sins, he promised to change his ways, and Jesus said,

“Today salvation has come to this house because he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

We’re told that everyone who saw this meeting between Jesus and Zacchaeus, the tax collector, thought it was all wrong. No doubt these were the people who thought they were better than Zacchaeus, perhaps people who saw his sins without recognising their own? But we have to remember that judgement lies in God’s hands, not our own and so, regardless of what we’ve done, regardless of how good we think we are, we need to acknowledge that we are sinners and throw ourselves on the mercy of God, just as Zacchaeus did, and just as the repentant thief who hung on a cross beside Jesus did. Zacchaeus was granted salvation and the repentant thief was granted a place in Paradise.

We can’t doubt that we will all be judged on how well we’ve fulfilled the Father’s will during our earthly lives. None of us can really doubt either that the answer to that question, for all of us, will be that we could have done better. But let’s not forget either than God wants us to be saved and wants us to enter his heavenly kingdom; that’s why he sent his Son into the world. And let’s not forget that judgement does belong to him, and not to us. That might mean that there will be people in heaven whom we wouldn’t expect to be there, but let’s do all we can to make sure that we get there to find out.

Amen.

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The Propers for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time (4 before Advent) can be viewed here.

Entrance Antiphon

Let hearts rejoice who search for the Lord.
Seek the Lord and his strength, seek always the face of the Lord.

The Collect

Blessed Lord,
who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning:
help us so to hear them,
to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them
that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word,
we may embrace and for ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life,
which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Readings

Missal (St Mark’s)         Ecclesiasticus 35:12-14, 16-19

                                    Psalm 33:2-3, 17-19, 23

                                    2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

                                    Luke 18:9-14

 

RCL (St Gabriel’s)          Ecclesiasticus 35:12-17

                                    Psalm 84:1-7

                                    2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

                                    Luke 18:9-14