So much for history. This crisis is a crisis which happened in Palestine in the 30s of the first century. It is a crisis that is perpetually re-enacted in the life of the Church, perpetrated in the word and the sacraments by which the Church lives. It is a crisis in the presence of which we now stand, and in the light of which we are now judged. If we can analyze it and grasp it, we shall achieve a Christian understanding of our existence as people of the world, of the Church. First of all, God is ready.
GOD IS READY
His time is now. He is always present and therefore always part of real life. The simplest way of getting rid of God as a factor that must be dealt with in the conduct of life is to deny that he exists at all. It is also the most intelligent and honorable alternative to dealing with him as the Bible does. To those who take that alternative, there is indeed something to say, but I shall not attempt to say it, partly because I am not the person to say it, partly because those to whom it needs to be said do not generally frequent Churches on Sunday mornings. I am concerned with the ways of removing God from real life which are practiced by religious persons—by ourselves.
One habit is to shut him out of the present and into the past or the future. It was the way of the Judaism Jesus had to contend with. Its two main strands were rabbinics and apocalyptic. Each at its best is a way of expressing the presence and universal care of God; each can be presented so as to be a means of excluding God from the present. Rabbinism venerated the ancient moment of revelation at Sinai, not only the written law of the Old Testament, but the unwritten law, the tradition which later was to become the Talmud, was given by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai. And there on the Holy Mount, it congealed like lava, the Word of God imprisoned in it like some fossilized relic of a life that had been, but now was gone.
Apocalyptic despairs of this world and relegates God to the future. Some day the sun will darken, the earth will melt, human beings will tremble, and then God will appear and act. But that is the place of his activity—not now. It would be a serious mistake to think of this as simply the error of ancient Judaism, upon which we look down with condescending superiority. Someone said of Carlyle that he believed in a God who died in the days of Oliver Cromwell. On the other side, an old pupil of mine who was at the Moscow Youth Congress this summer, told me of a young Russian who was willing to look on God as, in his words, “an eschatology of Communism.” After long material development, and perhaps after the failure of the solar system, it might be that God, a pantheistic sort of God, would appear. To be a little less highbrow and come down to Shakespeare’s level we all know Mistress Quickly’s comforting words to the dying Falstaff—“it is not time to think of God yet.”
It is over against all such ways of escape as these, that Jesus announces the message that God is ready—now! It is true that the past is his, and the future is his, but it is here and now that he confronts us in judgment and in grace, and the meeting cannot be postponed. In the parable, those who refuse the invitation today, have no tomorrow in which to rewind their decision. God is not shut up in the books of the historians who record the past or the philosophers who plan and dream the future. He is not shut up within the holy places of the pious. He is abroad in the world, and every word we speak and every action we do is a decision for or against him, the acceptance or rejection of his invitation. “Lord,” say the astonished goats, so surprised to find themselves on the left hand of the judge, “when did we see thee hungry, thirsty, or a stranger, naked, sick or in prison?” And the answer is—continuously. There is a prison in Oxford, and a hospital; there are folk lonely, hungry, and ill clad. God is as near as that.
A truly Christian life is a life that is open to God at every moment, which hears and obeys his word whenever and wherever it is spoken and therefore acts in love, pure, universal love. In fact the sum of the matter is this—the fact that God who is indeed the beginning and the end, is also the eternal Now, who is always at hand, life is always under his judgment and control. But this is made more explicit still in the parable.
PRIVILEGE AVAILS NOTHING
Apart from obedience, privilege avails nothing. An invitation is indeed a privilege but it doesn’t guarantee final admission into the Kingdom of God. That God spoke to the fathers by the prophets is indeed true. But it does not prevent their children from rejecting him to whom the prophets bear witness. The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat, they enjoy his succession, or at least they are acknowledged as his representatives. That does not absolve them from the searing attack—“Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites because you shut the Kingdom of heaven’s door against people. You don’t enter yourselves, nor do you allow those wanting to enter to do so.”
Our privileges, and they are many, put us in a delicate situation. On the one hand we ought to be grateful for them and the person who is not grateful is a miserable clod of earth without a speck even of human decency. On the other hand, we must never let our privileges exalt us, and give us a sense of security, as though God were no longer in a position to withhold anything we think over due.
I am thinking of the fruits of moral privileges, which so many of us have enjoyed and do enjoy, of the Christian homes into which we were born, of the examples of virtue and religion which surrounded us, of the Christian schools to which we went, of the learned and religious foundations to which in this and other places we belong, of friends that are better and wiser persons than we are. If we are ungrateful for such things as these, may God forgive us. Yet not one of them can rob us of our responsibility as we stand before the present Word of God, which addresses neither our parents, nor our schoolmasters, nor our class, but ourselves. Not even the “Lord, Lord” of conventional piety will serve, but only the radical and personal obedience to the will of God, which becomes actual in our decision.
I cannot but think also of those corporate religious privileges which we inherit from the past. How grateful we should be for the long traditions of Christian worship and fellowship which leads us back from the present to the Wesleys, to the earlier Dissenters, to the Reformers, to the scholars and saints of the medieval Church, to the primitive confessors, doctors and martyrs of the early centuries! Yet if for a moment we think we can rely on the religious privileges of past or present our Church has become a synagogue of Satan, and stands no longer under the grace of God.
You cannot forget, any more than I can, that event of 440 years ago which we celebrated only on Thursday—when Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenburg. That event was neither the beginning nor the end of the Reformation but it will remind us that God is far less interested in privilege, tradition, succession and descent than we are. O, that the Word of God would cut through the barbed wire entanglement of religious practice and belief with which we surround ourselves, so that we must answer for ourselves, for there is none to answer for us. Neither this generation of Christians nor any other can anchor itself to God by some succession of privilege; though we may suppose that we can do so, we have lost touch not only with the faith of the Reformers, but with the faith of the apostles and may have shut ourselves out the privilege of the Kingdom itself. But thank God we have no need of such privileges. For whatever worth it may give us, this parable sets forth
GOD’S INVITATION TO THE UNWORTHY
The free divine grace which bypasses privilege and descent and seeks out those who need it, and seeks them on no ground at all except their need and its own graciousness. When a human being stands, and knows that he stands, in the presence of the holy God, all such trivialities as the ambiguous achievements of a religious tradition, are seen in true proportion. We have one standing ground, and one only—his free unmerited love for us, the electing love which seeks and saves the lost.
Here again the parable can only be understood when it is set in the light of the total situation to which it belongs and the total situation reaches up to and includes the Cross. It is in light of the Cross, of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me, that my own supposed qualification