"LET US GO DOWN" _{(Part 3 of 3)}

THREE THINGS

1. For the sake of its well-being, a thriving community of persons will highly esteem three things: 1.) knowledge, 2.) right conduct, and 3.) equitable government. We begin by recognizing knowledge as actually a body of law, a body of non-contradictory universal moral and ethical precepts.

2. Absent universally accepted precepts which transcend geography, culture and circumstances, human beings are unable to come to terms with the imperative of humaneness toward one another. Nor is it possible for them to concretely establish humaneness in their cultures.

SELFISH INDIVIDUALISM

3 A further consequence emerges in that to the degree societies tolerate selfish individualism God’s image and likeness in human beings becomes unrecognizable.

4. Indeed self-centered and brutish behavior leads people to recoil from God’s purity in fear and self-disgust. Thus the grotesqueness of aggressive people and the cultures in which they live increases with every grave sin committed.

GENUINE PEACE

5. The body of universal moral and ethical precepts is the Natural Law obtainable by reason in union with the Revealed Law received by faith. A well-ordered community of persons highly esteems the right conduct of its members. The interest of the state are served best when its citizens are at peace and protected.

6. Genuine peace refers to an ordered and harmonious community which values its members’ lives and liberty, seeking to eradicate violence and poverty within its geographical boundary while maximizing opportunities for its citizens to pursue their well-being. Individual human beings pursue peace by voluntarily acting in ways that sustain and protect one another and the greater good of the community.

PURSUIT OF JUSTICE

7. An ordered community of persons highly esteems an equitable form of government. In short, persons want their government to treat them without prejudice or special favor or severity. Additionally, they want the opportunity to thrive free from undue hardship.

8. A society’s pursuit of equitable government first must be a pursuit of justice, insofar as it serves the people first and presides over the law second. With respect to a shared understanding of what it means for a community to be considered just, the synthesis of faith and reason has much to offer.

WHOLESOME PARTICIPATION

9. In straightforward terms, reason understands simple justice as giving to all persons what they are due. More powerful and momentous is faith’s contribution: Justice means giving to another what he or she is due in the sight of God!

10. The phrase “in the sight of God” raises the issue of sovereignty, understood as the possession of lawful authority and power over persons and territory. Mankind, upon whom God conferred his image and likeness, enjoys a wholesome participation in God’s sovereignty:

THEN GOD said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." [Gen 1:26]

AND GOD blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." [Gen 1:28]

WORTHY VIRTUE

11. The fact that God has conferred upon human beings a sacred, inviolable and priceless dignity implies a sharing in the divine excellence. Therefore human creatures ought to act toward each other in dignified and solicitous ways for the sake of the other’s objective good.

12. Added to this ought is the Christian faith intentionality which recognizes justice as a virtue worthy of instruction, necessary as a model of behavior and obligatory before God in recognition of his fatherly and providential care toward all human beings.

ABSOLUTE VALUE

13. Assuredly, the whole of God’s creation is directed to the salutary welfare of all human persons. Human beings therefore, individually or collectively, may not be denigrated. They may not be treated as objects of utility or as means to an end.

14. As a reflection on God’s sovereign personhood, the just exercise of faith and reason leads men and women of good will everywhere to conclude that all human beings possess absolute value in the world.

RIGHT TO LIFE

15. Therefore, a government’s superlative exercise of social justice is to be found in its unqualified protection of the right to life of all human beings from the moment of conception to the grace of natural death—a moral truth self-evident to young children who have not attained the age of reason!

16. Consequently, the human person—inclusive of the vulnerable and innocent of society—transcends both sabbath and state, for it was neither rabbi nor priest spoke but Christ who declared:

THE SABBATH was made for man, not man for the sabbath; so the Son of man is lord even of the sabbath. [Mk 2:27-28]

NECESSARY AND BENEFICIAL

17. And it was Christ who spoke through his evangelist to the gentiles, saying:

LET EVERY person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. . .  Therefore one must be subject, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. [Rom 13:1,5]

18. Yet both the sabbath—for Christians, the “Lord’s Day”—and the governing authorities are to be respected as necessary and beneficial in the present age of men. The governing authorities of imperfect human societies are established by the perfect God in whom authority and power is absolute, eternal and unchanging. Human beings who govern must seek God's will in all they undertake. They are obliged to image his truth and justice in all their human affairs.

ENTIRE CREATION

19. A society accepts the demands of justice when its people accept universal standards of human behavior. Acceptance refers to a society's free and reasonable conformity to universal standards. Members of society will act reasonably for the sake of their individual welfare if they are afforded education, given opportunities for experience and rewarded for their contribution. They will act reasonably for the greater good of the community to the extent they are free to discover their own reasons for doing so.

20. Thus a society must instruct its members in the corpus of moral and ethical law originating from above and outside itself. That which is "above and outside" refers to a person, one who has sovereign authority over the society. That person is God. It therefore follows that the context, the milieu, the domain of human justice must be the entire creation "in the sight of God" who sees and knows all.

ROBUSTNESS AND LIBERALITY

21. Therefore a commitment to human justice is a commitment to God who holds human beings accountable for their conduct and governments for their stewardship over human communities. Hence, it is reasonable for God to expect human society to prove its love for the good by its commitment to the truth, the perfection of ordered relationships, and equitable government.

22. To the extent a government educates its citizens in the robustness and liberality inherent in freedom—to apply the law to their own personal circumstances and fairly judge their own actions as right or wrong—it may claim to be an excellent and sovereign authority worthy of humanity and pleasing to God.

BUILT ON SAND

23. By valuing and validating the intrinsic worth of the individual and his family and the bonds he shares in common with all others, society takes on—indeed earns—the very thing we know as goodness and thus proportionately acquires the admirable character of its members’ inherent human dignity and absolute value.

24. It is this flawed indelible human goodness which directs human beings and their societies to perfect their conduct and attain to their supreme good who is God. For all its magnificence, the tower of Babel was a house built on sand. Its insolent self-centered society could not withstand the power of God's divine recompense. But for the historical record provided by the Book of Genesis, the memory of Babel’s stupidity, its proud city and tower, would have disappeared altogether.

HEROD'S TEMPLE

25. Throughout his ministry the Lord Jesus Christ illustrated his teachings by references to colossal structures and famous landmarks:

TRULY, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. [Mk 11:23]

26. Herod’s temple in Jerusalem was an obvious reference point for Jesus who spoke of his approaching death as the destruction of a temple.

PANORAMIC SURVEY

27. Chapter two of John's gospel records a clash between Jesus and the Jerusalem social order—the divine and human orders—in the context of the Jewish temple. We should preface this story by situating it in a wider gospel context.

28. The Gospel of John opens with a breathtaking contrast. Chapter one opens with a panoramic survey of Christ’s divine and human natures and the architecture of the cosmos. In the gospel's majestic and mysterious prologue, we read:

IN THE beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. [Jn 1:1-3]

SHOCKING CONFRONTATION

29. Surely the cosmos and the natures of Christ are worthy of prayerful studied reflection. But the evangelist denies the reader time to ponder the mystery of divine light. Chapter two transports the reader to the outer precincts of the Jerusalem temple to witness a shocking confrontation between Jesus and temple authorities.

30. We are enthralled by the human Jesus who directs his divine anger against the livestock merchants and money changers in the outer precincts of the Great Temple:

AND MAKING a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. [Jn 2:15]

MYSTERY OF GOD'S PLAN

31. Many persons, of course, responded to Jesus’ behavior with anger and resentment. Unable to see anything wrong with the extensive commercial activities of the temple, both buyers and sellers cited precedent. After all, wasn’t this the way things functioned for centuries. Didn’t they operate with the approval of the temple authorities?

32. Thereupon the distraught merchants, worshippers and priests surround Jesus and demand he justify his apparently shocking behavior. Consistent with his mission to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” [Mt 10:6, 15:24], Jesus takes the opportunity to draw his accusers into the mystery of God’s plan by which heaven and earth are to be reconciled.

OMINOUS PROPHECY

33. Standing in the middle of Herod’s magnificent Jewish worship center, Jesus affirmed the absolute value and dignity of his divine-human personhood by appropriating the significance of the great temple to himself:

THE JEWS then said to him, "What sign have you to show us for doing this?" Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The Jews then said, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?"

BUT HE spoke of the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken. [Jn 2:18-22]

34. On one occasion as they departed Jerusalem, Jesus’ disciples pointed out the impressive buildings of the sacred temple complex looming in the distance. Unexpectedly, the Lord replied to the Twelve with this ominous prophecy:

YOU SEE all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down. [Mt 24:2]

MOTIF OF CHANGE

35. Quite apart from the Lord’s profound and theologically significant words is the overarching motif of change. We are not talking here about change as a poetic device or as a stage of normal psycho-social development. To the contrary.

36. Among his disciples the Lord spoke of catastrophic change in personal and social terms. He prophesied the shocking destruction of Jerusalem and its Jewish aristocracy:

BUT WHEN you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it; for these are days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written. [Lk 21:20-22]

BIBLICAL RECORD

37. The apostles’ most wrenching experience was certainly the passion and death of the Jesus whom the Romans crucified at Golgotha after an agonizing passion. The Lord’s mother, the apostles and others scarcely recover from the shock of Jesus' execution when they learn he has risen from the dead on the third day.

38. Considering the length and breadth of the biblical record, we marvel how expansive the theme of change appears. Woven throughout the Old and New Testaments, change manifests itself in three prominent ways.

DRIVEN OUT

39. First, change may be experienced as the trauma of being driven out as were many found in the Old Testament record: Adam and Eve, their son Cain and the Shinar-ites. Those cast out also would include the post-Egyptian generation of faithless Hebrews whom God banished into the desert for 40 years, the fugitive elderly King David, and the war-torn and starving Jewish exiles to Assyria and Babylonia.

40. Notable is the New Testament example of God’s expulsion of the zealous prosecutor Saul from pharisaic Judaism and the Jewish expulsions of Christians from the synagogues following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD. The Roman expulsion of the Jews from Palestine in 120 AD belongs at the top of anyone’s list.

CALLED OUT

41. Second, the common theme of change takes the form of being called out. The Old Testament reveals that God called Abram out of the Chaldean city of Ur. He called out Moses and the reluctant Hebrews from Egypt.

42. The New Testament illustrates how God called out Joseph, Mary and the Christ-child from Egypt. The Lord Jesus called his apostles out of secular life with a word of authority.

"LET US GO DOWN"

43. Third, momentous change occurs in situations prompting God to act in the sense of “let us go down”. The Genesis stories of Adam and Eve’s creation, their expulsion from the garden, and the Tower of Babel, graphically illustrate God’s decisive and repetitive intervention in human affairs.

44. Scripture is replete with examples of Israel begging God to come down and intervene for their good, as for example, when all human efforts fail to the restore the integrity of their society

CHRIST'S INCARNATION

45. On other occasions, Israel begs God to intervene directly when they are languishing in exile or suffering from foreign oppression. The apocalyptic literature provides remarkable examples of this.

46. For Christians, the theme of “let us go down” is celebrated in the annunciation, the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, Saul’s conversion and in many other instances. Christians joyfully affirm that the “let us go down” theme is fulfilled in the incarnation of Christ the eternal Logos--the Word and the Truth, fully human in all things except sin.

HEAVENLY CITY

47. With respect to the story of the Shinar-ites in the Book of Genesis, it is hugely significant that the Babel expulsion story is immediately followed by God’s call to Abram to leave the Chaldean city of Ur and begin his historic journey west to the land that one day would be called Israel. (We must reserve for another time any thought on how the Book of Genesis is a devastating critique of contemporary secular urban centers.)

48. Much more remains that one could say about God’s preference for a wise and just society in the image and likeness of the heavenly city Jerusalem—a thought eloquently expressed in the words of the Vatican Council II:

THE CHURCH, then, God’s only flock, like a standard lifted on high for the nations to see it, ministers the Gospel of peace to all mankind, as it makes its pilgrim way in hope toward its goal, the fatherland above. [VATICAN COUNCIL II, Unitatis Redintegratio, no. 2 (1964)]

MOMENTOUS CHANGE

49. And what of the Lord’s ominous prophecy regarding the Judean capitol and its temple? Jerusalem and its great worship center suffered sacking, burning and destruction by the army of the Roman general Titus in the dark and terrible year of 70 AD. The Jewish general Josephus recalled in his memoirs:

WHILE THE Temple was ablaze, the attackers plundered it, and countless people who were caught by them were slaughtered. There was no pity for age and no regard was accorded rank.

CHILDREN AND old men, laymen and priests, alike were butchered; every class was pursued and crushed in the grip of war, whether they cried out for mercy or offered resistance. [Cornfield, Gaalya ed., Josephus, THE JEWISH WAR (1982); Duruy, Victor, History of Rome vol. V (1883)].

50. You and I too live in a city, a nation, indeed a world convulsed by momentous change. Many things are on fire in the world today. Everywhere militants and armies accomplish their bloody work in darkness. Tragically, the supply of innocent persons for the slaughter seems to be without end.

WHY LOATHING?

51. We live in an age without pity. The innocent are hunted down and extinguished for the sake of blood lust. The unborn are mowed down like wheat under the combines. Moreover, the stories of the innocent and helpless, like their lives, are crushed underfoot. May their passing be remembered and mourned in perpetuity.

52. Who can experience traumatic change and wrenching heartache in this generation and remain a stranger to the cross of Christ? Who can watch the great towers and buildings of our cities collapsing and burning and not think of Jerusalem’s Temple? Where is justice and the knowledge of goodness which sustains it? Why does this generation loathe the knowledge, holiness and sovereignty of God? There is still time for cities and nations to take the path that leads to God. Perhaps certain lessons will emerge from the rubble of ruined lives.

IS IT POSSIBLE?

53. The Christian Scriptures thoughtfully and carefully preserved the ancient story of Babel with its cautionary lessons. If it prompts the contemporary reader’s own personal reflection on the nature of change, hope remains for a world desperately in need of truth, right conduct and equitable government.

54. Inevitably, crucial questions emerge from the contemporary milieu of change and confusion: Is it possible for an individual of faith and reason to live a just and holy way of life? If so, is it possible for a community of faith-filled persons to build a society that is morally and ethically coherent? Can the Church founded by Jesus Christ carry the day? Can the divine-human relationship be restored and made fruitful? In tying to answer these questions, we need not lurch between the irenic and apocolyptic.

SUPREME LAW-GIVER

55. I believe we must answer these questions with a qualified yes. We must affirm the fundamental goodness of human beings everywhere who struggle to find meaning in a broken world. I say “qualified”, because my “yes” presumes that human beings of this generation still cherish the good and the law that seeks to enshrine it. My “yes” presumes that men and women in the present generation will continue to admire the complex and ordered universe surrounding them and imitate its integrity in their positive law. And that good and just laws everywhere may lead men and women of good will and their rulers everywhere eventually to the supreme law-giver who is God.

 

---