Episcopal Church of the Incarnation

West Point, Mississippi

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 21B]

Num. 11.4–6, 10–16, 24–29 Ps. 19.7–14 Jam. 5.13-20 Mk. 9.38–50

May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart,

that I may rightly and truly proclaim His Holy Word. Amen.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic philosophical novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the catch phrase of the middle brother, Ivan Fyodorovich, is “Everything is permitted.” Ivan espouses a strong rationalist, atheistic philosophy that leads in part to the murder of his own father. The world inhabited by Ivan (at least in his own mind) is one in which there is no right or wrong, only decisions of greater or less utility. As radical as this worldview may be, it is a worldview that has been adopted by much of our popular culture, but in observing this let me be quick to point out that the kingdom described by Jesus is no less radical; indeed, it is more radically different still. It is a world in which our Lord describes personal choices at the extreme fringe of contemplation: cutting off a hand; cutting off a foot; plucking out an eye. It is a world in which these choices are described in the context things beyond even that extreme fringe of contemplation: a hell of fire and self-consumption.

Cutting off a hand sounds radical, as it should, and yet we have become so inured to a culture in which “everything is permitted” that we don’t often pause to consider just how abnormal an absence of moral distinctions is. We can certainly select examples of evil that will elicit universal condemnation–evils like the Nazi death camps of the Holocaust–but such agreement comes about because a death camp is so far beyond the experience of almost all people that it doesn’t seem quite real, and so does not seem to present to each individual an individual moral choice.

And why have I used the example of a death camp? I am reminded of this example because of what Elie Wiesel records in his famous memoir of the Holocaust, entitled Night. Wiesel writes of arriving at Auschwitz with his father:

Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load—little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it ... It was a nightmare ...

My father’s voice drew me from my thoughts: ...

He did not want to see the burning of his only son.

My forehead was bathed in cold sweat. But I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it. ...

“Humanity? [he said] Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible ...”

(Night, trans. S. Rodway. London: Robson, 1974.)

Anything is possible. Everything is permitted: the Holocaust can be seen as the culmination of a nihilistic self-focus that makes no distinction in moral choices, which indeed holds that all choices are just that, choices which are neither moral nor immoral.

In our postmodern world reality is defined with reference to experience only; “truth” is self-referential only, and so “everything is permitted”. Who would have imagined another Holocaust, after the discovery of the death camps? And yet, within my own lifetime we have seen extermination centers in Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Rwanda, and mass executions as a news item repeated at least once a year in some part of the world.

And what does Jesus say? He calls us into the Way, the Truth, and the Life, embodied and given to us in Him. But He makes clear that this Way, this Truth, and this Life involve choices–individual choices taken freely in following our Lord–by which we choose a reality otherwise beyond our understanding because it is outside of our experience.

It is a truism in the history of literature and art that we can understand hell better than we can grasp heaven. Even Jesus describes paradise only in parables. From biblical times through Dante Alighieri’s Comedia, to our own day, hell is described in vivid imagery, while heaven is left much more to our imagination, and our imagination fails to provide us with images that seem at all real. Perhaps this is a problem of frame-of-reference. To return to the Holocaust, consider the testimony of Edith P., recorded on video for the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. Edith P. (an Auschwitz survivor) describes being in a train, not to Auschwitz, but from it. That’s why she lived; she was transported from the camp on a labor detail. She says:

One morning, I think it was morning or early afternoon, we arrived. The train stopped ... [a]nd a friend of mine said ... “I’m going to sit down and you’re going to stand on my shoulders [to look through this little window].” ... I looked out. And ... I ... saw Paradise! The sun was bright and vivid. There was cleanliness all over. ... People were people, not animals. And I thought, “Paradise must look like this!” I forgot already how normal people look like, how they act, how they speak, how they dress. I saw the sun in Auschwitz, I saw the sun come up, because we had to get up at four in the morning. But it was never beautiful to me. I never saw it shine. It was just the beginning of a horrible day. And in the evening, the end—of what? But here there was life, and I had such yearning.

From Edith P’s perspective, an ordinary railroad siding looked like paradise, because it was the first place in her recent and now timeless experience that was not filled with dirt, flames, a brute existence of death and hatred. And from ours? What does paradise look like? We’re not very good at describing it, because unlike the normal people in Edith P’s vision, heaven is not part of any experience we have had. Or is it? Think, for example, about a time in your life when you did something wrong, when you did something of which you were ashamed, and for which you expected punishment, only to find that when you were discovered—what happened? You were forgiven, and the wrong was forgotten. Through no merit of your own you were just forgiven by someone who had the power to condemn you. Heaven feels like that. Heaven looks like what you see in the eyes of one whose eyes communicate to you real love.

What does heaven sound like? I don’t know, although sometimes in liturgy or music I’ll get a chill, and get teary-eyed, and not know why. I knew a man who was knocked unconscious by an artillery round, and when he awoke two days later in a field hospital in a church in Belgium, the convent girls’ choir was singing Christmas carols, and heaven to him was the sound of female voices singing of peace on earth, good will toward men. The smell of heaven was evergreen and incense. The taste of heaven was communion wine daubed upon his lips.

That last example, the awakening of one from a near-death experience, is, like those of Elie Wiesel and Edith P., beyond the experience of most of us, and so it illuminates a common factor. It tells us that what is beyond our own experience can best be understood through testimony, through the testimony of another who has been there, who has seen and heard and now speaks of this place we don’t know. Like Jesus, who tells us, “... we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen ...” (John 3.11). Jesus, who tells us that the kingdom of heaven has come near to us, and that to live this kingdom we must choose it; we must make choices between God’s will and our own, between sin and righteousness.

Jesus testifies, and offers us choices. But each of us testifies as well. We testify to our faith in God when we choose His will over our own. We testify to hope when we choose the kingdom of heaven rather than a world in which no distinction is made between good and evil, a world in which “everything is permitted”. We testify to love when we choose to serve. We testify to forgiveness when we forgive.

Testimony is real. It is a form of evidence. It is a way by which we witness to each other that reality far surpasses our own limited individual experience, and that the kingdom of heaven is a radical choice. We choose the “peace which passeth all understanding”.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; as it was

in the beginning is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.