Remember you are dust and to dust you will return
… he (the Advocate) will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgement. Sin is a pathology, a sickness, an illusion that we authorise to define us as victims, rather than projecting our God image. The only antidote is Love, not condemnation or damnation.
It is only then that we will become heralds of the Gospel and instruments of transformation and peace in the world. Without this metanoia we have nothing to say to the world.
by imagining that retreat to a desert meant freedom from the world. The hardest world to leave, they knew, is the one within the heart.
Our journey into the desert is not accomplished by completing a to-do list. Loss and grief are an intrinsic part of all aspects of our lives including our spiritual journey. Life is change. We undergo change, loss, and grief from birth onward. Every venture from home, every move, every job or status change, every loss of a person, a pet, belief, every illness, every shift in life such as marriage, divorce, or retirement, and every, kind of personal growth and change; a cause for grief. These are our ‘little deaths of life’. After we have encountered and embraced this death and grief, the loss of our investment in the assumptions about self, life, and the world, we are capable of that
spaciousness needed to take God’s hand. It is only after this death and grief, that we open ourselves to that vulnerability of leading a life of daily conversion, centred on prayer, metanoia, and contemplation. It is only then that we can hear God’s Word so as to live from ‘Gospel to life and life to Gospel’.
Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgement: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgement, because the ruler of this world has been condemned. (John 16:7-11)
… Forgive us our trespasses… … Forgive us our sins… … Forgive us our debts… TRESPASSING UNHOLY
Interaction with transcendence, that which is sacred and holy, has since the dawn of Shamanic religion been surrounded by taboos, interdicts, and prohibitions. Trespassing into such holy space/time, holy groves, mountains, and forests, without the proper preparation and purification, was considered as unholy appropriation. Such trespassing was seen as leading to hubris or even madness and death. This contagion was considered to infect not only the perpetrator, but the whole community, even through multiple generations… the prayer is always communal… forgive us… here we find no scapegoating by passing of the apple and personal exoneration.
Within Jewish Scripture this is also translated as transgression to describe the betrayal of a relationship, the breaking of a treaty, treachery, violating a trust with someone who should be trustworthy within that relationship, a family member, a neighbour or even the state towards its’ citizens.
St Paul especially develops this theme with Adams’ betrayal of God’s trust leading to a web of violence and death that infects the human race. With the new Adam, Jesus the Messiah, these transgressions and their consequences are vicariously carried on behalf of humanity so that a new era of faithfulness, trustworthiness and integrity would be ushered in.
Here Paul draws from the promise of the new covenant of grace that God reveals to the Prophet Jeremiah as a new dispensation; “In those days they shall say no more: the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge… but every one shall die for his own iniquity; every man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge.”
According to Jewish law, a ‘trespass/guilt offering’, as opposed to a ‘sin offering’, was required when a person unintentionally violated a vow or ‘Holy things’ such as the sanctuary itself or a portion of the offerings reserved for the priests. The trespass or guilt offering is primarily about making reparations. It demonstrates the seriousness of violations against God, even accidental ones, and against one’s fellow man.
An atoning sacrifice has to be made before God, and restitution has to be made to man. The trespass offering was a bloody demonstration of atonement and reconciliation, but it was also a demonstration of grace as provision was made for reparations for the wrongdoing.
During the first Jewish temple period, sin (Hebrew - Avon: Sin/Iniquity), missing the mark, failing to meet the objective, straying from the right path, was seen as a burden, an oppression of guilt and shame, a weight carried by the sinner and the community This describes the human condition as failure to love our neighbour made in the image of God, a sin against the neighbour and against God.
This heavy burden bent the sinner and the community into a crooked, painful, hunched over position, bent out of shape, unable to see correctly and not fully human. The effects are hurt and suffering people, broken relationships and cycles of retaliation. Within scripture this is most often shown as being confused between right and wrong, justifying our actions by redefining good and evil according to our own wisdom. This deeply rooted justification of our actions to benefit at the expense of others is done through our illusions, telling ourselves stories that validate our actions as necessary and good, an ongoing infection and power that rules the world.
Punishment for such sin is the allowance to let people experience the consequences of their actions, bearing their iniquity. Carrying this iniquity on behalf of the people is the common Hebrew phrase for God’s forgiveness, and for mercy.
Any violation of the 613 commandments and countless other traditions, constituted a sin.
This burden of sin could be transferred onto another party to act as the ‘scapegoat’, the one who takes the blame on behalf of the community. Two goats were brought to the temple where one was sacrificed while the second, the ‘escaping goat’, was chased from God’s sight, be it to the desert or to Gehenna, as a place desolate and away from God’s presence, a ‘God forsaken place’.
The prophet Isaiah foretells the ‘servant’, who will embody God’s forgiving love and who will absorb and be crushed by these sins. The servant will emerge from death to
life to offer this new life to others so that they may walk upright with God and with each other.
Here, the characteristics of God’s forgiveness are revealed within three concepts: the idea of God’s sovereign grace; the idea of the substitutionary, vicarious and redemptive death that sacrificial blood signifies; and the idea of a responsible obligation to God’s law. According to the Jewish world-view, God’s forgiveness always requires the sacrificial shedding of blood. The sacrifice symbolises God’s sovereign grace that is granted through redemptive offering.
According to the Jewish philosopher and contemporary of Jesus, Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 B.C.E. – 50 C.E.), God’s forgiveness depends on ritual purification, indicating an emphasis on ethical achievement, such as repentance, prayer, a return to righteousness, and supplication of the deity. God’s forgiveness is granted through acts of covenantal faithfulness, such as repenting, confessing sins, abiding by God’s law, and trusting in God’s sovereignty.
Confusing cause and effect is a common fallacy that accompanies our journey through history. The Jewish understanding of atonement and redemption had evolved from God’s merciful forgiveness leading to repentance to the point that God’s sovereign action of forgiveness or punishment becoming dependant on our actions.
But you are merciful to all, for you can do all things, and you overlook people's sins, so that they may repent. For you love all things that exist, and detest none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it. How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved? You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living. (Wisdom 11:23-26)
After the exile to Babylon, which was a great commercial centre of trade, both the Hebrew language and metaphors changed. Sin took on a decidedly commercial aspect as a debt to be repaid rather than as a burden carried. This Babylon effect infected the understanding sin, righteousness, and judgement.
This became significant for the meaning of redemption; a significance that we still carry with us today. Debt to be repaid required an agreement. Bonds of such agreement with terms of repayments were recorded on clay tablets and stored in the royal treasury. When this debt had been repaid, the clay tablet would be broken to signify cancellation of the debt and the indebtedness of the debtor.
There was however another way that this could be repaid. The newly crowned or victorious ruler would as celebration, or to gain favour and support of the populace, replace these debt bonds with funds from the royal treasury. We find this story portrayed in the rich man who writes off the debts of a servant.
Such debt bonds would then be brought from the treasury and ceremoniously broken to signify the cancellation of any amounts owing. Out of this custom grew the belief in a Messiah who would also break the ‘bonds of sin’ and that debt accrued by sin which was the cause of all Israel’s hardships.
“Honour at once brings up the thought of vengeance. It must be so; he who thinks of honour must say vengeance, not only because the two are always found together in the stories, but more because it is only through vengeance that we can see the depth and breadth of honour. Vengeance contains the illumination and the explanation of life; life as it is seen in the avenger is life at its truest and most beautiful, life in its innermost nature.” ― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2
From the mists of history, the terror and fury of the disasters of nature, floods, droughts, fires and the dark nightmares of our imaginings, have turned our eyes to the heavens to placate the many vengeful and angry Gods.
Today we may feel discomfort with images of an angry God and the ways that religious sentiment can fuel and legitimise violence. In ancient Egypt and the Greek states, the powerful ruling classes used fear by choosing deformed, crippled, or otherwise maimed citizens as the blood sacrifice of scape-goats offered to appeased the Gods.
Although most people resist and recoil from any notion that God kills and maims, Scripture is replete with references to divine indignation. In the Book of Revelation, seven angels pour out bowls of God’s fury, which turns the sea into blood (16:3), burns blasphemers with scorching heat (16:9), and rains down huge hail stones on the wicked (16:21). “God remembered Babylon the Great and gave her the cup filled with the wine of the fury of his wrath” (16:19b).
Paul tells the Romans that “the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people” (Romans 1:18), and the Gospel of John declares that God’s anger remains on those who disobey the Son (John 3:36).
Patristic authors were deeply uneasy with references to divine wrath and employed a range of strategies (Denial and Distancing) in order to minimize the potential harm, scandal, or misunderstanding such biblical passages might engender. All were aware
of strains in ancient philosophy that denied the gods could be angry and, like nonChristian interpreters of classical texts, most were attuned to the problems of anthropomorphism… Human rage cannot be the frame wherein we come to understand what God’s anger means. In a world where misguided rage can easily masquerade as righteous indignation, it is no small thing to exercise great caution when we are tempted to project our wrath onto God. (McCarthy MC: Divine Wrath and Human Anger: 2014)
Many ancient religions have stories detailing the struggle between good and evil. Starting within the ancient Persian world with the kind of demonic, divine force that was responsible for evil that arose out of the notion that a good God could not be responsible for bad things.
Evil inclinations are however seen within Jewish Scripture as a gift of God’s creation leading through challenges and struggle to overcoming this tendency toward evil and the development the full ownership of ‘Good’ within us. There is no traditional Jewish idea of an evil entity as an adversary of God tempting God’s creation away from the right path. Within Judaism's mystical teachings, a light side and a dark side of human nature is noted, but the dark side is never given equal power to the light.
The serpent in the Garden of Eden is Introduced as ‘the most clever of all of the beasts of the field that God had made’. Satan does not make an appearance in Genesis because the concept of the devil had not yet developed. The books of Numbers and Job were written long before the book of Genesis. While the word satan appears elsewhere in the Jewish Scriptures, it is never a proper name since there is no devil in ancient Israel’s world-view. The noun satan, Hebrew for ‘adversary’ or ‘accuser’, occurs nine times in the Hebrew Bible: five times to describe a human military, political or legal opponent, and four times with reference to a divine being. In Numbers 22, the prophet Balaam, hired to curse the Israelites, is stopped by a messenger from Israel’s God , described as ‘the satan’ acting on God’s behalf. In Job, ‘the satan’ is a member of God’s heavenly council and one of the divine beings, whose role in Job’s story is to be an ‘accuser’, a status acquired by people in ancient Israel and Mesopotamia for the purposes of particular legal proceedings.
If God is good, then someone or something must be bad. If men are intrinsically good and made in the image of God, then someone or something must cause the decay in humanity. Essentially, the increasing development of an evil persona
fulfilled two growing needs of humanity which were that of needing someone to blame, and the other was in needing to support the evolving belief in a God who is purely and entirely good. This mirrors human struggles of the time. According to T.J. Wray and Gregory Mobley’s book The Birth of Satan, Satan can often been seen in parallel to the fall of man (e.g. in the Genesis story of Adam in the Garden of Eden, both Adam and Satan are punished) “It is as if Satan is an allegorical representative of the human race”
Studying Satan and all that he represents we learn more about our own culture, our world, our history, and humanity as a whole, because we blame him for the parts of humanity that we don’t want to acknowledge exist. Through a historical analysis of Abrahamic texts, it is apparent that Satan became a necessary element/entity which explains the aspects of humanity that we cannot accept come from God. (Huneidi, Hanan, "A Historical Account of the Conceptual Evolution of Satan in the Abrahamic Belief Traditions" (2014). Senior Theses. 52)
In the book of Job, the progression moving towards the more familiar form of Satan in an identifiable being form. In this story Satan was not necessarily depicted as an evil adversary to God, but rather a challenging associate, and even an “aspect of God” (Malone MSC, Peter. "The Devil." Compass 43.1 (2009): 14-25)
Jesus converses with Satan in the desert confirming Satan as a singular character in the Bible. During this conversation Satan offers Jesus power and glory if Jesus agrees to worshipping Satan. In this story Satan is a very useful character in solidifying the divine nature of Jesus as a supreme leader for his Jewish followers. Even a separate individual in this story, Satan is still acting as an arm of God in testing Jesus’ devotion to God and God alone. And yet, this is a marked shift for Satan from the traditional Jewish belief system, in which Satan has (or at least claims to have) powers independent of God (Malone 18)
… he (the Advocate) will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgement. Sin is a pathology, a sickness, an illusion that we authorise to define us as victims, rather than projecting our God image. The only antidote is Love, not condemnation or damnation.
