Posted by For I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all in Moses were baptised in the cloud and in the sea: and did all eat the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink: and they drank of the spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ. But with most of them God was not well pleased.
Today is Septuagesima Sunday, meaning that it is now seventy days before Easter, the greatest feast of the Christian year. It also marks the approach of the season of Lent, in which we seek to deepen our Christian discipleship through prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Since Lent is the most solemn period of the Christian year it is important that we allow time to prepare ourselves for it, and this is the purpose of the three Sundays before Lent, Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima. They enable us to move from the season of Christmas and Epiphany to the penitential season of Lent.
It is therefore appropriate that the epistle for this Sunday is from St. Paul to the Corinthians, in which he warns them not to squander the opportunities that they have been given. The Corinthians had been baptised into Christ, had been made children of God and heirs to the promises of God to Abraham. But many of them had fallen away into sin and idolatry. St. Paul therefore set before them what had happened to the children of Israel. They had been redeemed from the house of bondage in Egypt and passed through the Red Sea, but they had then fallen away in the wilderness, and most of them had failed to reach the promised land. Their passage through the sea had been their baptism and their feeding upon the manna, the bread from heaven in the wilderness, had been their holy communion, the food of men wayfaring. Whereas the spiritual food and drink given to the Israelites in the wilderness had been types and shadows, the newer rite was now available to them in the regenerating waters of baptism and in the bread of life in the Eucharist. It was now upon them that the end of the age had come and they needed to rise to their birthright and not harden their hearts like their forefathers in the wilderness.
It is important to note that, though most of his Corinthian converts were Gentiles rather than Jews, St. Paul still refers to the children of Israel as “our fathers”. Since all who were baptised into Christ, whether they were Jews or Gentiles, were now members of the new covenant people of God, the Body of Christ, the history of the children of Israel under the old covenant was now their history too. That is why in the great Paschal vigil on Holy Saturday the prayer refers to “the night in which thou didst lead our forefathers, the children of Israel” and the Canon the Mass refers to “our forefather Abraham”. All who are baptised into Christ are now members of the new covenant and heirs of the promises of God to Abraham. Hence, they can all speak of the children of Israel as our forefathers.
While St. Paul himself and our own liturgy take this point for granted in the second century a heresy arose under the leadership of Marcion which denied this fundamental truth. Marcion claimed to be a true disciple of St. Paul’s teaching that all are justified by faith in Christ, rather than the Law of Moses. However, he replaced St. Paul’s contrast between the ages of the old and new covenant with the belief that there were in fact two different deities. According to Marcion the God of the Old Covenant was the creator of the world and a God of judgment, and of wrath and anger. By contrast, the God of Jesus was a God of love who had come to rescue people from the false God of the Jews. Needless to say this teaching could not be reconciled with St. Paul’s letters as they stood, so Marcion produced his own version of them in which all references to the purposes of God in the course of salvation history were removed. Against Marcion, the Church strongly insisted that it was impossible to separate the message of Jesus from the history of salvation as recorded in the old testament. The heresy of Marcion wrongly undermined the Jewish roots of the Christian faith and was a denial of the doctrine of creation. Jesus did not come to save the world from the false creator god, but was himself the Word of God made flesh and thus both the redeemer and the creator.
But, we might say, is it really necessary to make such an issue of this point today? On the contrary, it is a point that cannot be emphasised enough. There is much evidence of Marcionism in modern Western Christianity. People say that the Christian faith is about love and not about judgement and that the new testament represents a completely different religion from the old. We need not concern ourselves, it is said, with the old testament, but only need to follow the precepts of the new testament. But this is precisely to fall into the same mistake that Marcion made. It is not possible to understand the new testament without recourse to the old testament. If we try to do this we will have to reject much of the new testament as well (which is precisely what Marcion had to do). The result of this error has been apt summarised as “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministration of Christ without a Cross.”
Today is a good day to begin to set aside the heresy of Marcion, for on this Sunday the lessons for Mattins in the Breviary are from the book of Genesis. We hear how God created the world and that all his creation was very good. We then read from St. Augustine’s exposition of Genesis in which he speaks of how it is human sin that is the cause of the fallen nature of humanity, but that man is made in the image of God. We then hear Pope Gregory the Great’s homily on the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, which we heard for today’s gospel, in which he explains the parable as an exposition of the purposes of God in salvation history. He states that “the early morning of the world was from Adam until Noah, the third hour was from Noah until Abraham, the sixth hour was from Abraham until Moses, the ninth hour was from Moses until the coming of the Lord, the eleventh hour was from the coming of the Lord until the end of the world. At this eleventh hour are sent forth as preachers the holy apostles, who have received full wages, albeit they come in late…. By the labourers at the early morning, and at the third hour, the sixth hour and the ninth hour, may be understood God’s ancient people, the Hebrews, who strove to worship him with a right faith in company with his chosen ones from the very beginning of the world, and thus continually laboured in his vineyard. And now, at the eleventh hour it is said unto the Gentiles also: “Why stand ye here all the day idle?”
What was true in the time of St. Paul, and then later in the time of St. Augustine and St. Gregory the Great is still true today. Let us pray that we will approach the season of Lent by taking heed to these solemn warnings and not fall away into sin and idolatry, but rather rise to our birthright and be faithful to our calling in our own time and place.