A fear that is not fear

Your blogger is fighting an autumnal virus so please excuse the croaky voice! An audio version of the gospel and reflection from 16 October is available here.

****

Today’s gospel (Luke 12: 1-7) sees Jesus surrounded by a crowd of thousands but, as if dramatizing what He is about to say, He speaks His warnings only to His disciples: Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops. There is a sense in which these words are not only a commentary on the Pharisees’ sneaky behaviour – their love of being seen to be good while they short changed justice behind the scenes – but also an insight into the true significance of human moral choice. This choice is not a private and autonomous affair, like our taste in socks, but a public engagement in, or refusal of, our call to the path of goodness. Along that path, Jesus then gives us two commandments which appear on the surface to contradict each other: on the one hand, fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell, and on the other, Fear not: you are of more value than many sparrows. What does He mean, this Teacher of all Teachers, by being so apparently self-contradictory?

This last passage begins with a third commandment which casts its own light on the contradictory injunctions about fear: do not fear, says the Lord, those who kill the body. And yet it is they who we do fear most: a fear inbred or learned through experience, or perhaps a fear gone autonomic, embedding itself in the overworked amygdala of an age of anxiety. How we fear those who kill the body! As a society, though hopefully not as individuals, we fear the Jihadi terrorists who plant bombs that tear their victims limb from limb, more than we seem to fear the cultural terrorists who dissolve all dignity, purity and decorum in a stew of normalised, popular erotica.

Nevertheless, Jesus’ injunction is not to fear the destruction of the body but to go against our habits, our sense of safety. How could He not be conscious of what this challenge asks of us, He who sweated blood in the garden at His own approaching sufferings? To our shame, not only do we fear those who kill the body; we fear those who hurt the body; we even fear those who threaten to hurt the body of our oversized sensitivities and who slight and frustrate our sense of how things should be. Is it any wonder He needs to train us through deprivation of the things we cling to, He who has urged us to leave all things and follow Him? Perhaps the body is, therefore, a metaphor for all those things we have wrongly learned to hold even unconsciously dearer than Him. When we do not fear those who kill the body, we will have arrived at a perfect freedom, for we will then be prepared to see all those things that we normally cling to unconsciously stripped from our possession, like skin flayed off a prisoner’s back. It is human to wince; but our Christian call is to let go, to let it happen, to let ourselves be stripped of our outer garments and attachments and even comforts as we follow Him to the cross.

So, how does all this illuminate the two injunctions to fear and to fear not? In the first case, the injunction to be afraid is not a command to fear cravenly, but to recall the fear of the Lord as a necessary element in our relationship of creatures to Creator. This is not to fear He will do us harm, but rather a recognition of the gulf that separates us from Him in purely existential terms: I am He who is, you are she who is not, as St Catherine of Sienna was told. Jesus was not being mean when He said this; He was allowing Catherine to be formed by the reality of who He was and who she was. Only in the light of that just fear could she or any of us truly have some inkling of the meaning of the Incarnation where the Almighty pours out His dignity, takes flesh, and walks among us.

In this regard, all our faith is about paradoxical balances: God is three and one, the Eucharist is sacrifice and sacrament, Mary is Virgin and Mother. So, the fear of the Lord, one of the seven privileged gifts of the Holy Spirit, a fear that speaks of reverence, humility and worship paid to the Almighty, complements even the most passionate and complete love of God through the virtue of charity, the theological gift par excellence. Fear is the gift that leads to docibilitas and docility: docibilitas, the teachable frame of mind that opens us to the lessons He is constantly teaching us; and docility through which we say our fiat upon hearing His voice. In this case, we should speak of a filial fear, a fear not of the waywardness of divine power but of its excellence, an eternal and everlasting excellence in all things from justice to love.

And here, with this evocation of love, is found the pivot point between today’s apparently contradictory commandments. While the command to fear bids us attend to God’s immense dignity as judge – the one who has the authority to cast into hell – the second command to fear not bids us attend to the loving condescension of the Father who visits His people from on high, who knows us to our very most intimate fibre, and to whom we matter more than we can ever understand. For God so loved the world.

Fear, therefore, and fear not; walk in reverence, therefore, but with passionate step; be humble, therefore, but reach up and touch the hand of the Father who only thinks thoughts of peace and not of affliction. In this fear-that-is-not-fear lies humility, the romantic soundtrack of our loving union with Him.