If you will, imagine that you’re watching a play for the first time. It's just before the final act, and the curtain hasn’t yet been raised. The curtain is made from gauze, so it’s partially transparent, but it’s also difficult to make out the details of what’s on the other side because the house lights are so dim.
The final scene is set, and you, along with the rest of the audience, are waiting with bated breath to discover how everything will end. Until this point, the play has been quite dramatic. It’s about someone named Jesus, who people believe is the long-awaited Messiah. Remember, you must imagine that you know nothing about Jesus; you’re seeing this play and hearing this story for the very first time.
Thus far, the script has taken you through Jesus’s earthly life, where he casts out demons, heals the sick, preaches the good news, and works wonders. And you’ve also seen how his ministry has disturbed others. You’ve witnessed the side conversations and secret meetings with his opponents. You’ve watched as this Messiah has been cheered by crowds, then abruptly mocked and viciously antagonized. You’ve seen his closest followers confess loyalty to him and then deny knowing him in the next breath.
At the end of the previous scene, you were left with a cliffhanger. One of the Messiah’s very own disciples betrayed him with a kiss and handed him over to the authorities, who then arrested him and brought him before Pontius Pilate. And then, at a climactic moment, as Jesus stands before Pilate, before any conversation is heard, the lights go out, the diaphanous curtain drops, and the act ends.
Now, you and the rest of the audience are impatiently waiting to see how everything will pan out in the final act. But remember, this story is completely new to you. And now, you’re looking through the dim lighting and gauzy curtain to try to predict what will occur next based on the scenery and characters assembled on stage. You can make out crowds of people. There’s also a hill, and there appear to be three crosses erected on this hill, or is it a mountaintop? That much isn’t clear. It seems that there are three people hanging on these crosses, but you can’t tell who they are.
And because this story is unfamiliar, you wonder what will happen, and you try to figure it out. You’ve seen all Jesus’s amazing works in the play until this point, and now you’re convinced that he is the world’s Savior. And although you’re deeply aware of the antagonism directed towards him, you’re also hopeful that he will bring God’s salvation to earth and that he’ll be vindicated in glorious form. Justice will be served to right all wrongs.
And as you try to figure out just who is hanging on those crosses, you become certain that one of them can’t be Jesus the Messiah. Based on your hopes for this Messiah and on what others have told you, you believe that Jesus’s vindication will mean that the ones hanging on the crosses will be the ones who persecuted him. Justice in human hands has been won. This is how God would want it.
As you’re trying to rationalize the ending in your mind, the curtain goes up. The lights fade in. You gasp as the rest of the audience gasps. You’re in shock. It’s not Jesus’s opponents who hang on the crosses. Jesus himself hangs on the central cross, surrounded by two criminals. The audience who, like you, doesn’t know what will happen, is scandalized. Some are leaving the theatre. You hear a murmur of discontented voices, and someone even yells, “this can’t be!” This isn’t how things are supposed to turn out.
It turns out that the gauzy curtain between you and the scene on the stage was a veil of judgment, which you now realize. When you couldn’t see through clearly to the other side, you made up the ending based not on God’s perspective but on a human perspective. How could Jesus be consigned to the fate of a criminal? How could his victory be won through death? Why didn’t he exact the world’s justice on those who persecuted him? How could God let this happen? This wasn’t how things were supposed to turn out. This makes no sense.
But of course, you rightly say, we know how this story unfolds, and it’s very hard to confront the ending of the story as if we didn’t know it. And yet, if we could encounter this story as if for the first time, we might realize that a veil still hangs between us and the redeeming life of our Lord and Savior. Isn’t it true that we still struggle to make out its ending through the opacity of the curtain’s veil?
I think that St. Paul’s words still ring true. If our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, he says. The god of this world—the one Scripture calls the father of lies, the Satan—is still at work. He’s not causing heads to spin or bodies to contort. He’s pulling down a translucent curtain between our eyes and the story of salvation that continues to unfold before us through the power of the Incarnation. And the story isn’t over yet.
Whether in the workplace or home or even in the Church, we’re still prone to make up the Gospel as we go along. It’s as if we view the world through a gauzy curtain rather than through the transparent lens of the Gospel. We look at situations and people through a veil, and we see the final ending of the play that we want to see. And this must mean that we don’t usually see the world through the eyes of the cross. Instead, we see the convicted felon as the encapsulation of his most hideous act. We see the person who offended us decades ago as one undeserving of our forgiveness. We see the degrees listed after our names as the truest marker of our identity. We see the size of our houses or bank accounts as our ultimate security.
Or we see political dysfunction as a reason for despair or the stock market as the predicter of a parish’s survival, or we deduce the absence of God from statistics on world poverty or hunger or predict the demise of the Church based on the litany of wrongdoings committed by Church leaders.
The veil which hangs between us and the Gospel is deceptive. It’s a delicate spider web woven by the Accuser and father of lies who’s waiting to catch us in his sticky grasp. And so often, we take the bait. We believe the lies. We believe that flashy voices speak the most convincingly or that skepticism is the road to wisdom. Many have simply come to believe that the Gospel can’t speak for itself. The Gospel needs to have sparkle and pizzazz and that, without those things, it will fail.
The Gospel is dressed up in whatever guise necessary for it to be heard, whether parlor tricks or sound bytes or easy messages of neatly packaged ideas and perpetual prosperity. And the gauzy curtain comes down on the stage between the Gospel and us, and we see through the veil what we want to see, not what God intends. We see a Gospel and a world made in our own image, where the offenders get their just deserts, the faithful get rich, and our unchallenged comfort is God’s eternal will.
But the paradox is that by dressing the Gospel up, we make it bad news. Such a veiled Gospel shames those who are small in this world and condemns the poor, the quiet, and the meek. A veiled Gospel elevates the contented ones, whose complacency is disturbed by the suffering masses. In short, a veiled Gospel turns the cross upside down and robs it of its power. The world of the veiled Gospel is one in which nothing is ever enough because the Gospel itself isn’t enough. Simply put: it’s a world where there is no trust in the Gospel.
It's no coincidence that we hear the convicting words of St. Paul on the same day that we hear the story of the transfiguration of Jesus on the holy mountain, on the very cusp of Lent. When looking through a veil at the crucifixion, we might very well see only the glory of transfiguration and ignore the cross on the other side in the valley. We see what we want to see and ignore what we want to ignore.
But although the father of lies will always seek to pull the wool over our eyes, there is One infinitely greater who will raise the curtain on a remarkable scene before us. It’s a scene of ultimate truth, where an empty tomb shines with the light of Easter morning. And from this empty tomb a Gospel that needs no makeup will be carried with great haste to the ends of the world by fervent believers who have the courage to trust it.
Even today, that Gospel pulses with electricity despite its scoffers. It stands, preserved in all its simple yet profound glory and truth. Although it has been fumbled in the hands of many and veiled by others, there’s nothing we need to add to it. It needs no costume dress or shiny sparkles. It only needs loving and trusting hands. It needs our hands to believe in its power and to ignore the voices that make us question its efficacy. And most of all, it needs our confident hands to carry its gleaming light into the darkness.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Last Sunday after the Epiphany
February 11, 2024