The Last Great Show

We ought to hate these pagan gatherings and assemblies, if for no other reason than this: that God’s name is blasphemed there — that there the shout goes up against us every day, “To the lions!” — that from there the decrees that hunt us down usually issue, and from there the temptations are sent out. What will you do if you are caught in that surging tide of godless verdicts? Not that any harm is likely to come to you from men there; nobody knows you are a Christian. But think how it stands with you in heaven. At the very moment the devil is wrecking the church, do you doubt that the angels are looking down from above and marking every man — who speaks and who listens to the blasphemous word, who lends his tongue and who lends his ears to Satan’s service against God? [a]

Will you not keep away, then, from those tiers of seats where the enemies of Christ gather, that seat of everything infectious, and from the very air overhead, foul with wicked shouting? Grant that you find things there that please you, things pleasant and harmless in themselves, even some things that are excellent. Nobody dilutes poison with gall and hellebore; the deadly thing is put into a dish well seasoned and sweet to the taste. In the same way the devil puts things of God, the most pleasant and welcome things there are, into the deadly cup he mixes. So everything there that is brave, noble, loud, tuneful, or delicious — take it for nothing more than the drop of honey on a poisoned cake. Do not think so much of your appetite for its pleasures as of the danger you run from its attractions.

Let the devil’s guests be feasted on delicacies like these. The places are theirs, and the times, and the host who does the inviting. Our banquets, our wedding joys, are still to come. We cannot sit down at table with them, and they cannot with us. In this matter things go by turns. Now they have the gladness and we the trouble. “The world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful,” says Jesus. So let us mourn while the pagans are merry, so that on the day of their sorrow we may be glad — in case, by sharing their gladness now, we share their grief then. [d]

You are too soft, Christian, if you want pleasure in this life as well as in the next; and you are a fool if you think this life’s pleasures are really pleasures at all. The philosophers, for instance, give the name of pleasure to quiet and rest. That is where their happiness lies, and their entertainment; they even boast about it. And you long for the turning post, and the stage, and the dust, and the ring! Answer me this one question: can we not live without pleasure, we who cannot even die without it? For what do we want but what the apostle wanted — to leave the world and be taken up into the company of our Lord? Your joys are where your longings are.

Even as things stand, if your plan is to spend this stretch of life enjoying yourself, how can you be so ungrateful as to count too small, and not thank God for, the many exquisite pleasures he has already given you? For what is more delightful than being at peace with God the Father and with our Lord — than the truth uncovered, than confessing where we went wrong, than pardon for the countless sins of our past life? What greater pleasure is there than losing your taste for pleasure itself, than contempt for everything the world can hand you, than real freedom, a clean conscience, a life that is enough, and no fear of death at all? What is nobler than trampling underfoot the gods of the nations — than driving out evil spirits, than performing cures, than asking God to show us things, than living to God? These are the pleasures; these are the shows that suit Christians — holy, unending, and free. [h]

Take these for your circus games. Fix your eyes on the running of the world, the seasons sliding past; count up the stretches of time; long for the finish line at the end of everything; stand up for the fellowship of the churches; startle at God’s signal; rise at the angel’s trumpet; take your pride in the palms of martyrdom. If it is the literature of the stage you enjoy, we have literature of our own in plenty — verses, sayings, songs, proverbs, and these not made up but true, not tricks of craft but plain fact.

Do you want fights and wrestling matches too? Then here they are, and no small ones. Look: unchastity thrown by chastity; treachery killed off by faithfulness; cruelty struck down by mercy; shamelessness put in the shade by modesty. These are the contests we hold among ourselves, and these are the ones we win our crowns in. Do you want blood as well? You have Christ’s.

But what a spectacle that is — the coming of our Lord, close at hand now, owned by everyone now, lifted high now, in triumph! What a shout from the armies of angels! What glory when the holy ones rise! What a kingdom of the righteous after that! What a city, the New Jerusalem! [k]

Yes, and there are other sights still. That last day of judgment and its verdicts that never end; the day the nations never looked for and made a joke of, when this world, gray with age, and everything it has produced go up in one great flame. What a vast spectacle bursts on the eye then! What is there to make me marvel? What to make me laugh? Which sight gives me joy? Which one brings me to my feet cheering?

As I see so many great kings, whose reception into the heavens was announced in public, groaning now in the deepest dark along with Jupiter himself — and the men who swore they had watched them go up. As I see governors of provinces, who persecuted the name of Christian, in fires fiercer than the ones they raged with, in the days of their pride, against the followers of Christ. And the world’s wise men besides, the philosophers themselves — the very men who taught their students that God takes no interest in anything under the moon, and used to assure them that either they had no souls at all or that their souls would never go back to the bodies they had left at death — now ashamed in front of those same students they misled, as one fire burns them together. And the poets too, trembling not before the judgment seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos but before the Christ they did not expect.

Then I shall have a better chance to hear the tragic actors, in fuller voice over a calamity of their own; to watch the players, far looser in the loosening flame; to look at the charioteer, glowing all over in his fiery car; to see the wrestlers, not in their exercise yards but tossed about in billows of fire — unless even then I would rather not spare a glance for such servants of sin, and would sooner fix my eyes, and never have enough of them, on the men who vented their fury on the Lord. I shall say:

“This is that carpenter’s son, or that hired woman’s son; that Sabbath-breaker; that Samaritan with a demon in him! This is the man you bought from Judas! This is the man you struck with a reed and with your fists, and spat on in contempt, and gave gall and vinegar to drink! This is the man his disciples stole away in secret, so that it could be said he had risen — or that the gardener carried off, to keep his lettuces from coming to harm under the crowds of sightseers!”

What quaestor or priest, however generous, will ever hand you the favor of seeing such things and cheering at them? And yet even now we have them, after a fashion, by faith, in the pictures our minds make. But what are the things eye has not seen, ear has not heard, and which have never so much as dimly entered a human heart? Whatever they are, I believe they are nobler than the circus, and both theatres, and any race-course there is.