A Kindness That Still Stammered

Now take the subject of a loan. When he asks, “And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you?” set beside it these words of Ezekiel, where God says of the righteous man he has just described, “He has not lent his money at interest, and he will not take any increase” — the increase meaning what comes back over and above the loan, which is what lending at interest is. The first step was to root out the fruit of the money lent, so that a man might the more easily get used to losing the money itself, if it came to that, once he had learned to lose the interest on it. This, I maintain, was the law’s work: preparing the way for the good news. It was shaping the faith of those who were willing to learn, by stages, for the full daylight of Christian discipline, working through the best rules it was capable of, and teaching a kindness that still stammered. [a]

In that same passage of Ezekiel he says, “And you shall give back the pledge taken for the loan” — give it back, plainly, to the man who cannot repay, since God would hardly prescribe returning a pledge to a man who is able to pay. It is put more clearly in Deuteronomy: “You shall not sleep on his pledge; you shall be sure to return him his coat by sunset, and he shall sleep in his own coat.” Clearer still is an earlier passage: “You shall release every debt your neighbor owes you; you shall not demand it back from your brother, because it is called the release of the Lord your God.” Now when he commands that a debt be released to a man who will not be able to pay it — and it is a stronger argument still when he forbids that it even be asked back from a man who can — what else is he teaching than that we should lend to people we cannot be repaid by, since he has laid so great a loss on lending in the first place?

Then: “And you shall be the children of God.” What could be more shameless than for this god to be making us his children, when he has not allowed us to make children of our own, having forbidden marriage? How does he propose to invest his followers with a name he has already erased? I cannot be the son of a eunuch — least of all when I have for my Father the very Being the whole universe claims as its own. Is the Founder of the universe not as much a Father, and a Father of all men, as that castrated god of Marcion’s, who is the maker of nothing that exists? Even if the Creator had never joined male and female, even if he had let no living creature at all have young, I was still his before Paradise, before the fall, before the expulsion, before the two became one. I became his son a second time as soon as he shaped me with his hands and set me moving with his own breath. And now he calls me his son again — this time fathering me not into the life of the soul but into the life of the spirit.

“Because,” he says, “he is kind to the ungrateful and to the evil.” Well done, Marcion! How cleverly you have taken the showers and the sunshine away from him, so that he should not look like a Creator. But who is this kind being who up to now has not so much as been heard of? How can he be kind when he had never before given any evidence of the kindness under discussion here, which consists of the loan to us of sunlight and rain? — a god who is never going to receive from the human race the honor that is owed to the Creator; while the Creator, to this very day, in return for his vast generosity in the gift of the elements, puts up with men who pay the returns his graciousness deserves to idols sooner than to him.

But God is truly kind in spiritual things as well. “The words of the Lord are sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.” So it was he who taunted men for their ingratitude — he who deserved their thanks; he whose sunshine and rain even you, Marcion, have enjoyed, and enjoyed without thanks. Your god had no right to complain of man’s ingratitude, because he had used no means at all to make men grateful.

He teaches compassion too. “Be merciful,” he says, “as your Father also had mercy on you.” That instruction is of a piece with “Share your bread with the hungry; and if he has no house, bring him into your own; and if you see the naked, cover him,” and with “Judge for the fatherless, plead for the widow.” I recognize here the old teaching of the one who “prefers mercy to sacrifice.” But if it is now some other being who teaches mercy on the strength of his own mercifulness, how does it come about that he has had no mercy on me for so vast an age?

“Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down and running over, will men give into your lap. For with the same measure you measure out, it will be measured back to you.” As it seems to me, this passage announces a repayment matched to what a man deserves. But repayment from whom? If only from men, then he is teaching a merely human discipline and a merely human recompense, and we shall have to obey man in everything. If from the Creator, as the Judge who pays men what they deserve, then he is compelling us to submit to the one in whose hands he has placed a repayment that will be welcome or terrible according as each man has judged or condemned, acquitted or measured out to his neighbor. If from Marcion’s god himself, then that god will be exercising a judicial function — the very thing Marcion denies him. So let the Marcionites take their choice: is it not just as inconsistent to desert their master’s ruling as to have Christ teaching in the interest of men, or of the Creator?

But “a blind man will lead a blind man into the ditch.” Some people believe Marcion. But “the disciple is not above his master.” Apelles ought to have remembered that — a man who corrected Marcion, though he was Marcion’s pupil. The heretic ought to take the beam out of his own eye first; then he may go on to convict the Christian, if he suspects a speck in his. Just as a good tree cannot produce bad fruit, so truth cannot generate heresy; and as a rotten tree cannot yield good fruit, so heresy will never produce truth. So Marcion brought nothing good out of Cerdon’s bad store, and neither did Apelles out of Marcion’s. In applying to these heretics the picture-words Christ used of men in general, we make a far more fitting use of them than if we squeezed two gods out of them, as Marcion’s ruinous reading does.

I think I have the best reason possible for still holding the position I have held all along: that in no passage to be found anywhere has another God been revealed by Christ. I am surprised that in this one place alone Marcion’s hands should have gone numb at their work of adulteration. But even robbers have their qualms now and then. There is no wrongdoing without fear, because there is none without a guilty conscience.

So then, all that time the Jews knew no other god than the one beside whom they knew none; nor did they call on any other than the one they knew. That being so, who is it plainly going to be who said, “Why do you call me Lord, Lord?” Will it be the one who had never yet been called on, because he had never yet been brought out into the open? Or the one who was always regarded as the Lord, because he had been known from the beginning — the God of the Jews? And who, again, could possibly have added, “and do not do the things I say”? Could it have been someone who was only then trying his hand at teaching them? Or the one who from the beginning had addressed his words to them, both through the law and through the prophets? He could reproach them with disobedience even if he had never had any other occasion for the rebuke. The truth is that the one who was then charging them with their old stubbornness was none other than the one who, before Christ came, had said to them, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart stands far away from me.” Otherwise, how absurd it would be that a new god, a new Christ, the revealer of a new and so grand a religion, should denounce as stubborn and disobedient people he had never had it in his power to put to the test.

In the same way, when he praises the centurion’s faith — how incredible a thing it is that he should acknowledge he had “not found so great a faith even in Israel,” if Israel’s faith was nothing to him! And on the strength of those very words it could not have been worth his while to approve and to compare a thing that was until then raw, indeed, I might say, until then nothing at all. Why, though, should he not have used the example of faith belonging to another god? Because if he had done so, he would have said that no such faith had ever existed in Israel; whereas as things stand he implies that he ought to have found so great a faith in Israel, since he had in fact come for the purpose of finding it, being in truth the God and Christ of Israel, and had now rebuked it only as one who meant to press it and hold it up. If he really had been its opponent, he would have preferred to find Israel’s faith in just that state, having come to weaken and destroy it rather than to approve it. [r]

He also raised the widow’s son from death. This was no unheard-of demonstration. The Creator’s prophets had done such things; then why not his Son much rather? And so plainly had the Lord Christ brought in no other god for the working of so great a wonder as this, that everyone present gave glory to the Creator, saying: “A great prophet has risen among us, and God has visited his people.” Which God? The one whose people they were, of course, and from whom their prophets had come. But if they glorified the Creator, and Christ — hearing them and knowing what they meant — refrained from correcting them even while they were still calling on the Creator in that vast display of his glory in the raising of the dead, then either he was announcing no other God than the one he thus allowed to be honored in his own acts of kindness and power, or else how does it happen that he quietly let these people stay so long in their error, when he had come for the very purpose of curing them of error?

But John, they say, is tripped up when he hears of the miracles of Christ, as though they were the works of a god not his own. Very well: I for my part will first explain why he stumbled, so that I may the more easily blow up the stumbling-block of our heretic. Since the Lord himself of all power, the Word and Spirit of the Father, was at work and preaching on earth, it was necessary that the portion of the Holy Spirit which had been preparing the ways of the Lord through John, in the measure of a prophet’s gift, should now leave John and go back to the Lord again, as to the whole sum it came from. So John, now an ordinary man and only one of the crowd, was indeed tripped up, but tripped up as a man is — not because he was expecting or thinking of some other Christ as teaching nothing new and doing nothing new; he was not even expecting such a one. Nobody entertains doubts about a person he neither expects nor thinks of, since he does not know that such a person exists.

Now John was perfectly sure there was no other God than the Creator — as a Jew would be, and still more as a prophet. Whatever doubt he felt was more easily about Jesus, whom he knew to exist but did not know to be the Christ himself. It is with this fear, then, that John of all people asks the question, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” — simply inquiring whether he had come as the one John was looking for. “Are you the one who is to come?” That is: are you the coming one? “Or should we look for another?” That is: is the one we are expecting someone other than you, if you are not the one we expect to come? For he was supposing, as everyone thought at the time, from the likeness of the miraculous evidence, that a prophet might in the meantime have been sent, from whom the Lord himself, whose coming was then expected, was a different person, and greater. That is where John stumbled. He was in doubt whether the one everyone was looking for had actually come — the one, moreover, whom they ought to have recognized by his predicted works, just as the Lord sent word to John that it was by those very works that he was to be recognized.

Now since those predictions plainly had to do with the Creator’s Christ — as we have proved in examining each of them — it was perverse enough of him, if he was giving himself out to be not the Creator’s Christ, to rest the proof of his claim on the very evidence by which he was pressing to be received as the Creator’s Christ. Far greater still is his perverseness when, not being John’s Christ, he nevertheless gives John his testimony, declaring him a prophet — no, more than that, his own messenger — and applying to him the Scripture, “Look, I send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.” It was a neat move to bring in the prophecy on the better side of the alternative that John’s perplexity had offered, so that by affirming that his own forerunner had already come in the person of John, he might put out the doubt lurking in the question, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” Now that the forerunner had finished his errand and the Lord’s way was prepared, he ought now to be acknowledged as the one for whom the forerunner had made the way ready.

That forerunner was indeed “greater than any born of women”; but for all that, the one who was least in the kingdom of God was not beneath him — as if the kingdom in which the least person is greater than John belonged to one God, while John, greater than any born of women, belonged to another. For whether he means by “least person” anyone at all on account of his low standing, or means himself, as being thought less than John — since everyone was running out into the wilderness after John rather than after Christ (“What did you go out into the wilderness to see?”) — the Creator has an equal claim to both as his own: to John, greater than any born of women, and to Christ, or to every “least person in the kingdom of heaven” who was to be greater than John in that kingdom, while belonging just as much to the Creator; a person who would be so much greater than the prophet because he would not have been tripped up over Christ, the weakness that at that moment made John less great.

We have already spoken about the forgiveness of sins. As for the woman “who was a sinner,” what she did — covering the Lord’s feet with her kisses, washing them with her tears, wiping them with the hair of her head, anointing them with perfume — produced evidence that what she handled was no empty phantom but a really solid body, and that her repentance as a sinner deserved forgiveness according to the mind of the Creator, who is in the habit of preferring mercy to sacrifice. And even if the spur to her repentance came from her faith, she heard herself counted righteous by faith, through her repentance, in the words “Your faith has saved you,” spoken by the one who had declared through Habakkuk, “The righteous will live by his faith.”