The Ravens and the Shut Door

Who would be unwilling for us to worry ourselves about food for our life or clothing for our body, except the one who has already provided both of them for man — and who, precisely because he is the one handing them out, forbids all anxiety about them as an insult to his own generosity? Who was it that fitted the nature of “life” itself to a condition “better than food,” and shaped the stuff of “the body” so as to make it “more than clothing”? Whose ravens are they that “neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and are yet fed” — fed by him? Whose lilies and grass are they that “neither toil nor spin, and yet are clothed” — clothed by him? Whose Solomon was it who “was beyond everything in glory, and yet was not dressed like” the little flower? [a]

Besides, nothing could be more disjointed than for one God to be handing out his bounty while the other tells us to take no thought about so kind a distribution — and to do it with the intention of belittling him. Whether he really refuses to have such trifles thought about as a way of running the Creator down — since, after all, neither the crows nor the lilies work for them, and they come to hand of their own accord just because they are worth so little — will appear a little further on.

Meanwhile, how is it that he scolds them for being “of little faith”? Faith in what? Does he mean the faith they were not yet able to show perfectly in a god who had only just been revealed, and whom they were still learning as best they could? Or the faith they owed to the Creator for this very reason, that they believed he was of his own will supplying these needs of the human race, and so took no thought about them? For when he adds, “All these things the nations of the world seek after” — nations that do not believe in God as the Creator and giver of everything — then, since he was unwilling that his own people should be like those nations, he was reproaching them for being short of faith in the very same God in whom he had just noted that the nations had no faith at all.

And when he goes on, “But your Father knows that you have need of these things,” I would first ask which Father Christ means us to understand here. If he is pointing to their own Creator, then he is also declaring him good, since he knows what his children need. But if he means that other god, how does that god know that food and clothing are necessary for man, when he has made no such provision for him? If he had known the need, he would have made the provision. And if he does know what man needs and has still failed to supply it, then in that failure he is guilty either of spite or of weakness. Yet in admitting that these things are necessary for man, he has really declared them good — for nothing evil is necessary. So he will no longer be a belittler of the Creator’s works and indulgences; and with that I finish off the answer I put off giving earlier.

Again, if it is another god who has foreseen man’s needs and is supplying them, how is it that Marcion’s own Christ promises them? Is he being generous with someone else’s property? He says, “Seek the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added to you” — added by himself, of course. But if by himself, what sort of being is he, to hand out what belongs to another? And if by the Creator, whose all these things are, then what sort of being is he, to promise what belongs to another?

If these things are “additions” to the kingdom, they must come second; and the second place belongs to the one to whom the first place belongs as well. His are the food and the clothing, whose is the kingdom. So the whole promise belongs to the Creator — the full substance of its parables, the exact matching of its comparisons; for they have to do with no one but him, since at every point they answer to him.

We are servants, because we have a Lord in our God. We are to “have our belts fastened” — that is, we are to be free of the entanglements of a cluttered, over-busy life; and “to have our lamps burning” — that is, our minds lit by faith and shining with the works of truth. And so we are “to wait for our Lord,” that is, for Christ. Returning from where? If “from the wedding,” he is the Creator’s Christ, for the wedding is the Creator’s. If he were not the Creator’s, not even Marcion himself would have gone to the wedding, invited or not, since in his god he has found one who hates the marriage bed. The parable would have broken down in the person of the Lord himself, if the Lord were not someone to whom a wedding is a fitting thing.

In the next parable too he makes a glaring blunder, when he assigns to the person of the Creator that “thief, whose hour, if the master of the house had only known it, he would not have let his house be broken into.” How can the Creator wear the look of a thief in any way at all, Lord as he is of all mankind? No one pilfers or plunders his own property. It is that other one, rather, who plays the part of a man swooping down on what belongs to someone else and cutting man off from his Lord. And when Christ points out to us that the devil is “the thief” — whose hour, if man had known it at the very beginning of the world, he would never have been broken in upon by him — he warns us “to be ready,” and for this reason: that “we do not know the hour when the Son of Man is coming.” Not as though he were the thief himself, but rather as the judge of those who did not get themselves ready and took no precaution against the thief.

Since, then, he is the Son of Man, I take him to be the Judge; and in the Judge I claim the Creator. So if in this passage Marcion displays the Creator’s Christ under the title “Son of Man,” meaning to give us some hint of the thief whose hour of coming we do not know, you still have the ruling laid down above: that no one is a thief of his own property. And besides that, our principle stands safe — that just so far as Christ presses the Creator on us as someone to be feared, just so far does he belong to the Creator and do the Creator’s work.

So when Peter asked whether he had told the parable “to us, or to everyone,” he set out, for them and for all who would rule in the churches, the comparison of the stewards. The steward who treated his fellow servants well while his lord was away would, when his lord came back, be put in charge of everything he owned; but the one who acted otherwise would be cut off and given his portion with the unbelievers, when his lord returned on a day he was not expecting him and at an hour he did not know — and that is the Son of Man, the Creator’s Christ: not a thief, but a Judge.

So in this passage he either sets the Lord before us as a Judge and gives us instruction about him, or else he sets before us the simply good god — and if that, then he is now asserting that god’s power to judge as well, however much the heretic refuses to allow it. For an attempt is made to soften the sense when it is applied to his god, as though it were an act of calm mildness merely to cut the man off and assign him his portion with the unbelievers, on the theory that he was not summoned before a judge at all but only sent back to the state he came from. As if that very process were not a judicial act! What nonsense. What will the end of the cut-off ones be? Will it not be the loss of salvation, since they are being separated from those who are going to reach it? And what will the condition of the unbelievers be? Will it not be condemnation? Otherwise, if these cut-off and faithless ones have nothing to suffer, then on the other side there is nothing for the accepted and the believing to obtain. But if the accepted and the believing are going to reach salvation, then the rejected and the unbelieving must necessarily come to the opposite end, the loss of salvation. Here, then, is a judgment; and the one who holds it out in front of us belongs to the Creator.

Whom else than the God of retribution can I understand by the one who will “beat his servants with stripes,” whether “few” or “many,” and will require back from them what he had entrusted to them? Whom does it make sense for me to obey, but the one who pays back? Your Christ announces, “I have come to send fire on the earth.” That most lenient being, the lord who has no hell, had not long before held his disciples back from calling for fire on the unwelcoming village. Whereas it was the Creator who burned Sodom and Gomorrah up in a storm of fire. Of him the psalmist sang, “A fire will go out before him and burn up his enemies all around.” Through Hosea he made the threat, “I will send a fire on the cities of Judah,” or, if you prefer, through Isaiah, “A fire has been kindled in my anger.” He cannot lie.

If it was not he who spoke his voice out of the burning bush as well, then it can hardly matter what fire you insist on our understanding here. Even if the fire is only a figure, still, from the very fact that he takes the pictures for his own meaning out of my element, he is mine, because he is using what is mine. The likeness of fire must belong to the one who owns the reality of it.

But he will explain best himself what sort of fire he meant, when he goes on to say, “Do you suppose that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.” What is written is “a sword” — but Marcion corrects the word, as though dividing were not the sword’s own work. So the one who refused to give peace meant the fire of destruction as well. As the fight is, so is the burning; as the sword is, so is the flame. Neither one fits that lord of his. At last he says, “The father will be divided against the son and the son against the father, the mother against the daughter and the daughter against the mother, the mother-in-law against the daughter-in-law and the daughter-in-law against the mother-in-law.” Since this war among relatives was sounded out by the prophet’s trumpet in those very words, I am afraid Micah must have been predicting it about Marcion’s Christ!

This is why he called them “hypocrites”: because they could “read the face of the sky and of the earth” but “could not tell what this time was” — when of course he ought to have been recognized, fulfilling as he was everything that had been foretold about them, and teaching them so. But then who could know the times of a man for whose very existence there was no evidence? He is right, too, to reproach them for “not judging even of themselves what is right.” Long ago he gave that command through Zechariah, “Give the judgment of truth and peace” — through Jeremiah, “Do judgment and righteousness” — and through Isaiah, “Judge for the fatherless, plead for the widow” — and he laid it to the charge of the vine of Sorech that when “he looked for righteousness from it, there was only a cry” of oppression. The same God who had taught them to act by his command was now requiring them to act on their own judgment. The one who had sown the rule was pressing for a full harvest from it.

But how absurd, that the man who was destroying God the righteous Judge should now be commanding them to judge righteously! For the Judge who commits a man to prison and allows no release out of it until “the very last lepton” is paid — him they handle in the person of the Creator, meaning to run him down. That quibble, though, I think has to be met with the same answer as before: as often as the Creator’s severity is paraded in front of us, so often is Christ shown to be his — Christ, who urges submission on us by the motive of fear.

When the question came up again about a cure performed on the sabbath, how did he argue it? He said, “Does not each one of you on the sabbath untie his donkey or his ox from the stall and lead it away to water?” So when he did a work that met the condition the law itself laid down, he was confirming the law, not breaking it — the law that commanded no work be done except what might be done for any living creature; and if for a creature, then how much more for a human life? [w]

When it comes to the parables, it is granted on all sides that I insist everywhere on a fit between the picture and the thing pictured. He says, “The kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and threw into his garden.” Who is to be understood by the man? Surely Christ, since even Marcion’s Christ was called “the Son of Man.” He received from the Father the seed of the kingdom — that is, the word of the good news — and sowed it in his garden: in the world, of course; in man, say, at the present day. Now since it says “in his garden,” and neither the world nor man is his property but the Creator’s, the one who sowed seed in his own ground is shown to be the Creator. Or else, if they want to dodge this trap by shifting the person of the man from Christ to anyone at all who receives the seed of the kingdom and sows it in the garden of his own heart — not even that reading would suit anyone but the Creator. For how does it happen, if the kingdom belongs to the most lenient god, that a scorching judgment follows hard behind it, a judgment whose severity brings weeping?

As for the comparison that comes next, I am afraid it may somehow foretell the kingdom of the rival god! For he compared it not to the unleavened bread the Creator is better acquainted with, but to leaven. Now that is a fine catch for men who are scrounging for arguments. But for my part I must drive out one empty conceit with another, and argue that even leaven suits the Creator’s kingdom, because after the leaven comes the oven — or, if you prefer, the furnace of hell.

How often has he already shown himself a Judge, and in the Judge the Creator? How often has he driven people away, and in driving them away passed sentence on them? In this passage, for instance, he says, “Once the master of the house has got up” — and in what sense, if not the sense in which Isaiah said, “When he rises to shake the earth terribly”? “And has shut the door” — shutting out the wicked, of course. And when they knock, he will answer, “I do not know where you are from.” And when they recount how “they ate and drank in his presence,” he will go on to say to them, “Get away from me, all you workers of wickedness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

But where? Outside, no doubt — once he has shut them out with the door closed on them. So there will be punishment inflicted by the one who shuts them out for punishment, when they see the righteous going into the kingdom of God and themselves held outside. Held outside by whom? If by the Creator, then who is inside, receiving the righteous into the kingdom? The good god. Then what business does the Creator have holding outside for punishment the people his adversary shut out, when he ought rather to have received them kindly, if they must come into his hands, so as to irritate his rival the more?

But when the other one is about to shut the wicked out, he must of course either know that the Creator will hold them for punishment, or not know it. So either the wicked will be held by the Creator against the excluder’s will — in which case the excluder is the Creator’s inferior, submitting to him unwillingly — or else the thing is carried out with his will, and then he has judicially decided on it himself; and in that case the very author of the Creator’s disgrace will turn out to be not one bit better than the Creator. Now if these ideas cannot stand up to reason — one god supposed to punish and the other to set free — then both the judgment and the kingdom belong to one power only; and since they both belong to one, the one who carries out the judgment can be no one else than the Creator’s Christ.