“God does not show favoritism.” A short verse found in the book of Romans, it may seem at odds with life experience and with what we observe in the world around us. Offered in another translation, “God is no respecter of persons,” and yet life often suggests that some get more of a leg up than others.
If God does not favor some over others, then perhaps we may ask why some are born into great privilege and affluence here in the West while others are born into 3rd World Nations in abject poverty? The latter are always preoccupied with where their next meal is coming from while the former rarely give it a thought.
Some are born with robust health and others enter this life sickly from day one. Some are greatly talented with tremendous skill in the arts & music. Others are intellectually brilliant or have keen athletic ability, and yet much of the masses of mankind have no great gift to speak of.
Religiously speaking, how is it that some come into this world with an apparently inborn bent towards the spiritual while others demonstrate nothing more than a material inclination their whole lives? A case in point, we can wonder about John the Baptist who was full of the Holy Spirit within his mother’s womb while in the words of the Psalmist, “others go astray from birth and are wayward from the womb.”
This of course leads to the perennial question of Rebekah’s twins. The Lord says in the book of Malachi, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau I have hated.” We are told in later commentary in the New Testament that this proclamation was made before either was born, before either one had done good or bad; and yet the Bible says that God does not show favoritism.
What a mystery! That there are those who spend their lives with a seemingly natural inclination toward piety while others are by contrast inclined toward evil might appear as if the deck is stacked against some while it is stacked for others. That some remain victims of addictive behavior from youth while others exhibit steady self-control raises the same kind of a question.
And then this can of worms leads into more questions like “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Harold Kushner wrote a very popular book on this very subject in the 1980s to help people deal with what appears as life’s unfair blows. Likewise we could ask the same question in reverse, “Why do those who practice evil often have a carefree pleasurable life?”
For those who hold to the God who does not show favoritism, there is no easy answer to these mysteries along conventional lines of thinking. Nor does nature vs. nurture always make a good explanation of the 30, 50, or 70 years we have journeyed on planet Earth.
Rather, the answer to these questions might have less to do with the circumstances of this life than with circumstances that took place before we were born. It may be a radical proposition, but it is certainly not a novel idea. The notion that people were in existence prior to their birth is one that comes from ancient times. Even in the Old Testament, in the account of the prophet Jeremiah we are presented with it. It was the Lord who told the prophet, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
Throughout the ancient world, the knowledge of pre-existence was prevalent. Not only in the East where it survives today but throughout the whole Mediterranean, various nations had understanding of it. Among the writings of the Jews we find the concept appearing in a number of places including a number of quick allusions to the idea in the Old Testament. In the Book of Job, there is one such reference in the introductory chapter where Job laments his great suffering. Recognizing his destitute condition, he uttered a phrase that perhaps many overlook. He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I will return there.” The sage had an understanding that as he had come from him mother’s womb empty-handed in this life, so he would do so in another just as he had many times in the past as well.
It was certainly a belief among the ancient Jews that we lived before our current existence in the body, supported by both spiritual and secular writings of ages past. The great historian Josephus who lived in the first century is quoted as saying, “All pure and holy spirits live on in heavenly places, and in course of time they are again sent down to inhabit righteous bodies.” Here he expresses the Jewish belief that holy men of old, namely prophets would periodically return again for more work in the land of the living.
And this notion was no better embodied than in the story of John the Baptist who is equated with Elijah the Prophet. It was at the end of the Old Testament, in the book of Malachi that the Lord promised that he would send the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the Lord. That is to say, the passage suggests Elijah would come again as the forerunner of Jesus’ incarnation.
And some 400 years later, the prophecy was fulfilled in the person of John the Baptist. Jesus makes this point clear a few times in the book of Matthew when he is speaking to his disciples. In one passage, he says, “’To be sure, Elijah comes and will restore all things. But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands.’ Then the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist.”
A little earlier in the same gospel, Jesus tells them very plainly that John is Elijah returned when he says, “I tell you the truth: Among those born of women, there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist … For all the prophets and the Law prophesied until John. And if you are willing to accept it, he is the Elijah who was to come. He who has ears, let him hear.”
The similarity between both Elijah and John is very strong, not only in the spirit and power they displayed as the servants of God but even in physical appearance. Both are cast as a kind of wild man of the desert, a nomadic loner full of the spirit. Elijah the Tishbite was described in 1 Kings as a “man with a garment of hair and with a leather belt around his waist.” Likewise, the book of Matthew says, “John’s clothes were made of camel’s hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey.”
Having established the connection between the two men, one might ask why it was necessary that Elijah should return again. This notion is a little at odds with conventional Christian understanding that people come for a solitary life and then move on to their eternal destiny after death.
Surely at one level the role of Elijah as the forerunner, the one who prepares the way of the Lord was part of God’s ancient plan for the coming of his Son. He was destined to be the “voice of one crying in the wilderness” a role that had to be fulfilled. And yet at another level, a certain defect in the life of Elijah required that he should have to return again for another go at it.
Recall that Elijah had a great victory over the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, where the Lord demonstrated that he is the true God over the false god Baal. He put 400 of the false prophets to death. After his great triumph, Ahab’s wife Jezebel was infuriated and sent Elijah a threatening note saying, “May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like that of one of them [the slain prophets.]”
Elijah became greatly afraid, and putting his “tail between his legs” ran for his life all the way from Northern Israel to Sinai. In despondency, he cried out to God to take his life. At a point in time where he had a lot of momentum for the complete overthrow of Baalism in Israel, he cowered and fled.
This great failure necessitated his return again at a later time to make up for his mistake. It was as John the Baptist that Elijah made another appearance to make good on his weakness. After zealously serving God in the wilderness for some years, John was ultimately thrown in prison by Herod. Herod’s wife Herodias greatly desired John’s death, and on her birthday her desire was granted when Herodias’ dancing daughter requested his head on a platter.
What finally happened to John is very reminiscent of Elijah’s greatest fear, to be hunted down and slain by Jezebel. In the end Elijah’s fear was met by the sword of Herod when John was beheaded in his prison cell. Like Jezebel who sought to kill Elijah, Herodias sought to kill John and succeeded, and the account was settled.
The divine principle that is captured in the narratives of Elijah and John is what is summarized in the New Testament book of Galatians. “Whatever a man sows, he shall also reap.” If one does well, it shall be returned to him as such. If one does evil, that also shall revisit him in the future.
It is the principle of the divine checking account. Whatever good we do is credited to us as a merit or deposit and whatever evil we do is credited to us as a demerit or a withdrawal. In the East, this principle is known as karma, but no matter what we call it, it is a universal principle that operates automatically. What we call sin in the West would also be called bad karma in the East. Regardless of the terminology, it represents a debt toward God that needs to be paid.
The apostles who were fully entrenched in ancient Jewish wisdom understood this principle and once questioned Jesus about the circumstances of a man born blind. The account of John 9 records the disciples’ astute question, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” Perhaps many times we read this passage quickly and it doesn’t fully register what the apostles have asked. Their question presumes the man’s blindness was a punishment for sins he had committed before he was born since he came into the world with that defect. They knew that his disability might well have been linked with a sin prior to his birth.
That the disciples had this train of thought was not their own invention, but firmly seated in the tradition of their Jewish predecessors and we find another hint of this ancient Jewish belief in the Wisdom of Solomon written in the 3rd century B.C. It is a spiritual writing that is received as canonical scripture among Catholics and Orthodox, and within text the author comments on the good fortune of his own birth situation writing, “As a child I was by nature well endowed, and a good soul fell to my lot; or rather, being good, I entered an undefiled body.”
Both the story of the man born blind from the gospel of John and this excerpt from the Wisdom of Solomon capture the ancient understanding that good merit would follow a person into another life just as bad would do likewise.
This Jewish wisdom followed into the Early Christian Church and we have numerous Early Church Fathers who offer commentary on the subject. The most popular one was probably Origen, the brilliant student of Clement, Bishop of Alexandria. Of Origen, St. Jerome wrote that “he was the greatest teacher of the Early Church after the Apostles.”
Origen has written much on the topic, but a few of his quotes are fairly popular. In one work he writes, "Is it not rational that souls should be introduced into bodies, in accordance with their merits and previous deeds . . . ?" In another place he says, “souls come into this world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defeats of their previous lives"
In a longer quote on the subject, Origen says, "Every one, therefore, of the souls descending to the earth, is strictly following his merits, or according to the position which he formerly occupied, is destined to be returned to this world in a different country or among a different nation, or in a different sphere of existence on earth, or afflicted with infirmities of another kind, or mayhap to be the children of religious parents or of parents who are not religious: so that of course it may sometimes happen that a Hebrew will be born among the Syrians, or an unfortunate Egyptian may be born in Judea."
Returning again to the Old Testament, the concept of reincarnation is present in numerous passages, if not on a superficial level then on an allegorical level. Consider the passage in Exodus in which Moses was preparing to receive the 10 commandments for the second time. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed his great attributes to Moses. At the end of the Lord’s short proclamation about himself, he says, “Yet [the Lord] does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation”
Now going back to the original proposition of God as no respecter of persons, this seems entirely unfair if not cruel. Why should the children be punished for their ancestors’ sins? What could they possibly have to do with it? Why should they bear any consequences from it?
If we are going to stick with the God who doesn’t play favorites, there is only one way to understand what the Lord is saying. When the Bible talks about the fathers and their children, in many contexts it goes beyond the immediate meaning of physical ancestor and descendant. In reality, the father and the child are one in the same person. The father is the individual in an earlier incarnation. The child is the same individual in a later incarnation. So the father’s sins are the child’s sins. What the person did in a prior life is being returned on him in another. So God is vindicated of any wrongdoing or unfair treatment. To look for an explanation for what has befallen us in our lives, we really must look no further than ourselves.
Not only is there support for the effects of karma and the consequent cycle of rebirth in the writings of the ancient Jews and early Christians, we find the same ultimate concept of sow and reap in the very teachings of Jesus himself. A thread of these teachings is found in the parables of Jesus as well as his sayings in the four gospels.
In the parable of the talents recorded in Matthew, we have three servants who were entrusted with varying amounts of money by their master. Two of them put the money to work and gained a 100% return on what was given to them. The other servant was fearful and hid his allotment in the ground. When the master returned after awhile to see what his servants had done, he rewarded the two diligent servants but punished the lazy one. Then Jesus concluded the parable by saying, “For whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.” And by this passage we should understand that the Lord will repay us for what we have done, if not in this life, then in the next, because such is the law of sow and reap. Like the servants of the parable, each of us will give an account of what we have done in the flesh to our master and we will be repaid accordingly.
The law of karmic retribution is found in Jesus’ words in the Garden of Gethsemane. When he was arrested, Peter flew off the handle (as was his nature) and cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant. Jesus immediately chided him and said, “All who live by the sword will die by the sword” warning as always about the long and lasting effects of our actions. Though we may not reap the effect immediately, “what comes around eventually goes around” as the ancient proverb tells us.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ words are sobering again when he warns us against judging others. He tells us, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
And in the same famous discourse, after teaching the Lord’s Prayer to the crowds, he expounded further on it by saying, “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”
So many things disqualify us from entering the kingdom of heaven which in the words of Jesus is a very hard thing. Near the end of the Sermon on the Mount he says, “Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” His warnings tell us that we will definitely not enter eternal life carrying judgment and unforgiveness not to mention other disqualifications which are enumerated all throughout the gospels.
Now up until this point, it might sound like we are all doomed to keep returning again and again to earth life, incarnation after incarnation to settle debts that we have accumulated over the ages. This kind of image paints a picture of God as Divine Scorekeeper keeping a tally of our merits and demerits ever attempting to balance the divine checkbook.
Not to say that this picture is untrue, but it is a small part of the bigger picture that God has in mind. This life is not just about making up for past sins, it is about spiritual progress and development that occurs over a very long period of time. As the saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and neither are we. Our earthly sojourn is an evolution from earth consciousness to spiritual consciousness. It is about moving away from the sense nature and its material desires to a higher place.
Along the way we must experience the gamut of what earth life has to offer, be tested in every way, and learn many lessons. Sometimes we will fail and then we are given the opportunity to try again until we learn and acquire what we need for advancement. In our early incarnations as a human being, we are often self serving creatures seeking to please ourselves through any and every sense desire under the sun. After a long and hard road, the human soul eventually develops into the servant of God seeking to help others through love. What happens in between these extremes is the upward struggle of human life.
In some incarnations we must experience the joy and responsibility of being a family man or a mother and all that that entails. In some lives, we will be celibate and learn to focus on others. Sometimes we will be wealthy and be tested with the snare of possessions. At other times we will be impoverished and feel the pain of want. In some incarnations we will be enslaved and working for a taskmaster to learn the lesson of obedience, and yet in others we may find ourselves as a free entrepreneur doing as he pleases. In some stages in our development we will have excellent health and be very strong to do what is expected of us in that life. In other times, we will be born sickly or an invalid, requiring constant care by others and learning the lesson of patience.
More or less we will experience the many different vocations and life settings that are out there until we have gained mastery and learned all there is to learn from earth existence. Many tests will come to prove us along the way. When there is failure, another opportunity will be given at some other time or place to make good on it and push forward. Ultimately, the human soul pays off all its debts toward God, learns all the lessons of earth life, and becomes the servant of God to enter into the heavenly kingdom never to return again to the physical world.
While the soul is progressing toward the heavenly goal, it cycles between this life and the afterlife many times, and in God’s plan for men, the knowledge of where he has come from before is mercifully veiled from him for a number of reasons. One such reason is captured in Paul’s letter to the Hebrews where he celebrates the people of faith who finally obtained the goal of entering the heavenly kingdom. He expresses that if these would-be saints had remembered the country they had left behind, they might have sought to return to it, but because that knowledge has been removed from their memories, instead they sought a better country – a heavenly country setting their sights on the higher goal of everlasting life. The reality is that the afterlife for particularly good souls is very beautiful in itself, but if such good souls should recall it when they return to earth again, they might not have the ambition to achieve something higher. So God wipes out prior memories to keep us striving for the highest so that we can continue to develop spiritually and climb the ladder to heaven.
This process of spiritual evolution was in the minds of the Early Church Fathers who wrote about the need for reincarnation along the soul’s journey to purification. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, a man of the 3rd and 4th century said, “It is absolutely necessary that the soul should be healed and purified. If this does not take place during its life on earth, it must be accomplished in future lives.” Synesius, a 5th century bishop of Ptolemais taught the same concept. In a prayer of his that has survived, he says, “Father, grant that my soul may merge into the light, and be no more thrust back into the illusion of earth.”
The growth process of the human soul is certainly depicted in the parables of the Lord. Jesus often talked about the kingdom of heaven and on one occasion revealed that the kingdom of God is within us. It is not something that we can point to over on the next hill or in a neighboring valley. Rather it is the life of the spirit which has humble beginnings within us as an early human being.
Jesus illustrated the small beginnings of the spirit within us when he taught the Parable of the Mustard Seed. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, it grows into the largest of plants so that the birds of the air nest in its branches. The same concept was also evident in the Parable of the Yeast. The kingdom of heaven is like a little bit of yeast that a woman took and mixed in a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough. The kingdom starts off small in each of us and little by little expands as the spiritual supplants the animal. Eventually the spirit grows so large that the body can no longer contain it and then it is time to leave earth existence once and for all.
From one life to the next, the spirit grows in each of us, getting bigger and stronger with each incarnation. Sometimes the process is two steps forward and one step back, but the process is always marching forward. As alluded to earlier, the progress of the soul from life to life is captured in allegory in the Old Testament in the relation between fathers and children.
It was in the wilderness where Israel wandered for 40 years that the Lord became angry with the people for complaining and grumbling against him. Many times they murmured against him wishing to return to the fleshpots of Egypt. Then in his anger, he promised all of the adults who came out of Egypt that their bodies would drop one by one in the desert until they were all wiped out. Their children would be like shepherds of their parents waiting vigil until the last of their carcasses was buried. Then he promised that he would take the children into the Promised Land that was at first rejected by the fathers.
In this passage which is repeated several times in the Old Testament, the advanced state of the children is contrasted against the immature state of the fathers. Parent and offspring are the same soul. The former represents the person in an earlier incarnation or stage of development where we are prone to complain and still seek the comforts of Egypt or the flesh life. The latter represents the person in a more recent incarnation where advanced spiritual state entitles him to enter into the Promised Land which also typifies Jesus’ kingdom of heaven and a final graduation from earth existence.
The concept can also be found once again in the story of Elijah which was described in detail earlier. Recall that after Elijah fled from Jezebel that he was despondent, and after sitting down under a tree he prayed that he might die. He said, “I have had enough, Lord. Take my life; I am no better than my fathers.”
Of course he wasn’t talking about his biological father, or his grandfather, or his great-grandfather; he was bemoaning himself in all of his prior incarnations. In his despair he was acknowledging that he had made no great improvement over the course of some lives and realized that he had once again been disqualified from winning the heavenly prize for which we are all called. In his dejection, he cries out to God to take his life for he had failed and failed greatly. He knew it would be necessary to return once again in the future for another mission and another opportunity to succeed.
Now with all of this talk about returning again and again to incarnation with second chance after second chance given to us to make improvement, some are certainly asking a very important question. Conventional Christianity does not give second chances after death but maintains hell with eternal punishment for the disobedient. What are we to do with all of the passages especially in the gospels that talk about “eternal damnation?” How does that fit into all of this reincarnation talk?
It turns out that despite all of the accounts in the gospels about hell, of the six theology schools in the Early Church scattered around the Mediterranean, only one professed eternal damnation. Another taught final annihilation of the wicked, while the other four taught universalism or the final salvation of all mankind.
Furthermore, the disparity between the various schools was not one due to geography, or culture, or intellect but was attributed to language. The Universalist schools were Greek while the eternal damnation school was Latin. All schools had access to the scriptures, but their interpretation of certain passages was greatly influenced by the tongue they spoke.
What has been rendered as “eternal punishment” in the Latin Vulgate as well is in our English bibles is the phrase “kolasin aionion” in the original Greek. Unfortunately perhaps for us English speakers, the Greek expression packs a very different meaning than what has descended to us through the Latin tradition.
The word “aion” in the Greek phrase is the time or duration qualifier. It is the same word from which we get our English word “eon” which we use to describe a long period of time. Likewise in classical Greek, the root word also denoted a long but finite period. It is the same word that we translate as “age” which is commonly taken as a few thousand years.
The word “kolasis” in Greek also means punishment as we translate it, but it is punishment with a very specific connotation. It is chastisement punishment or punishment for the sake of improvement or correction. In classical Greek it is used in the context of pruning branches off of a tree to make it more fruitful. It is the kind of punishment that tends to the improvement of a criminal.
So the term “eternal punishment” that we frequently use should really be translated as “temporary remedial punishment” if we are to stay true to the original text. Many passages of scripture make a lot more sense if this understanding is kept in view.
One of the more mysterious passages in the Bible is readily understood keeping to the Greek rendering of terms. It is the excerpt from 1 Peter upon which part of the Apostle’s Creed is built. The clause “He descended to the dead” referring to Jesus’ descent into hell after his crucifixion stems from 1 Peter 3. There it says that “Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.” And in just the next chapter, Peter says that “the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead” referring back to Jesus’ preaching.
According to conventional Christian understanding, this passage appears absurd. For what reason would someone preach to anyone who is in their final destination? If those in hell are in a permanent situation, why would Jesus take the time to come down and preach to them?
The word “preach” carries with it a meaning of exhortation and moral encouragement. Jesus’ visit to the prisoners of hell was part of a mission to help them as he desires to help all of us on the road to salvation. He descended to meet those who were paying off a debt and who would one day return again to take on the flesh in another incarnation with another opportunity to make good on past mistakes. It is for this reason that the ancient church has always prayed for the dead as they need the merits of our prayers in preparation for returning to earth life once again. And the early church followed this tradition from its Jewish forbears who made intercession for the dead and through their prayers offered atonement for the sins of deceased loved ones as described in the story of the Maccabees.
Now there is no question that hell is a brutal place of undeniable torment, but it is a place of limited duration, lasting for us as long as it takes us to realize the error of our ways and repent of our behavior. King David seems to have understood the temporary nature of this ugly place, for he wrote in the Psalms “You will not leave my soul in hell.” Elihu one of the friends of the suffering Job also appears to have comprehended this idea as well, for he acknowledged that God would bring the soul of a man back from the Pit to once again see the light of life, even multiple times if necessary.
The reality is that our tenure in that wretched place we call hell endures as long as it is necessary for us to make payment for our sins in life. This also should be dictated by reason – that a finite creature can merit no more than finite punishment, and so it is in the words of Jesus Christ who taught the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant. In the lengthy story, Jesus describes a king who forgave a servant a very large debt because he had compassion on him. After the man was relieved of his great burden, the ungrateful servant went out and seized a fellow by the neck who owed him a small amount by comparison. Without mercy, the servant who was forgiven a very large debt threw him into prison until the fellow should pay his small obligation. When the king heard about it, he took his servant and threw him in jail until he should pay back all that he owed.
In a similar vein, during the Sermon on the Mount Jesus taught saying, “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still with him on the way, or he may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. I tell you the truth, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.”
In both accounts, the merits of our sins are presented as a finite debt, something that can be paid back. A “last penny” indicates an end to the repayment as does the word “until” which sees a culmination to the time of punishment. In both cases the analogy of prison is used to describe the place of punishment, and in the classical Greek sense, this prison is a correctional facility as we name it today in our culture.
Once again, the punishment is analogous to pruning branches off of a tree and casting them into the fire. Such are the words of Jesus in the gospel when he says “every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” And this is none other than the fire of purification and refinement.
It was early in the Old Testament that we meet such a tree that was thrown into the fire like Jesus has described in Luke. Moses before he was leader of Israel was in the wilderness of Sinai when he came across the Burning Bush, a tree set ablaze ever burning but not consumed. Such a tree is a symbol of man who goes through the purification process. The fire that envelopes the bush is a “friendly fire” because it is for cleansing and not destruction.
The fire is God himself who in the early years of our human existence causes us much pain and torment upon contact. Later as we have advanced to a high spiritual state, what was once the fire of pain and trial mutates into the fire of love and zeal. St Francis of Assisi had put this very well when he said, “God is a consuming fire; he burns and we burn with him.”
Our God is “like a refiner’s fire,” ever purifying and cleansing his beloved mankind. Unless this fire continually burns us, we will not see him, “for without holiness, no flesh will see God.” “The Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts a son.” In the words of Saint Catherine of Siena, the great medieval mystic, “everything that comes into our lives comes from love.” It is God’s love that is ultimately responsible for everything that enters our lives, whether blessing or curse, for everything is designed to lead us toward him and will bring us to the one who loves us.
Now up until this point. I am sure that this presentation has sounded like some kind of Eastern religious discourse. If I hadn’t been using bible verses and quotes from the Early Church, the content might have seemed very similar to a teaching of some Buddhist or Hindu leader. The burning question at this point which is also the culmination of this talk has to do with how Jesus Christ fits into this whole picture. To put it another way, we could ask, “What makes our Christianity special in contrast to all the other religions in the world?”
What makes the Christian religion special, of course is that God has come to us in incarnation as a man, like us in every way. The God-man visited us for the very special purpose of making the arduous journey of the human soul a whole lot easier and faster than it ever could be without him.
Jesus’ sacrifice upon the cross obtained for the human race an infinite treasury of good karma to use the Eastern phrase. As an infinite being, only Jesus was qualified to amass a limitless amount of merit. As a perfect man only Jesus could act as representative of the human race and deposit these vast riches in trust for mankind.
The good merit that he has obtained for us is not only the reward for living a fully obedient life, but it is also the compensation for enduring the punishment that is due for the sins of mankind. Out of his great love and concern for souls, it is Jesus’ great joy to make this treasury of merit (also known as grace) available to all of his followers. His repository of good human karma avails to all those who bear the name Christian an opportunity to greatly mitigate personal punishment and to accelerate spiritual growth.
Historically, it has been understood that Jesus has made the merits of his life and death available to his followers through the Church that he started 2000 years ago. It was to this Church that he entrusted the 7 sacraments that he instituted. Through these sacraments, Christians may freely tap into Jesus’ infinite treasury to help them along at every step in their journey. Through these sacraments, Christians may tap into the divine life of Christ, pulling it down and infusing it into their souls.
There is a sacrament that is available to help us at every point in life. There is one for when we are born and one for when we die. There is one when we reach adolescence and one for when we get married. There is one for when we screw up and sin against God and there is one when we are sick. Obviously the scope of the all of the sacraments is too big to cover in a short talk, but I will touch on a few of them briefly.
Baptism which is the common sacrament throughout all of Christianity is the cornerstone sacrament. It is the sacrament of initiation into the Christian religion and allows us to proudly take the name Christian. What is special about Baptism is that it effects a radical cleansing of the soul of the recipient. It washes away sin in a comprehensive way. The merits of Jesus’ death are applied to the one who receives Baptism to wipe out the sins that have been committed in his life up until that point.
The teaching on Baptism has always been consistent in the Early Church regarding its radical cleansing effects. The Early Fathers faithfully followed the Apostolic Tradition which was transmitted to us. In the Book of Acts, Peter preached to the crowd on the day of Pentecost saying, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” Later in the same book, the Apostle Paul is recorded as addressing another crowd in the same way saying, “And now what are you waiting for? Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name.” This Apostolic teaching ultimately found a prominent place in the Nicene Creed where it says, “We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.”
Peter also said to the crowds at Pentecost that the promise of God was for the believers and their children. In following the Apostolic tradition, the Early Church not only baptized adults but also their infant children as well. The theological reason for baptizing babies was perhaps lost over time though. Those who may have questioned why an innocent child needed Baptism finally met a response through the great Augustine of the 4th century. He taught that though an infant had committed no sin of its own, it had Original Sin that needed to be cleansed, a concept that has survived through the centuries and up until the present.
Augustine argued that every child has Original Sin inherited from Adam and Eve, the parents of the human race. Though Augustine’s recognition of Original Sin was very astute, perhaps his rationale behind it was a little defective. His premise suggests that the sin of others can be inherited or transferred to someone else. Though Augustine’s idea became widely accepted after his lifetime, as discussed earlier in this talk, reason suggests that his notion is both unfair and unjust.
The law recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy says, “Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin.” And likewise in Ezekiel a passage reads, “The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son.”
Rather than inheriting the sin of our biological parents or ancestors, that children are born with Original Sin is more a reflection of the sin or bad karma that the infants bring into this life from prior incarnations. In this way, Baptism is a radical forgiveness of sins from not only this life but from lives gone by for which we still suffer. And this is why the Apostles taught to baptize children like we do adults.
Although Baptism can only be administered once per lifetime, Jesus still provided for us to obtain forgiveness of our sins when we stray off the path after we have been baptized. He provided two sacraments which are commonly called the Sacraments of Healing because they have to do with forgiveness.
The sacrament of Confession is available to all Christians who sin subsequent to their Baptism and is a means provided by Jesus to forgive those transgressions. As the name of the sacrament implies, confession of particular sins is a requirement to tap into Jesus’ good karma and wipe out the offenses. If we enter the sacrament with a repentant and humble heart saddened by what we have done, the forgiveness is available to us through the ministry of the Church. The popular quote from 1 John sums it up saying, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
Jesus gave the power to forgive sins in his name to his 12 apostles and their successors. It was in the Gospel of John after the Resurrection that Jesus appeared to his Apostles and gave them this authority saying, “If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” Along the same lines, the epistle of James tells us to “confess our sins to each other and pray for each other that we may be healed.”
The second sacrament of healing which is commonly known as the Anointing of the Sick also has a link with the forgiveness of sins. Its scriptural basis is also found in the epistle of James chapter 5 where he instructs saying “Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned he will be forgiven.”
After having sketched briefly the 3 sacraments of forgiveness which have the power to neutralize our bad karma, I briefly mention that there are 4 sacraments of what we could call spiritual empowerment or sacraments of spiritual growth. 3 sacraments deal with cleaning up the negative liabilities we carry and the other 4 enable positive forward directional growth toward our common goal.
Without going into too much detail, the most powerful of the 4 spiritual growth sacraments is known as the Eucharist or more commonly Holy Communion. It is a sacrament of phenomenal power, because in it we ingest into our being the very Body and Blood of Jesus himself. This sacrament is the ongoing miracle that continues from the Last Supper where Jesus offered the first Eucharist.
With the 12 gathered around him at table, he took the bread, blessed it, broke it and proclaimed “This is my Body.” In the same way he took the cup and proclaimed “This is my Blood.” His joy was immense as he bestowed on us the gift of himself to remain with us always until the end of the world.
We dare not receive this sacrament if we are aware of serious sins which would heap much trouble upon us. As the Apostle Paul tells us, “Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.” But if with a good conscience we receive the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, we receive his divine life into ourselves which begins to change us and conform us to himself. This is why Jesus in the Gospel of John said, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life within you.”
Now I have completed this brief sketch of Christianity and its uniqueness in a world of many religions. The good news is that Jesus’ work has streamlined the process of the developing soul sparing it potentially many years of punishment and speeding it toward perfection.
In a world where there is often a sharp divide between Eastern and Western religion, it has been shown that there is a reconciliation between both extremes. The truth which is universal spans the gap between the two. Though a doctrine long forgotten, a Christian may believe in the pre-existence of the soul and the teaching of reincarnation which was mainstream in the West 2000 years ago. Ample scriptural and historical support allows him to do so. East and West have more in common than they think, and there is much that both sides can learn from each other about the process of salvation.