A story is told of the final temptation of Christ. Satan had been trying to tempt Jesus to sin, to compromise, to abandon His divine mission (see Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13), and according to this story, Satan tried one last time to deflect Jesus from His goal. Jesus had been arrested, interrogated, condemned by the Sanhedrin, brought before Pilate, again condemned, mocked and flogged. He carried His cross along the way from the Roman praetorium to the place of execution and was nailed to the cross. His adversaries continued to mock Him, even unto the end: “He saved others, He cannot save Himself! He is the King of Israel; let Him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in Him!” (Matthew 27:42). And it was then, the story goes, that Satan whispered into His ear the words of the final temptation, intended to convince Jesus to give it all up and indeed come down from the cross. Satan said to Him, “They’re not worth it, Lord”.
“They’re not worth it, Lord”. The temptation was powerful, because the words were true. We were and are not worth it. Yet Christ remained on the cross, bearing away the sins of the unworthy world, cleansing the cosmos with His precious Blood, and overthrowing the demonic powers of darkness, breaking their ancient hold on the human race.
Let us be real clear: the words of Satan, though legendary, were true. We are not worth the suffering caused to the sinless Son of God. And yet of course that was why He suffered for us, the sinless for the sinful, the innocent for the guilty, the immortal God for mortal and dying men.
In our secular society, one of our basic and most fundamental dogmas is that human beings are worthy; that we are basically good at heart, and that the Church’s teachings about human sinfulness and guilt are simply oppressive lies, intended to deceive us and keep us down, the helpless victims of oppressive priests. But, secularism insists, human beings are supremely worthy and noble, a bit mistaken at times, but underneath it all, utterly admirable. We will soon enough overcome all our little foibles such as crime and war, build Utopia, and boldly go where no man (sorry: “no person”) has gone before. This view of human nature is our defining dogma, the unshakable belief undergirding everything we do, and fueling the World’s antipathy to the Church. Let’s hear it for the human race! Axios!
All the evidence—I mean, absolutely all the evidence, every single shred of it—suggests the contrary. We scarcely need to listen at the six o’clock news or read the history of the twentieth century (or of any century) to know that the secular dogma is wrong. In the wee and quiet hours of the morning we need only examine our own hearts to know that evil lurks within. That explains, for example, Germany in the 1930s: the Germans were not monsters, but people like us—just like us. That is why the Lord almost casually referred to the common man as “evil” in the Sermon on the Mount: “If you, being evil, (Greek πονηρός/ poneros) know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give what ais good to those who ask Him” (Matthew 7:11). He did not mean by this that everyone was a slavering sadist, killing innocent children and pulling the wings off of flies, but rather that given the right (or wrong) circumstances, anyone is capable of anything.
In this human unworthiness and evil, we see the immense condescension of God. And I cannot help but think of the story that Jesus People musician Terry Clark, told about his own conversion.
During 1969-1971 Terry served in the American military in Thailand. He said that at a listening station there, and, as he said, “had gone through some real traumatic changes”, seeing and experiencing monstrous atrocities, shocking brutality, and true evil. Because of this he said that he experienced what he called “a breaking inside and I just checked out”. Terry said that he concluded that “there was no way that the human existence could be justified. I made the conclusion, stepped over the little picket fence into na-na land that night, embarrassed, totally humiliated, that I was a human being because of all I’d seen human beings do and been through and participated in.” He said that therefore he “threw off all restraints” and “when you do this, pretty soon they come in white jackets and take you away”.
In fact, they took him to the hospital in Munich to the mental ward. Their diagnosis was “no hope”. He said that “they decided that the psychosis was too deep because I had seen death close to me and that I would never recover”.
It was then that he had an experience of Christ which changed his life. The Lord spoke to his heart and said to him, ‘Terry, I know how you feel. I’ve seen everything that human beings have ever done. But I want you to understand the difference in our response to that. You’ve decided not to be a human being, and I decided to become one.’ Terry went on to say, that then the Lord “took my emptied-out shell and flooded me, drowned me, in how He feels towards human beings. It crushed me, it drowned me, and I figured it was probably just a glimpse of how He feels towards human beings, but it was enough to almost kill me just from His passion He has for us His children”. Needless to say, this revelation caused a new diagnosis, and Terry was soon released.
Terry’s experience reveals that human beings indeed are anaxios and unworthy. But our evil is, in one sense, irrelevant, in that God still loves us nonetheless, and He sent His Son to become one of us, to die for us and to rise again, uniting human nature to Himself so that we could share His divine nature and find salvation. We are not worth saving, but Christ saved us anyway. No wonder our response to this is Eucharist—thanksgiving. Throughout all our life and into the endless ages to come, it is our joy to thank Him and glorify Him for saving us, the evil and unworthy.
The immensity of God’s love and condescension and the power of His salvation may be discovered in a tiny little verse in the Book of Revelation. In Revelation 3:4 the Lord describes the redeemed in these words: “they shall walk with Me in white, for they are worthy”.
They are just two little words in the Greek—axioi eisin—“they’re worthy”, but in those two words are hidden the whole transforming power of the Gospel. As St. Paul said, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things—all the evil, the unworthiness, the brokenness, the shame—all the old things have passed away. Behold, new things have come. Those redeemed by Christ will walk with Him in white, in radiance, in peace, in the joy of an upright heart, for He has made them worthy.
