Dawn is Not Day

Salvation takes time. It is not a binary state: saved/unsaved. Though justification does in fact belong to the heart of Christianity, justification must increase (which is called sanctification).

To get this wrong risks turning Christian election into partisanship, as if we are a remnant against the world. The truth is other: election is always only ever for mission. We are a remnant for the world. If we are called out of Babylon, chosen to be church, it’s because we have been entrusted with the responsibility to save the world. We are not Christian to save ourselves, which would be like a man pushing past women and children to get to the lifeboat.

There is no “they,” some party of the reprobate, against which we must war until the end of time. The enemy lies coiled within every human heart, the serpent-whisper to be the god of our own religion, even if some of us call our private, self-flattering, system by the noble name of “Christianity.”

To tell the world it is wrong (as we sometimes must, say, to defend the life and innocence of children) without at the same time reminding ourselves that we are wrong in ways we often cannot even see, betrays the necessity laid upon the Christian to grow in justification, turning us into pharisees and, therefore, into partisans of the Adversary rather than instruments of the Advocate wielded to rescue the crushed and the lost.

Our increasing justification requires wanting and working-for the justification of every single human being. This is the justice of love.

Yesterday’s matins reading continues Pope Saint Gregory the Great’s teaching on the need for a marrow-deep Christian humility, so that we do not replay the insufferable arrogance and obscenity of Job’s friends and Elihu, the comfortable accusing the anguished.

Having just seen a headline about an American delating a working father to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, I think of the moral horrors to which structural pharisaism leads, whether in the twisted soul of a nominal Christian, or of a worldly conservative or progressive. “Rep. Dan Donovan (R-SI, Brooklyn) said, ‘Liberal activists are attacking ICE agents and military personnel for following the law in detaining an immigrant reportedly here illegally.’” Truly this is to be possessed by the Adversary, doing literally satanic work: to pervert “law” into something other than an instrument of love. (In this case, the result is to leave this poor man’s children fatherless. What pharisees of left, right, and center all have in common is an absolute conviction of belonging to the party of the pure. They are the gnostic ones who securely possess the saving knowledge that sets them apart from and above and against the hopelessly lost. The surest test of such diabolical pride is to see how children fare at their hands: in their right to life, in their right to innocence and bodily integrity, in their right to have their mother and father raise them, in their right to the basic material and spiritual conditions of human flourishing.)

We are all prone to think ourselves the measure of reality, to think ourselves the perfected embodiment of the party of enlightenment. But a Christian must not continue in such darkness. To avoid our blaspheming Christianity, we must hear Saint Gregory:

“Since the daybreak or the dawn is changed gradually from darkness into light, the Church, which comprises the elect, is fittingly styled daybreak or dawn.

“…This reference to the dawn conjures up a still more subtle consideration. The dawn intimates that the night is over; it does not yet proclaim the full light of day. While it dispels the darkness and welcomes the light, it holds both of them, the one mixed with the other, as it were. Are not all of us who follow the truth in this life daybreak and dawn? While we do some things which already belong to the light, we are not free from the remnants of darkness. In Scripture the Prophet says to God: ‘No living being will be justified in your sight.’ Scripture also says: ‘In many ways all of us give offense.’”

What a pope; what a Christian! Let’s hear the truth that we are not the truth, though the Truth has begun to take hold of us.

Each of us is a corpus mixtum; the city of God and the city of man carry out their apocalyptic contest within each of us. If we do not persevere in submitting to the ordeals leading to increase of justification (including humiliation without which we cannot be humble), we betray justice. If we dare, like Job’s friends, if we dare tsk-tsk those who are more anguished than us, we can know our having backslid into the night.

The dawn becomes day when we seek our justification in the vindication of the suffering, the victims with whom the Victim identifies Himself without reserve. Sanctification means the collapse of the interval between us and the Crucified, leaving only one Body, one universally reconciled Body, in which Truth has comprehended and digested us.

Then will our justice shine forth like the noonday sun.