There is a curious detail in the third chapter of Luke’s Gospel. John the Baptist has been calling the people of Judea to repentance, and he does not mince his words. “He who is mightier than I is coming,” John proclaims. “He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Next we are told that the coming Christ will appear with a winnowing fork in his hand, in order to gather the wheat into his granary.
So far so good. Except that John immediately adds: “But the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Well, that certainly puts a damper on things. But we are not finished yet, because in the very next verse St Luke gives us this surprising comment: “So, with many other exhortations, he preached good news to the people.” Good news, you say? Tell that to the chaff
I speak in jest, of course, but in fact I think these lines from sacred scripture have a lot to teach us about the meaning of our Christian faith. The word Gospel comes from two Old English words meaning “good news”, which is a direct translation of the Greek word euaggelion. To be a Christian is to proclaim and live out the Gospel, and the Gospel is good news.
But we do not always pay sufficient attention to what that good news actually consists in. What makes it good? What makes it new? To answer these questions, we need to be clear about the state of humanity prior to receiving the Gospel. If Elon Musk finds out tomorrow that he has earned another $1,000 on the stock market, this will barely register as good news. But if you walk up to a homeless man and hand him a grand in cash, the reaction will look very different.
For increasing numbers of modern Christians, the state of humanity without the Gospel is much like Elon Musk sitting on his billions. Today many Catholics and Protestants alike hold the view that hell is virtually or completely empty. What these Christians are therefore committed to believing – unless they happen to be annihilationists, which most of them are not – is that all or virtually all human beings are going to live for ever in perfect happiness, regardless of whether they ever embraced Christ or chose to obey his teachings.
According to this line of thought, the vast majority of humanity is destined one day to enjoy spiritual riches which will make Elon Musk’s present fortune pale in comparison. The good news of Christianity can therefore be boiled down to this: we now know for sure that everybody is going to heaven. One perk of choosing to become a Christian is that you will get to help share this good news with others. But if you choose not to become a Christian, that is fine too, because your eternal fate will be no different from those who are Christian.
Now there is only one problem with this whole approach, which is that it is not true – at least, not according to John the Baptist, St Luke or Jesus. Recall the point with which we began. John tells his audience in no uncertain terms that the coming Messiah will divide the wheat from the chaff. This is sobering, but what is really significant is that St Luke seems to imply that this message of salvation and damnation is part and parcel of the good news John was sent to proclaim.
In other words, St Luke is telling us that in order to appreciate the good news, we first have to admit the bad news. If humanity’s spiritual condition prior to Christ’s coming were analogous to Elon Musk amassing his riches, then there would not be any bad news worth noting. But of course that is not our condition. As the Gospels repeatedly warn us, our spiritual state before and apart from Christ is much more analogous to the homeless man who possesses nothing and who will soon die from exposure to the elements if he does not get help.
“And when he comes,” says Jesus of the Holy Spirit, “he will convince the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgement” (John 16:8). This is good news that begins with the recognition that there is something wrong with us. Deep down, most of us know this to be true. We know that our hearts are not ordered as they should be, that our desires are often selfish, weak and cruel. We know that we are not living the kind of life that deserves the eternal bliss of heaven. We know that we need to be healed.
Consider a brief thought experiment. If I am experiencing severe stomach pain and I go to the doctor, arguably the worst possible outcome is for the doctor to say to me: “I cannot diagnose anything wrong with you; perhaps you are just imagining it.” As I am sitting in the doctor’s office, when I know for a fact that there is something wrong with me, what I want in that moment more than anything is bad news. I want confirmation of what I know in my heart to be true: I am sick and I need help.
Something similar holds true in our spiritual lives. We need to know the bad news about ourselves, because without it there is no prospect of us finding the good news that Christ brings. To tell a desperately sick person that there is nothing wrong with them is not good news; it is fake news.
“The Good News of Jesus,” wrote Abbot André Louf, “is first and foremost that we are sinners and that our sin has been forgiven.” That good news is dramatically brought home to us at the beginning of our Lenten journey. In the thousand-year-old tradition of anointing with ashes, we recognise that we are sinners in need of help.
And yet the cruciform shape of those ashes is there to remind us that our help has come. He became one of us and died on a cross, so that the bad news of sin and death would not have the last word, and so that all those who respond to his call might be gathered into his granary and so escape the unquenchable fire.
