I have a
somewhat ambivalent relationship with the sun. Not the Son of God, Jesus, I
mean the big fiery thing in the sky, the sun with a ‘u.’ Most pragmatically,
like all life on this planet, of course, we’re totally dependent on it, both
for warmth and so that plants can grow and give us things to eat and oxygen to
breath. It also feels good. There’s just something about a sunny day that just
feels better. This time of year, the sun gets up right up when I do, which
makes getting up a lot easier. “Feeling the sun on your back” is a common expression
for the pleasantness of being out, being active, on a sunny day. But, given
that there is not a lot of a sun in the land of my people, my skin is pretty
terribly adapted to sun. I burn really easily. I have so little pigment in my
eyes that it’s actually really hard for me to see well on a very sunny day,
without shades for my glasses. Actually, in one place I lived, the place I went
for my eye exams was an optometry school, and the students and instructors would
always get excited when they started examining me because I’m so low on eye
pigment that, apparently, you can see various features of ocular anatomy on me
that you can’t easily in most people, because of the greater amount of pigment,
and they’d generally start calling people over to look at my eyes. Less
personally, I know what increased exposure to the sun’s rays is doing to our planet,
and its capacity to be hospitable to human life. Heat and light and the sun
play ambiguous roles in our lives: necessary, often pleasant, sometimes
onerous, potentially dangerous.
Even
without all the scientific knowledge I relied on just now, the church father
Origen used this ambiguity of the sun to help him understand how different
people react differently to God. He was troubled by the description from Exodus
that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, but he noted that the one sun will harden
clay, but melt butter. God pours forth brilliant grace, but different hearts
respond differently. For Origen, then, I suppose you were just meant to hope
that you were butter, and not clay.
Malachi
also used that ambiguity of the sun in his preaching, but he didn’t want people
to just sit back and hope they were made of the right stuff. In what we heard
from him as our first reading today, he talks about the coming of the Day of the
Lord, on which all evil will be burnt away but for “you who fear God’s name,”
they will enjoy the sun’s healing rays. In the next half-verse, that we didn’t
read, he tells his listeners that they will “go out leaping like calves from
their stalls.” Heat, warmth, light, sun, can be burning, or can be healing and
delightful. And Malachi tells us which it is depends on what our lives our oriented
to: evil works, or God’s name. A message like this can be a profound message of
hope: all that is not of God, all that is wrong with the world, will be burnt
away; there will be a day when God will not let it torment us anymore; and all
that afflicts us, even if it’s not evil, will be healed. But it should
also make us ask: what side are we on?
Malachi
was a profit who preached after the Jewish people had come back to Jerusalem,
after the exile in Babylon. The rebuilding of the Temple was well underway, but
life was not as idyllic as people had hoped it would be. A lot of Malachi’s ire
was reserved for corruption among the priests, but he has a decent amount of
ire left for the rest of the people too. He critiques the people for the twin
crimes of idolatry and mistreatment of the poor and marginalized. He lists out
sins of adultery, paying unjust wages, “thrusting aside the alien,” and not
fearing God. Malachi doesn’t seem to view these things as separate; putting
other things in place of God goes hand in hand for him with putting another
person in place of one’s spouse, or setting money or convenience over human dignity.
But
Malachi doesn’t just call people out; he calls them to have hope that God has a
solution. Several times in brief book we have from him, he describes the action
of God for which we wait as fire. Sometimes, as in the reading we heard today,
it’s a fire that burns away evildoers. But, in other parts of the book
of Malachi, he describes the fire as a refining fire, which he compares to
fuller’s soap. This image doesn’t divide the world into evildoers and god-fearing
goodies, but sees that fault line within each of us. When Malachi talks about fuller’s
soap, the Hebrew word is בֹורית which sounds
almost like בְרית, which means “covenant.” God cleans us up through his radical
covenant commitment to us. This process of being cleaned up doesn’t sound like
fun, because healing often isn’t fun. Visit a chemo patient, or talk to someone
working through some really hard things in counseling.
If the word you need to hear today is relief that evil
will be reduced to ashes, know relief. Know God will do that. But if you’re in
a position to look deeper into yourself, think about what needs to be burnt
away in you. We should try to eradicate all these things from ourselves while
we live, to grow in virtue, to turn from wrong, to love God and love neighbor.
But, if we can’t drive it all out ourselves, God can still keep on healing,
even after we die. That’s our Catholic belief in purgatory, that God can keep
on healing, get us ready for heaven, even after we die. Now, that might not be
a fun experience. It can even be painful. God’s ardent covenantal love is a
refining fire and a fuller’s soap. That’s why we pray for those souls in
purgatory, undergoing that healing, just as we do for people undergoing
difficult medical treatments, or working through difficult issues in therapy.
But, the end, the end is feeling the sun on your back, healing rays that can’t
burn any more, and leaping like calves, leaping with the purest joy, the joy of
the redeemed.
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