'Woe to You, Chorazin! Woe to You, Bethsaida!'

Joyless Moralist, commenting on a recent post, brought up a passage from the Gospel of Luke which some have found troubling.  Jesus is speaking, at the time when He is sending out His apostles to preach the Gospel the first time-- not after the Resurrection, but while He is still alive.  In cities that receive them with joy, they are to heal the sick and say 'The kingdom of God has come near you.'  But:

whatever city you enter, and they do not receive you, go out into the streets and say, 'The very dust of your city which clings to us we wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this, that the kingdom of God has come near you.' But I say to you that it will be more tolerable that Day [meaning the Day of Judgment?] for Sodom [a notoriously wicked city from the Old Testament which was destroyed by the wrath of God after its inhabitants tried to gang-rape three travelers, among other sins] than for that city.

Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you. And you, Capernaum, who are exalted to heaven, will be brought down to Hades. (Luke 10: 10-15)

How is all this consistent with God's justice, let alone His mercy?  Surely a merciful God would not desire to bring cities down to "Hades" (which I think is the same as the Jewish Sheol, and perhaps as the Christian Hell; I don't know the relationship between Hades, Sheol, and the "fiery gehenna" and "outer darkness" mentioned elsewhere).  And on what grounds would a just God punish cities which merely declined to receive certain itinerant preachers, or which did not regard the occurrence of certain miracles as an inducement to change their lifestyles?

But this may the wrong question.  For does Jesus actually curse or merely predict?  The "woe to you" sounds a bit like a curse, but can be read, I think, as a sorrowful prediction of the consequences of their failure to repent (of actions which they knew by conscience, and not merely by revelation, were evil, even if they had lost their awareness of it to some extent through the dulling effect of sin on conscience).  And indeed, without Christ, who of us is not destined to be "brought down to Hades" in due course?   

Homer envisioned the "strengthless dead" in the shadowy underground realm of Hades.  The Jewish Sheol was a similarly shadowy place which it was best not to think about too much.  The modern poet A.E. Housman focuses obsessively on death, in poems like this:

WITH rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping	5
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

And this:

ON your midnight pallet lying,
Listen, and undo the door:
Lads that waste the light in sighing
In the dark should sigh no more;
Night should ease a lover’s sorrow;	5
Therefore, since I go to-morrow,
Pity me before.
In the land to which I travel,
The far dwelling, let me say—
Once, if here the couch is gravel,	10
In a kinder bed I lay,
And the breast the darnel smothers
Rested once upon another’s
When it was not clay.

And this:

WHEN I watch the living meet,
And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street
Where I lodge a little while,
If the heats of hate and lust	5
In the house of flesh are strong,
Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.
In the nation that is not
Nothing stands that stood before;	10
There revenges are forgot,
And the hater hates no more;
Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
And the bridegroom all night through	15
Never turns him to the bride.

And this:

WHEN I meet the morning beam,
Or lay me down at night to dream,
I hear my bones within me say,
‘Another night, another day.
‘When shall this slough of sense be cast,	5
This dust of thoughts be laid at last,
The man of flesh and soul be slain
And the man of bone remain?
‘This tongue that talks, these lungs that shout,
These thews that hustle us about,	10
This brain that fills the skull with schemes,
And its humming hive of dreams,—
‘These to-day are proud in power
And lord it in their little hour:
The immortal bones obey control	15
Of dying flesh and dying soul.
‘’Tis long till eve and morn are gone:
Slow the endless night comes on,
And late to fulness grows the birth
That shall last as long as earth.	20
‘Wanderers eastward, wanderers west,
Know you why you cannot rest?
’Tis that every mother’s son
Travails with a skeleton.
‘Lie down in the bed of dust;	25
Bear the fruit that bear you must;
Bring the eternal seed to light,
And morn is all the same as night.
‘Rest you so from trouble sore,
Fear the heat o’ the sun no more,	30
Nor the snowing winter wild,
Now you labour not with child.
‘Empty vessel, garment cast,
We that wore you long shall last.
—Another night, another day.’	35
So my bones within me say.
Therefore they shall do my will
To-day while I am master still,
And flesh and soul, now both are strong,
Shall hale the sullen slaves along,	40
Before this fire of sense decay,
This smoke of thought blow clean away,
And leave with ancient night alone
The stedfast and enduring bone.

Yes, the rose-lipt maidens and light-foot lads fade and fall asleep; yes, we live for only a "little hour" and leave nothing but bones; yes, our thoughts, our souls, are but "smoke" and "dust"; yes, we are destined to lie in that "couch of gravel," to join the "nation that is not," where "the bridegroom all night through never turns him to the bride"... unless we can be somehow be changed, resurrected, made immortal.  Woe not only to Chorazin and Bethsaida, but to all of us, unless death can somehow be revoked, and we can scarcely imagine how.  That is what Jesus offers us, that is the Gospel, the "good news"-- that we can be saved, that there will be a "new heaven and a new earth," that we will inherit eternal life.  It may not be surprising, then, that such a strange and wonderful gift should come with strange and austere conditions attached, not indeed so that God will be willing to give it to us, but that we may be able to receive it. 

C.S. Lewis writes that:

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God: 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says: 'Thy will be done.'  All that are in Hell, choose it.  Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.  No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.  Those who seek find.  To those who knock it will be opened. (The Great Divorce, pp. 72-73)

Chorazin and Bethsaida were shown a path out of the human predicament of sin and mortality, and declined to take it.  They probably did not see it that way-- we often see things falsely in our blindness and self-deceit-- but they were rejecting salvation.  By this account, it was they themselves that brought the woe, while Christ merely observed it, sadly.  At any rate, something like this is the only way I can see to reconcile 'woe to you, Bethsaida!' with the justice and mercy of God.

Comments

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