No fear – Easter 5, 1 May 2015

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. [I John 4:18]

Fear has to do with punishment…  Guilt and fear go together.  But guilt, fear and punishment are among the foundation assumptions of our secular culture – and also, I fear (!), quite a bit of our Christian version of it.  It seems logical and just to people that offenders be caught and punished proportionately to their offence.  When victims complain that they have not got justice, what they usually mean is that the offender has not been sufficiently punished, named and shamed.  Fear is seen as necessary if you are guilty.  Threats of revenge, payback, are meant to instil fear.  The frequent cliché is that people who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear.

But it’s deeper than all that.  God is seen as exacting retribution, making us pay for our sins, real or imagined.  Someone upon whom calamity has fallen asks what they did wrong.  A child harmed is always somehow an “innocent” child, as though that was ever the issue, as though it might be better if the child had been wicked.  Never mind that Jesus explicitely damned all this kind of thinking in what we know as the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere, and that his teachings have been read and taught in church for 20 centuries… we still persist in seeing life as a matter of rewards and punishments.  I have conducted funerals in which the deceased was lauded as a kindly old bloke, when in fact, as everyone knew, many to their cost, he was rancid old tyrant whom only God could love.  Once or twice I suggested as much, with results which live in my memory. 

Jesus teaches, St Paul teaches, and here St John teaches, that the Spirit of the Risen Christ brings us day by day, year by year, as we consent, to a life in which love has progressively less room for fear.  Faith is not, and never was, about reward and punishment, divine or otherwise.  The greatest fears, the fear of death, of pain, of separation, of loss, of helplessness, even the fear of shame – we become aware eventually that these fears in us are looming ever smaller.  It is that the ego is being relegated to its proper place, which is not in control.  The ego is learning not to be afraid, not to defend itself so much, not to stand guard all the time.  It is a freedom.  A freedom from fear. 

This is one of the central issues of contemplative life and prayer.  As time goes by, we find we are less interested in control, and we are shedding our fear of guilt, of mortality, of human frailty, of what might happen.  The quiet confidence of love is replacing fear, and we deeply consent to be “in Christ”, in life and in death.