How can we fear God while we’re also told ‘Do not be afraid’?

19 C | 10 AUGUST 2025 | LUKE 12 32-48

Last week’s gospel was about a foolish rich man, whose foolishness was apparent in his avarice, the silliest of sins because it trades on the illusion of ownership. In this week’s gospel, avarice is once again shown to be the silliest of sins, this time because it is blind to the abundance that is already ours, an abundance that is due to sharing, not ownership. Everything we have, including life itself, has been shared with us. Jesus refers directly to this abundance when he says at the beginning of today’s gospel that “it has pleased your Father to give you the kingdom”. He then draws out three injunctions that follow from such great good fortune. He tells us, first, that if we have been given the kingdom of heaven, we can afford to be fearless; secondly, we can afford to sell everything else and give the proceeds to the poor; and lastly, we should be ever vigilant and alert, our loins girt and our lamps burning, because the Son of Man is coming at an hour we do not know and at a time we least expect. What’s interesting is that each of these injunctions appears to involve a paradox.

For instance, we’re told that we’re to be fearless and unafraid. “Do not be afraid” is repeated endlessly throughout the gospels by Jesus. And yet, we’re also constantly told that we must fear God. How is fearing God compatible with being fearless and unafraid? We understandably fear those who might harm us, as opposed, that is, to our friends, who have best interests at heart. But God calls us his friends precisely because he has our ultimate interests at heart. Fearing God surely can’t mean being afraid of him. On the contrary, it means the very opposite: in situations that would normally occasion fear, the ‘fear’ of God is manifest precisely in our fearing nothing and nobody (Gareth Moore). It is to be filled with a confidence and trust that nothing can disturb. To ‘fear’ God is not to live in dread of him, but rather to be in awe of his infinite goodness, beauty and unfailing love for us. It is to be conscious simultaneously of both all that we have and all that we lack; it is to experience what Peter experienced when he said to Jesus, “Leave me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”

The second injunction tells us that we should sell all our possessions and give the proceeds to the poor because in this way – and this way alone – we will “lay up treasure” for ourselves in heaven. But again, this too seems paradoxical. It appears to be advising us to lay up decidedly better treasure for ourselves, an act not so much of generosity as shrewd self-interest: a worldly counsel, in other words. Another difficulty with this seemingly paradoxical advice concerns the poor in whose direction we shift our wealth. By the same logic, will not they be disadvantaged by having that of which we’ve disburdened ourselves? What about their “treasure in heaven”? Look at what happened to the first Franciscans, who were dirt-poor by choice: such was the pity for their plight on the part of the people among whom they lived that they were soon living in gracious cloisters and enjoying the bounty of the rich and even the Crown. (Wittgenstein famously gave his vast inheritance to his already vastly wealthy sister, saying that it wouldn’t corrupt her, since she was already rich.)

The key is to realise that “laying up treasure in heaven” means not laying up treasure anywhere. To lay up treasure in heaven is to find our security not in things – not even in spiritual things – but in God. It is to be disburdened altogether of anxiety-generating acquisitiveness and silly avarice. “Treasure in heaven” can never be lost, because there’s nothing, quite literally no ‘thing’ to lose. To lay up treasure in heaven is to switch from getting to giving, from having to being. And, yet, to have treasure in heaven, is to have everything: which is why Saint Francis of Assisi spoke of himself not as poor but rich. His poverty wasn’t about having nothing but about having everything he needed. And finally, our Lord tells us: “Let your loins be girt and your lamps burning: stand ready, for the Son of Man will come at an hour you do not expect”.

Now this saying has often been understood to refer to the dreaded day of judgement, the day of wrath and final reckoning, when all our misdeeds will receive their just deserts and condign punishment, the Dies irae, dies illa/Solvet saeclum in favilla, the stuff of “hell, fire and damnation” sermons, beloved of a generation of preachers who seemed never so animated or cheered than when contemplating the eternal damnation of their flocks. But, again, though it does refer, at least in part, to the coming of Christ and future judgement, that judgement is not best understood according in the terms of those blood-curdling sermons. Whatever else it will be, judgement will occur when partial truth meets Truth itself; when the intimations of beauty and goodness we experience in this life, come face to face with Beauty and Goodness itself; when all that is relative meets the Absolute; when the mystery which is us, meets the Mystery which is God; when, by acknowledging all our failings and sins, we will be disburdened of them and know for the first time perfect beauty, truth and love.

But all of this we will be free to choose or reject. And we will be we able freely to choose then, only with the self that we have become through our free choices now, in this life. In this sense, we are our own judges, and judgment is happening now. Herbert McCabe used to say that the state of mind of those in Hell – if, that is, there is anybody in Hell – is one of denial, endlessly and petulantly complaining that there must be some mistake, they don’t understand what it is they have done wrong. They are unable to acknowledge their need of forgiveness and so cannot say, with Peter, “Leave me, Lord, for I am a sinful man”. In other words, they damn themselves because, even though they are offered God’s utter goodness and beauty and the certainty of his unfailing love, their vision has been distorted, they are now unable to see things as they are, unable to recognise their great good fortune.