The Meaning of Holiness

 

This week is Holy Week – the week in the Christian Kalendar (liturgical calendar) that begins with Palm Sunday, ends with Holy Saturday, the eve of Easter, and includes Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.  Each of these days is a remembrance of important events that took place in the week immediately prior to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the event remembered on Easter itself.     The account of the events of this week and of the Resurrection itself occupy about a third of each of the Synoptic Gospels and just under a half of the Gospel according to St. John.   The Death and Burial of Christ, along with His Resurrection are the events proclaimed in the Christian Gospel (1 Cor. 15:3-4).   That it commemorates the most important events in Christian salvation history, the events at the heart of the Christian kerygma, explains why this week is Holy Week.  In this essay we will be considering the what rather than the why.   What does it mean to say that a week – or anything else for that matter – is holy?

 

Probably the most common mistake made about holiness – the condition of being holy – today is to regard it as being the same thing as purity.   It is a subtle mistake since holiness and purity are very much related.   The concept of separation or apartness is essential to both.   (1)     Purity, however, is a separation in which the from is emphasized.   Water is pure, when it is has been separated from all contaminants or, as we are more likely to think of it, when all contaminants have been separated from it, by a filter, for example.   Holiness, by contrast, is a separation that emphasized that for which something has been set apart.   Something is made holy by being set aside for God.    While holiness implies and includes the kind of separation involved in purity – you cannot separate something unto God without separating it from something else – the reverse is not the case, you can separate something from something else without separating it unto God or anything else.    That having been said, holiness, properly understood, does not have the same implications about that from which the holy has been separated as purity does.   When something is consecrated – made holy by being set aside for God – this suggests that everything that has not been consecrated, everything from which the holy has been set apart, is ordinary, everyday, common and mundane, but not necessarily that it is in some way bad.

 

The Fourth Commandment (2) illustrates this point:

 

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.   Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.  (Exodus 20:8-11)

 

The commandment is to keep the Sabbath holy.   The rest of the passage is the explanation of the commandment.     It would be absurd to read into this that the labour in which the Israelites were engaged during the rest of the week was bad or sinful.   That is obviously not what we are supposed to take away from this.   Rather, the point of it all is that for this day to be reserved for God, it had to be kept apart from the usage of ordinary weekdays, and hence from their labour, good and necessary as that may happen to be.  

 

The word “reserved” is an especially good one for explaining the meaning of holiness.   We all understand the concept of a restaurant table or a hotel room or a cabin at a ski resort being “reserved”.   This is what happens when the restaurant, hotel, or resort takes the table, room or cabin out of general availability and reserves its use for a specific party.   If you think of God as having made a reservation for one day out of the seven (the Sabbath), one nation out of the nations of the world (Israel), one tribe of priests out of that nation (the Levites), one building and its furnishings (the Tabernacle/Temple) so that they are no longer generally available but are set aside for His Own use this will give you a pretty good grasp of the notion of holiness as it applies to people, places, and things other than God Himself.        

 

The holiness of God Himself, it needs to be noted, cannot be explained this way.   Try it and you will see just how strange it sounds.   Earthly holiness, however, is the illustration God has given us of His Own holiness.    The better we understand earthly holiness – how the Sabbath, Tabernacle, etc. were holy – the better a picture we will have of God’s holiness, provided that we remember that as an illustration of God’s Own holiness, earthly holiness is rather like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave and that analogies can only go so far in what they say about God before they become mostly apophatic, that is, telling us what God is not like rather than what He is like.    When used of God Himself, holiness speaks of His supreme transcendence over all Creation that makes all earthly holiness seem ordinary and common by comparison.   A glimpse of it, such as that which the prophet Isaiah caught in his vision of the divine throne room and the seraphim singing the Sanctus, invites the prophet’s response: “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seek the King, the LORD of hosts” (Is. 6:5).

 

In the Old Testament, the Ceremonial Law – the dietary restrictions separating “clean” from “unclean” animals, the designating of the weekly Sabbath and certain annual Feasts as holy days, the establishment of the Tabernacle/Temple, priesthood, and sacrificial system and the elaborate instructions for consecrating everything involved in these – well illustrates the earthly holiness, the setting of times and places and people and things aside and reserving them for God, that is itself an illustration of God’s transcendent holiness.    In the events that we remember in Holy Week, Jesus Christ fulfilled the Old Testament promises that God would establish a New Covenant that would be superior to the Mosaic Covenant of which the Ceremonial Law was a part.    In the Book of Acts and the epistles of St. Paul, the New Testament makes it quite clear that the Ceremonial Law of the Mosaic Code is not binding upon the Church established under the New Covenant.   The reason for this is also made clear – in the Church, believers in Jesus Christ whether they be Jew or Gentile, are united in one body and so that which had kept them apart is removed.

 

This does not mean that holiness is any less important under the New Covenant than under the Old.   The New Testament frequently speaks of holiness, most often in reference to God, with the vast majority of these references being mentions of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, i.e., the Holy Spirit.  The Scriptures, prophets, city Jerusalem, Temple, Sinaitic Covenant, and angels are all called holy.   There are also uses of the term that are distinct to the New Testament.    It is applied to both individual Christians and to Churches.  In the salutation at the beginning of almost all of his epistles, St. Paul addresses the members of the Churches to which he is writing as “holy ones”, or, as the Authorized Bible renders this expression, “saints”.  (3)    The Church is called a “holy temple”, a “holy priesthood” and a “holy nation” (4) and the root of her very name in the original Greek New Testament has connotations similar to those of the words meaning holy. (5)

 

In reference to Christian believers and Churches, holiness can either be something attributed to us on account of what Jesus Christ accomplished for us by His Death (Heb. 10:14) or it can be something to which we are called to strive (Heb. 12:14, 1 Pet 1:15-16).   Clearly there is a difference between these two kinds of holiness and the difference is comparable to that between two different kinds of righteousness that the New Testament also speaks about, that which St. Paul discusses at length in his epistle to the Romans as being credited to the believer on the basis of grace (Rom. 4) and that which St. James attributes to the believer’s works (Jas. 2:14-26).   It should not be assumed that because of this parallel usage in the New Testament holiness has become merely another word for righteousness.   Holiness retains its primary meaning from the Old Testament of being reserved or set apart for God.  By His Sacrifice on the Cross, Jesus Christ has reserved us who believe in Him, individually and as the spiritual society that is His Church, for Himself.   By the same Sacrifice He has taken away our sins and given to us the righteousness whereby we are accepted by God.    Although accomplished by the same Saviour in the same Sacrifice these are two different things and our understanding and appreciation of what our Saviour has done for us is diminished if we blur them into one.   Similarly, when St. Peter calls us to be “holy in all manner of conversation (6)” (1 Petr 1:15) the holiness of which he writes must be distinguished from what is often called practical righteousness.   Since both pertain to everyday behaviour it might be harder to conceptualize the difference here, but think of practical righteousness and practical holiness as two different aspects of the behaviour to which the Christian is called.   Practical righteousness is the aspect defined by it being right rather than wrong.   Holiness, however, is the aspect that sets it apart from the behaviour of the world.  The opposite of the holiness to which the Christian is called is worldliness.   Worldliness is the condition of being of the world.   “The world” in this sense of the word means neither “God’s Creation” nor “human civilization” but rather the evil that operates in these and which forms, along with the flesh in the sense of the evil in fallen human nature and the devil the triumvirate of the Christian’s spiritual enemies.   It consists, St. John tells us, of “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 Jn. 2:16).   Worldliness is conformity to these things, holiness is being set apart unto God from them.  

 

That the New Testament does not provide the Church with a lengthy and elaborate set of rules about consecrating places and times to replace the Ceremonial Law of the Old Testament does not mean that reserving these things for God is any less important under the New Covenant than the Old.   The Old Covenant operated on the principle of Law.   The New Covenant, the Covenant of the Gospel, operates on the principles of Grace and Liberty.   The Christian’s liberty, St. Paul tells us in several places, is not to be used as a license to sin and the Christian living out his liberty under the Gospel should, actually, manifest a higher level of righteousness than that attainable under the Law.   Since, as we have seen, holiness is no less important under the New Testament than the Old, what is true of righteousness is true of holiness as well.   Those who take Christian liberty to mean that the Church, no longer under the Ceremonial Law that separated Israel from the Gentile nations, ought not to consecrate the spaces and places in which she meets to God, or to reserve the day of Resurrection for God each week as the Lord’s Day, or to set Holy Feasts and Fasts in commemoration of the events of the Gospel such as those remembered this week have twisted the matter entirely beyond recognition.   Christian liberty means that the Church is free to do precisely this and since her appreciation of and capacity for holiness ought to be greater under the Covenant of Christian liberty than what was available under the Law and we should expect more places, people, and days to be reserved for God under the Gospel than under the Law rather than fewer and have no business sneering at the holy days celebrated in Christian liberty in remembrance of the Gospel as “man-made” or “pagan”.

 

   (1)   The primary words used for “holy” in the Hebrew Old Testament – קָדוֹשׁ (qadosh), Greek New Testament -  ἅγιος  (hagios), and in the Latin liturgy – sanctus, all belong to word families  that stress the ideas of  “separate”, “set apart” or even “cut”, as do the primary English synonyms for “holy” – “sacred” and the archaic “hallowed”   Oddly enough, this is not the case with the word “holy” and its German cognate heilig.   These belong to a family of words including “health” and “whole” which would seem to have almost the opposite flavor, that of completeness rather than separation.

   (2)   This is the Fourth Commandment by the Jewish, Reformed, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox systems of numbering the Commandments.   The Roman Catholics and Lutherans number it as the Third Commandment.

   (3)   Obviously this does not apply to the epistles addressed to individuals rather than Churches.   Interestingly though, in his epistle to Philemon he twice uses the same term to refer to the Christians in the Colossian Church to which Philemon belonged.   In his first epistle to the Thessalonians he uses a similar expression “holy brethren”, albeit at the end of the epistle when he gives instructions for its reading (5:27).   In Hebrews there is no formal salutation at the beginning of the epistles, but he calls those to whom he is writing “holy brethren” in one spot (3:1), and instructs his readers to “salute…all the saints” at the end (13:24).    This leaves the Galatians as the notable exception to the rule.

   (4)   St. Paul twice speaks about a “temple of God” in 1 Corinthians.   The second time, the nineteenth verse of the sixth chapter, would seem from the context to be talking about the literal, physical, bodies of the Corinthian believers.   The first time, however, in the third chapter verses 16-17, which begin with “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God”, the wording suggests that they are collectively the temple of God, meaning that the Corinthian Church is in view, which makes sense considering that schism is the topic that is being addressed in this earlier section of the epistle.   The references to the Church as a “holy priesthood” and “holy nation” come from 1 Peter, verses 2:5 and 2:9 respectively.   St. Peter is addressing the same mostly Jewish Christians in what we now call Turkey to whom St. Paul wrote the epistle of Hebrews and in these verses he makes his point by employing the Old Testament’s language regarding Israel.

   (5)    Ἐκκλησία when used in non-religious contexts would usually be translated “assembly”.   The legislative assembly of Athens, for example, was called by this word.   It was formed by adding the preposition meaning “out of” in both Greek and Latin to the verb καλέω which means exactly what it sounds like as it shares a common ancestor with its English equivalent “I call”.    The “assembly” is formed of those who are “called out” (cf. Rev. 5:9-10).       

   (6)   “Conversation” in the English of the Authorized Bible does not mean what it means in present day usage.   We use it to mean talking to each other.   In 1611 it meant conduct or behaviour as carried out in society, in the company of others.

The Witches' Sabbat

The hour of midnight was quickly approaching on the eve of the day set aside in the liturgical calendar of Western Christendom for the remembrance of all the saints. On the gloomy peak of a craggy mountain a bonfire crackled and blazed, awaiting the arrival of a congregation that would shortly be gathering around it with somewhat less holy intentions than those who on the morrow would flock to their parishes to partake in the sacrament on that high feast day. The black draped altar, visible in the light of the flames, bore testimony to the fact that a mass of a very different nature would be taking place there that night.

One by one, flying on broomsticks through the dark skies, propelled by the power for which they had long ago traded their souls, they arrived – the sisters of the night. When all were present and accounted for, the high priestess addressed the coven:

“Dear sisters I bid you welcome, on this, the most sacred of our sabbat nights. As I am sure you are all aware, this year’s Samhain is a particularly important one. That for which we have long dreamed and planned is about to take place. Four hundred years ago, the settlers of New England hanged and burned our predecessors. Now, in a week’s time, one of our own is set to be elected to the highest position in the country that grew out of New England, the most powerful position in all the world.”

The eyes of all present turned from the speaker to look upon the crone in question, who stood there rubbing her hands and cackling with sinister glee.

“The master himself will explain more about the significance of this event. The witching hour has arrived and the time is now come to summon him.”

The hags stepped into a large circle containing a chalked inverted pentagram and joining hands chanted the incantation that would call their diabolical overlord into their midst. Behind the black altar, the air split and sulfurous flames burst forth from a portal to Tartarus that had opened up. Out of this door stepped a sinister, horned, fiend. The sisters of the night began to applaud and to chant his name.

“Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!”

“Thank you, thank you everyone,” Lucy (1) said.

“Ladies, our moment has finally arrived. Two thousand years ago the Son of our enemy entered this world and altered history. Now it is our turn. This year will witness the rise of my daughter who will usher in a thousand years of darkness. Step forward daughter.”

The presidential candidate stepped forward and knelt before the devil.

“You have been the most faithful of all my servants. I made Mick and Keith famous, but they forgot all about me. Even Ozzie has not always been there for me when I needed him. But you, my dear, you have never let me down.”

“Millennia ago, such ancient peoples as the Ammonites, Hittites, and Carthaginians worshipped me under various names – Moloch, Kronos, Baal – and sacrificed their children to me. Your sisterhood, driven underground during the era named after the Son of our enemy, has kept this sacred practice alive all these years, practicing it in secret. Now, with the help of my friends in the judiciary it is openly, freely and publicly practiced again. No more need for gingerbread houses and other such ruses. It is legally protected now, in the name of women’s health and rights. Hah hah. As if the women who sacrifice their children to me in this way had not sold their womanhood to me along with their souls. Hah hah.”

The sisterhood cackled with mirth at this.

“You, my dear, are the avowed champion of this, our sacred rite, and for this you will be greatly rewarded. With the help of the corporate media, which has long done my bidding, you will soon be ruler of the new empire that has arisen to take the place of my Babylon of old. With the help of your military-industrial complex cronies you will lead this empire into the battle with Gog and Magog that was prophesied in the book of our enemy so long ago. We, however, will emerge triumphant from that conflict and you will rule the world in my name.”

The assembly of witches cheered and the meeting moved on from being a political rally to an orgy of wild revelry in which they were joined by demons, monsters, ghouls, and all the foul creatures of darkness that haunt the nightmares of men and roam the earth on the eve of All Hallows.

These proceedings had not gone by unobserved. From a hiding place behind a cloud above the mountain, two visitors from the celestial sphere had seen and heard everything without being detected themselves.

With a troubled look on his visage, St. Gabriel asked St. Michael what he thought of all of this.

“It is the same old Lucy”, St. Michael answered. “He has made these promises to many other ambitious would-be world conquerors in the past.”

“He seems confident that he will be able to put that horrible witch into office and win the battle of Armageddon.”

“His pride has always been his undoing. He was confident that he would be able to win that insurrection he stirred up in heaven too.”

“What is going to happen?”

“I don’t know any more than you do. If Lucy manages to get his daughter into power and if she starts the battle of Armageddon, the outcome will not be what Lucy has promised his followers, for the Lord has said that when that conflict finally does come, He will return to earth and defeat the forces of Lucy’s champion personally. He has not confided in me – or anyone else for that matter – whether this is that time or not.”

“Do you think Lucy will succeed in giving her the power she craves?”

“It is difficult to say. The path that he has set her on to power is that of popular election and so the outcome depends upon the free will of a large number of people. Those people have been given a trump card to play against Lucy if they so choose.”

“Mortal free will has often seemed to serve Lucy’s purposes more than ours.”

“It seems that way, yes, but don’t forget that it was a gift of divine grace given to them just as it was to us. Without the assistance of further grace it has served Lucy’s purposes in the past but only so far as the Lord allows. The Lord is merciful and frequently extends that further grace.”

“Will He do so this time? I hope for the sake of the mortals that He does.”
“I don’t know. As with the day and hour of His Second Coming He is not revealing anything until the time arrives. He has assigned to us, as He has to the mortals, the role of having faith.”

“I know. Things are looking pretty dark though.”

“I agree,” said St. Michael “but there is an old saying of the mortals which, slightly modified, may provide a little bit of comfort and hope.”

“What is that?”

St. Michael smiled and said:

“The night is always darkest before the Donald”.




(1) Lucy, short for Lucifer, has previously appeared in Lucy’s Day in Court and Justice for Minnie.

Lucy’s Day in Court – A Short Story

Justice Bob Baddecision of the Ontario Inferior Court, was having a good day. Upon his arrival at the courthouse that morning, the first case he had heard had been one of disputed possession. Old Bill Fussbudget had filed a complaint that his neighbour, Jimmy Jackanapes had been stealing fruit from his apple tree. Last year it had been Jimmy who had laid the exact same complaint, regarding the exact same tree, against Bill. This had been going on, back and forth, for years. The tree lay right on the line between their adjacent properties and while inspectors had been sent out to assess the matter more times than either man could count, none had been able to come to a definitive decision as to which party held the legitimate title to the tree, which bore fruit that could rival the juiciest and tastiest of any grown commercially in the Niagra region.

Enter Justice Baddecision. In a decision, that he felt certain would go down in the annals of jurisprudence as the greatest display of wisdom since the days of King Solomon, he issued an order that the tree be cut down and chopped into firewood, half of which was to be given to one man and the other half to the other. When this ruling was announced, at first the courtroom fell silent, undoubtedly out of awe and admiration at the judicious manner in which a bitter dispute that had vexed the community for years had been resolved. When, after a few moments of this silence, the plaintiff recovered his voice sufficiently to ask what was to become of the current crop of apples, the last that the tree would ever bear, he was told that the apples were being taken into custody by the court.

On an entirely unrelated note, allow me to mention that Justice Baddecision and his wife were famous for their homemade apple cider, which had won numerous awards at municipal and provincial fairs. Later that year – and again, I must stress that this is told merely as a point of interest – they would finally win the coveted national award upon which they had set their sights for so very long.

Having started the day so well, the worthy judge awarded himself an early lunch from which he returned to the courthouse at a leisurely pace, to hear the case of John J. Moneygrubber versus Mrs. Poorwidow. The plaintiff, as it turns out, had become the owner of a house in which Mrs. Poorwidow and her family had formerly been tenants, when he bought the mortgage from a bank that was selling off its bad loans. Mrs. Poorwidow had been unable to make her mortgage payments ever since her husband died in Afghanistan. The small amount of money she was able to make in her part-time job went to feeding and clothing her eighteen children. Mr. Moneygrubber had foreclosed on the mortgage almost immediately upon buying it, but the defendant had resisted leaving, as she and her children had no other place to go. Now Mr. Moneygrubber was asking for an injunction ordering the lady and her brood to vacate the premises immediately.

Justice Baddecision, fair-minded and conscientious fellow that he was, carefully listened to the cases presented by both sides. He heard Mr. Moneygrubber argue that Mrs. Poorwidow was maliciously preventing him from tearing down her house and paving over the lot to provide extra parking for his building next door. He heard Mrs. Poorwidow explain how she had fallen through the cracks of Canada’s generous social safety net, having been told by social assistance workers time and again that she did not qualify since she had a job and was not a member of a visible minority, and that if evicted she and her children would be literally living on the streets. Then he made his decision.

He issued the injunction evicting Mrs. Poorwidow from her home, and awarded Mr. Moneygrubber $50, 000 in damages to boot, even though that had not been asked for, because he felt the remark about visible minorities to be a racist one which offended his progressive, liberal, sensibilities. Besides, he knew that section of town and its dreadful lack of adequate parking well, and who was this Mrs. Poorwidow to stand in the way of progress, anyway. Especially when it caused so much grief for his friend Mr. Moneygrubber, a member of his club, whom he golfed with frequently, and with whom he had enjoyed lunch just the other day.

Yes, the justice was having a very good day indeed. Full of self-satisfaction over the masterful way he had handled these two cases, he leaned back in his chair. He imagined he heard angels, chanting in Latin, singing the praises of his wisdom and justice.

Wait a minute.

The justice leaned forward. He had not imagined it. That was Latin he was hearing. Well, Latin of a sort. What he was hearing was being sung backwards. Not backwards in the sense of the fake, pig-Latin of schoolchildren, but real Latin sung backwards.

Was that the Mass being sung in reverse?

What the devil was going on here?

The justice looked around for a possible source of this peculiar chant but at the moment, with the sole exception of himself, the courtroom appeared to be empty. Could it be coming from outside the building?

Then, it seemed like the courthouse was hit by an earthquake. The room began to shake, the lights went on and off several times, and then a huge crack opened up in the floor. Out of the crevice flames burst forth, giving off a pungent odour, like unto that of rotten eggs.

Someone must have caused an explosion in the basement, Baddecision thought, forgetting for the moment the weird backwards Latin. Then he saw something that nearly stopped his heart.

From the weird, sulfuric flames, which oddly seemed to be casting off darkness instead of light, arose a being. A monstrous being, it was at least five times the size of a human being, with the torso and arms of a man, but the head and legs of a goat, with huge reptilian wings, and a pointed tail. Around its huge, curved horns, a nimbus of darkness hung. Around its neck was a necklace of human skulls. It opened its hideous mouth and out came the most horrible sound you could ever imagine, as if a choir of hissing serpents and howling jackals had teamed up with an orchestra of fingernails against chalkboards, screeching brakes and tires, and rusty hammers falling angrily against anvils to perform Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire while every human soul the beast had ever swallowed screamed out in agony. The creature radiated pure, malevolent evil that struck the judge with a sense of oppression, horror, disgust, and terror all at once.

Then the creature underwent a metamorphosis. Before the judge's eyes it shrunk in stature to the size of an ordinary man. Its non-human features began to disappear, leaving only cloven hooves and horn stumps to indicate the true identify of a distinguished looking man, with long dark hair tied in a ponytail, a goatee, wearing a very expensive, designer suit. The dark halo vanished and an aura of light, albeit a light that looked wrong somehow, as if it had been broken eons ago, began to surround the man.

The judge, horrified at the evidence of his own eyes that the ministers in the United Church he had attended since a boy, who had all assured him that the fiend that stood before him now could not possibly exist and was a superstitious invention of primitive peoples that we all know better than to take seriously these days, were rather ill informed, and, to be quite blunt about the matter, wrong, shook in fear.

“Relax, Your Honour”, the Prince of Darkness began, “I am…”

“I know who you are,” the quivering justice sputtered, “you are the…”

“The devil, Satan, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, etc. ad naseum”, the fiend finished. “Yes, I have been called by many names. Since we are in a court of law I will go by my original name, Lucifer. You can call me Lucy for short as that is what I prefer”.

“ Lucy? That’s a girl’s name!” the judge, who was beginning to regain his composure, said with a sneer.

All of a sudden a trident appeared in the devil’s hand, and, as he pointed it at the justice, menacing looking lightning jumped from tine to tine.

Judge Baddecision straighted up completely and said “Who do you think you’re trying to scare with that pitchfork of yours.”

Putting the trident down, Lucy responded “That’s odd. It works most of the time.”

“You obviously haven’t met my mother-in-law”, Baddecision retorted. “After being subjected to her tongue for twenty minutes you will fear no other sharp object ever again.”

“Don’t get me started on mothers-in-law.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I had a mother-in-law once. Thousands of years ago, back before the Flood. I met this chick, a real sweet little thing, and drop-dead gorgeous. I married her and her mother never gave me a minute’s peace. I was just not good enough for her little girl.”

“I can’t imagine why she would have thought that.”

“Oh shut up. It was the same thing day after day. Why did you marry him? He’ll never amount to anything. He got himself kicked out of heaven didn’t he? What kind of a future is he going to provide for you in hell? And how on earth are you going to be able to afford to raise my grandchildren? Nephilim eat ten times more than regular size children?”

“What happened to her?”

“She drowned in the Flood. I guess I ought to thank God for that one.”

“Well, she sounds bad, but I still don’t think she could hold a candle to mine.”

“I will have to make her acquaintance. She sounds like she could be of much use to me in the torture chambers of hell”.

“You can have her. Now what in blazes are you doing in my court”.

“Don’t you know? I’m the plaintiff in your next case.”

“What?”

The judge turned to his desk to pick up his file on the next case when he noticed, for the first time, something unusual about it. It was a scroll, made out of a kind of suspicious parchment. Baddecision instinctively knew that he did not want to know what kind of skin had gone into making that scroll. The ink was clearly human blood but it was written entirely in a sort of hieroglyphic writing that used nothing but images of torture, suffering, and death.

“How am I supposed to read this?”

“My bad”, the devil said. “You should have been given the English translation.”

He snapped his fingers, manicured but with each nail filed to a sharp point, and the scroll vanished to be replaced with a more ordinary looking legal document in English.

“Lucifer versus Everett Body,” the judge read. Looking up he asked “Who is this Everett Body? Shouldn’t he be here if you are suing him?”

“What are you talking about?” Lucy said, grabbing the brief. “Curse those idiots in the secretary pool down in legal. They never seem to be able to get anything right. That is a typo. It is supposed to be Everybody.”

“Everybody?”

“Everybody. As in every single person on Earth.”

“What kind of complaint could you possibly have against everybody?”

“It is a defamation suit. I am sick and tired, after thousands of years, of everybody on this little mudball you call a planet, defaming my character”.

“There are two kinds of defamation, libel which covers written material and slander which covers speech. This is…”

“Both. I have been libeled in writing and slandered by word of mouth throughout the ages.”

“But you’re the devil! How can anything anybody ever said possibly defame you?”

“Everything everybody has ever said about me has defamed me. It is all negative. I have the worst reputation of anyone in history.”

“Aren’t the things said about you true?”

“No. Well, not all of them. People blame me for their own bad decisions all the time. How many times have you heard someone say ‘the devil made me do it’? I didn’t make a single one of those people do the things they blamed me for.”

“Weren’t you the one who tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, leading to the fall of mankind?”

“Yes, but I didn’t make Adam and Eve eat that fruit. I tempted them to do so, but they chose the fruit of their own free will. It was easy. My job was half-done for me. You should have seen how luscious that fruit was. You would understand, having a soft spot for apples yourself.”

The devil gave Judge Baddecision a knowing wink.

“How do you know about that?”

“Oh please, consider who you are talking to. At any rate, my point is that the things that everybody says about me have sullied my character, tarnished my reputation, and caused me a great deal of emotional pain.”

These words were spoken with a great amount of emotion and at the end, Lucy began to sob violently. Tears fell upon the judge’s desk which burned through it as if they were made of acid. Quickly grabbing a box of tissue, the judge handed it to the devil who wiped his eyes and loudly blew his nose.

“Shouldn’t I be hearing a violin right about now?” the judge sarcastically asked.

“No, I had to give my fiddle away to a little twerp named Johnny down in Georgia a few years back and I haven’t got around to replacing it yet. That’s part of the reason for this lawsuit. I need money. Fiddles of gold aren’t cheap and boy with the way the price of brimstone has been going these days it is likely to be a cold day in hell very soon unless I can get my claws on some moolah.”

“Why don’t you go talk to Mick and Keith? They are rolling in the cash and aren’t they supposed to have sympathy for you or something like that?”

“Yeah, well talk is cheap. They can sing about their sympathy all they want, I have yet to see a dime from either of them, no matter how many times I’ve hit them up for money over the years. Besides, ever since Mick was knighted he has no time for me anymore, like he’s too cool for me now. I invented cool!”

The devil began to blub and sob even louder than before. As more of his desk was disintegrated, the judge was at a loss for what to do.

“Mick doesn’t love me anymore!”

Judge Baddecision, awkwardly threw his arms around Lucy and began to pat him on the back.

“There, there. I’m sure that’s not true. Mick still loves you.”

“Then why doesn’t he return any of my phone calls? Or respond to my friend requests on Facebook?”

“He’s a busy and important man.”

“Its all because of what people say about me. It’s turned Mick against me. Its destroying my self-esteem!”

“Yes, well, I’m very sorry for you and all that, but I still don’t see how you think you have a case here.”

“I understand that according to your defamation laws, once a complaint has been made there is a presumption of guilt against the defendant until he proves himself innocent.”

At this point the judge began to feel rather uncomfortable but he answered “Yes, that is correct”.

“Well, I have made my complaint. I charge everyone in the world with defaming me, in print or by word of mouth. Everything that has ever been said about me has damaged my reputation, hurt my self-esteem, and caused me emotional trauma from which my doctor says I will never recover.”

Here, Lucy handed the judge an affidavit from his therapist stating, that indeed it was his professional opinion that the devil was irreparably psychologically damaged and would never recover.

“The burden of proof is now upon the defence.”

“Where is the advocate for the defendants?”

“I don’t know. That’s not my problem. This is a civil case. Defendants are responsible for providing their own defence.”

“Well what do you say to the truth defence? Perhaps you didn’t make everybody do what they have said you made them do, but surely much of the bad press you have received is accurate?”

“Accurate yes, but it has still impacted me emotionally and harmed my reputation. My understanding is that under your law truth can be offered as a justification of defamatory speech but it is not an absolute defence.”

“Well”, Baddecision hemmed and hawed, “That is true. But come on now, you are the source of all evil in the universe. Surely you cannot expect people to be going around singing your praises and tossing you bouquets all day long? You must admit that you have deserved your negative image?”

Here Lucy gasped in shock.

“Well, I never. I am the victim here, and you, a forward thinking, progressive judge, are blaming the victim!”

“I didn’t mean it like…”

“I imagine that next you are going to say that I deserve it because I am a demon. When will the prejudice and stereotyping of my race ever end?”

“Hey! I didn’t say anything like that. Some of my best friends are demons!”

“Yeah, like I haven’t heard that one a billion times. I think maybe I had better report your remarks to the Ontario and Canadian Human Rights Commissions”.

The judge’s face began to change colour, alternating between various shades of green and grey. His knees began to knock and his legs began to wobble. He shook all over. He suddenly found breathing to be difficult and could see stars swimming around his head, as he contemplated with horror, the thought of being hauled up on a human rights charge.

“No, no, no. I rule in your favour. Everybody is guilty of defaming you. I’ll give you everything you want, damages, costs, you name it. I hearby issue a cease-and-desist order forbidding anybody on this planet from every saying anything negative against you again. Just don’t involve the Human Rights Commissions.”

“Thank you, Your Honour, you have been most reasonable. We must do lunch one of these days”.

As Lucy began to sink back down into the Stygian depths, the judge returned to his seat, and wiped his brow.

“Damn you to hell” he whispered.

“You’re too late to pass that sentence. That happened a long time ago”, a sinister voice muttered, coming up from out of the crack that still was smoking in the floor of the courtroom.