Wholeness: Psalm 122 and Mark 5:24-34

I don’t want to miss this. I want it to be the case that I’m finally on the threshold of not just a new chapter of my life, but perhaps a third book in the tale. I want this new book to be the part when I become Joseph, matured by his slavery, bolstered with virtue, and possessed of irrevocable wisdom born of suffering. I have long lost the uninformed certainty of youth, but ever since, my faith has been feeble. I want my faith to have integrity and for it to have the force of deep, stable feeling.

I was thinking either last night or this morning, what a shame it was that I’ve gone so long, sought so many resources, and have yet to overcome my addiction. I can imagine having the same thought a decade hence. With the full meaning: God, forbid it.

This powerful story from the Gospel is timely then. This woman had been afflicted for twelve years, “and had endured much at the hands of many physicians, and had spent all that she had and was not helped at all, but rather had grown worse” (verse 26). What a sorry plight. And I nurse the submerged suspicion that her case was different from mine—a physical defect for which she could not be held accountable. My perennial disease is an “intolerable neural itch,” and I am entirely accountable for it. If only the binds we tie ourselves were as easy to unknot as sailor’s hitches.

The woman’s faith is of course remarkable. Christ’s power and the mechanisms of its release are more so, and His first response to the woman’s action invites awed speculation. Why does He ask her a question? Why did she have to acknowledge herself to Him? Most amazing to me is the woman’s response (after the disciple’s comic, almost insubordinate sarcasm in reply to Christ’s question). Mark says Jesus “looked around to see the woman who had done this,” seeming to imply that He knew who she was or that He really had to search for her in some way (verse 32).

I love her next move: “But the woman fearing and trembling, aware of what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him, and told Him the whole truth” (verse 33). Was her discomfiture the mere embarrassment of being called out in a crowd? Or had she made a realization about Christ’s identity? After all, she was at last well, and she knew it, having “felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction” (verse 29). Maybe she was embarrassed, but she was also in awe—and who can imagine the relief, the joy, the rapture? And yet she, fearing and trembling, came back to Jesus, “fell down before Him, and told Him the whole truth” (verse 33).

What’s the meaning of her telling Jesus the whole truth? She might easily not have known He knew already, but Mark’s phrasing almost makes it seem she was confessing, testifying. The phrase in English, “told Him the whole truth,” connotes a sense of guilt somewhere, but that can’t be too relevant. She could be humbling herself for her effrontery, the slyness of her seeking Him, but that’s certainly incomplete, too. Her action, in gesture and speech, is pure, untrammeled worship.

Then what is the role of worship in all of this, and how does it apply to me? If I forget for a minute (and I’ve forgotten for months) that Jesus has already done the essential, finalizing miracle for me, in letting “the power proceeding from Him” to come forth into my life to stop the ever flowing, ever staining stream of my sin, accruing damnation upon damnation, by allowing himself to be stripped, skinned, and bled dry, giving me His pure garments in exchange for mined, caked in blood—if I ever forget that for a minute, I’m missing what I must not miss.

But if I don’t miss it, if I realize what He’s accomplished for me—that He has ended my affliction—then won’t I, too, like this woman, fall down before Him, having experienced in myself who He is, to confess His salvation in joy, awe, and gratitude? Won’t I truly begin to worship?

The glory and wholeness contained in Christ’s words: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your affliction” (verse 34).

Broken (Tuesday)–Luke 22:24-34

I don’t typically cry when I read Scripture. Once, when I read this passage in Luke, I did—so personal is its meaning to me.

First of all, I love this passage for its institution of the Christian talent ethic. In a putative democracy, really a meritocracy, like America, this seems the hidden wisdom we need. The ultimate purpose of talent is to serve, especially the worst off; it’s only the incidental purpose of talent to bring bread to the table. Christ, the greatest being, came to earth to serve. By human standards, the Incarnation is actually insane.

But I also love this passage because of its theodicean subtlety and for its Providential glory. Jesus tells Peter that Satan demanded permission to sift him like wheat. The only other moment like this, when Satan tries to deal with God (and God lets him!) regarding human beings, is in the book of Job. What does it say about God’s sovereignty that He, for a time at least, tolerates demands from Satan (the adversary’s name is capitalized in the Gospel, so I’m going to do it too)? It seems to show that God allows us to be tempted—knowing that we will fall. Whether we like it or not, that logic runs throughout the whole Redemption narrative.

We have an adversary—and an adversary that has agency, and, apparently, some potential for claim on our lives. Jesus testifies to that. But in the same breath, He tells Peter, “but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” We have an adversary, but our Advocate is greater.

In our walks, we are going to fail Christ. But He will not fail us. This passage ends with Jesus telling Peter that He’s going to deny Him. Imagine the last thing you would ever want to do, the ultimate act of betrayal of all that you love and value—you’re going to do it, Jesus tells Peter. And for us, whether that is our lot our not—essentially—we have already done the same. You’re going to cheat on your wife. You’re going to abandon your family. You’re going to bankrupt your business. You’re going become a prostitute. You’re going to betray your nation. You’re going to lose your faith. That’s what Peter heard from Christ.

“Lord, with you I am ready to go both to prison and to death!”

“I tell you, Peter, the cock will not crow today until you have denied three times that you know me.”

I included, “You’re going to lose your faith,” up there because, for me—after the most heinous deeds of my life—that would be the final failure. But notice what Jesus already said to Peter: “But I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail.” What a comfort! In saying that, Jesus warned Peter that the greatest temptation after succumbing to the greatest temptation is—to lose the faith.

And what happens when someone does the unimaginable and loses their faith? Is that why people lose their faith—because they betray the Lord? I know a man who had an affair and who is now given to doubting God’s existence. How could there be a God who would make someone who could do something so horrible, he reasons. Surely a person’s betraying the faith—denying Christ when it counts—is a common cause, if not the only, of this thing—deconversion, as one friend of mine calls it. Given the pandemic of this spiritual phenomenon in the West, I propose a new field of theological study—desoteriology (apologies to Barry Barlow).

But back to my question—what happens when someone loses the faith (my friend says he “rid” himself of it)? Their sin causes them to doubt, but in the state of doubt—and, especially, final unbelief—where is their sin? What is sin if there is no Gospel, no God? From what did they need saving? They perhaps lacked the integrity to stay committed to their worldview, but who says you have to stay committed to your worldview—especially if it’s false? Sure, they’ve lost grace, but it turns out they never needed it in the first place—at least not in the way they thought. For them, the problem is solved. But if they are wrong—if it is otherwise—“the last deception is worse than the first.”

So then—what about the believer who does the unimaginable, who still believes after betraying? Why does the Lord let them stay on the hook and let the others go? Is it a matter of His sovereign choice? Or is it some quality of doggedness in the believer? In my case, at least, from the angle of experience, it looked for all the world like choice.

But what good is choice against the sifting power of Satan? And why did Jesus need to pray for Peter to keep the faith?

Does anyone have the faith to take Jesus seriously when he tells Peter what to do after he turns again? (And what comfort for Peter that Jesus told him in no uncertain terms that he would turn again!) He said, “Strengthen your brothers.” After that? With what strength am I to strengthen my brothers? Are they even my brothers after what I’ve done?

Appropriately, the Blue Book authors talk about brokenness this week. The encouragement they give is to embrace brokenness and to be vulnerable about it. What hope do we have of helping anyone with their difficulties if we are not honest, with others and ourselves, about our own? We don’t have to advertise our darkest secrets to every one—but maybe we do need to with some people. In the very state of being honest with ourselves about our brokenness, we will be the type of people to whom it is possible to listen. We will come nearer authenticity, and people will recognize it, whether they can express it or not, whether they register it consciously or not. Moreover, how can He bind our wounds if we refuse to own that we are wounded? How can we receive treatment if we deny that for which we need healing?

Just after Peter denied Jesus, Jesus died on a cross, forgiving His enemies, to unleash the grace Peter—and every single one of us—needed to be whole. Peter did end up turning again (nothing is more important than repentance!) and strengthening his brethren. What’s more, he did eventually follow Jesus, not only to prison, but also to death. Legend has it he refused to be crucified in the manner of Christ and so was crucified upside down.

We are weak but He is strong; strength is perfected in weakness; in brokenness is wholeness found. For, though we have and adversary, our Advocate is greater.

Ordinary: Psalm 98 and Acts 4:1-13

Christianity is radically egalitarian. God not only opens the doors to the poor and despised, He uses them to accomplish his will on the earth. In this passage, the noble priestly caste comes up against God’s lowborn servants and marvels at their power. This aspect of the faith ought to be attractive to modern egalitarian liberals; whether it is or not, the modern liberal’s rejection of the basis for egalitarianism (God and humanity as the imago Dei) is ironic. In that sense though, so is the historical conservative’s failure to truly recognize the equality inherent in his worldview.

It’s strange reading this passage after reading the first part of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche’s diagnostic attributes egalitarian, Judeo-Christian values to powerless peoples’ ressentiment of their betters. He directs our attention to the stream of language and argues that the dichotomy “good-bad” has its roots in physical and social differences between the strong, healthy, joyous aristocrats and the weak, sickly, and unhappy peasants of old. Given his assumptions, his case is compelling enough.

Especially relevant to our passage is Nietzsche’s charges against (and I’m only saying what he says, and there are apparently all kinds of reasons he wasn’t an anti-Semite)—against the Jews. If “good” was originally a concept derived from nobility, and “bad” was derived from the nobility’s conceptions of their social inferiors, then, Nietzsche suggests, the revaluation of Jewish ressentiment consisted in the inferiors’ calling the noble, powerful, and beautiful “evil” and misappropriating for themselves the characteristic—“good.” Here’s a pretty concise expression of his idea (Nietzsche speaks for the “Jewish” spirit of ressentiment here):

“…The wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!” (p. 34 The Genealogy of Morals, New York, Vintage Books, 1967, trans. Walter Kaufmann)

If you find yourself more familiar with the New Testament than the Old, or if you’re the type who sees the Old through the lens of the New, you may have, upon reading that quote, immediately thought of the Beatitudes. Nietzsche anticipates you.

In the next aphorism (section 8 in the first essay), he says that Jesus was the inevitable consummation of this Jewish ressentiment. He’s not stingy about giving credit where it’s due either:

Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that “all the world,” namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait? (p. 35)

I actually laughed out loud as I reread that. But, of course, a horselaugh is no argument, and it would be better to treat Nietzsche’s claim in kind.

It lends credence to the Christian metanarrative, spanning the Old and New Testaments, that Nietzsche calls Christ’s coming and the consummation of his life (his death) a “farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge,” a revenge for which Christ’s executioners get the credit. Nietzsche seems to see the improbability of this, but nevertheless posits it. The facts of Christ’s life and its results are so uncanny, so wild, that they require such an outlandish explanation (if you refuse to consider the other probability—that Jesus was divine).

What if Nietzsche were wrong about this whole thing, though? What if these “slave morals” were really just God’s morals, revealed to Moses and the Prophets and expressed perfectly through Christ and the Apostles? And what if Jesus were really the Lord of the Resurrection? How might He have reacted when he witnessed Nietzsche writing that blustering sentence? Would he have laughed like I did? Would he have cried?

I think that if Nietzsche’s conclusions (which you can assume as you read him) about metaphysics, God, man, and language are correct—then he’s right enough about social hierarchies and values. Egalitarianism is entirely unnatural. From sharks, snakes, and insects, to wolf packs, ape troops (with the possible exception of bonobos), and human societies, Nature favors the strong over the weak. Unless God did reveal himself, why the hell would the strong, competent, beautiful, and happy care much about the unhappiness of the others? Why shouldn’t they enjoy the privileges with which Nature graced them? I say if there is no God and no revelation, then the strong should enjoy their privilege and not waste a second’s peace on compassion for the wretched. For thus the universe has willed it, and if human freedom can conceive of defying nature in the name of egalitarianism—there’s no real reason it should. More than that—all of nature will work against these egalitarian efforts.

I suppose some materialists would say that evolution somehow necessitates greater and greater egalitarianism and that the development towards equality or socialism is right and inevitable. Perhaps it is—but only on the basis of a sad and paltry pragmatism. The truth is—there are vast differences between human beings, and if equality isn’t metaphysical, it isn’t. Only practical considerations about the strength of mobs and the expediency of throwing them a token bone every now and then, fending off the inevitable tide of their growing solidarity against the powerful, are the powerful’s only real reasons for being (or acting) egalitarian.

On the other hand, I know a guy who acknowledges the rigid fascism in nature and who arbitrarily defies it and insists on equality because he wants to—he simply hates cruelty, and as he says, “I’ve never met a man I didn’t like—and I always like him until he [expletives] me over.” He knows and even insists that his quixotic affinity for the brotherhood of man is foundationless. I take this affection of his as a clue—perhaps his assumptions are wrong.

Christianity is self-aware about its revaluation of values. It knows the natural man values only strength, wisdom, wealth, and beauty. The raising of the valleys and the lowering of the mountains is not a work of Nature—it’s a work of Grace. In the first chapter of I Corinthians, Paul calls his audience to realize this:

For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised, God has chosen, the things that are not, that He might nullify the things that are, that no man should boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, that, just as it is written, “LET HIM WHO BOASTS, BOAST IN THE LORD.” (Verses 26-31)

The fact that Christianity turned the Greco-Roman world upside down, and indelibly shaped Western history, recommends that we consider whether or not Christ was who he said he was, and wether or not the apostle’s succeeded in truly boasting in the Lord as Paul preached.

This episode in Acts is just one such instance of God’s power exercised through the likes of Nietzsche’s peasants—in this case, a Jewish fisherman. Full of the Holy Spirit, Peter addressed the rulers and elders of the people, “all who were of high-priestly descent,” who had arrested him and John for preaching the resurrection and for healing a sick man; he says, “Let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by this name this man stands here before you in good health.” Luke writes, “Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John, and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were marveling, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

The Dance: Psalm 149 and Psalm 150

Hallelujah. Praise the Lord.

In Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky Lev Shestov identifies the ability to sincerely say this word as the difference between ataraxia and despair. Nietzsche, Shestov recalls, said “God is dead”; Tolstoy said “God is the good”; both, he concludes, mean the same thing. In other words, if God is not the personal Being that made the universe, the earth, all that fills it, and stamped man with the imago Dei, then he’s not God. God cannot be Tolstoy’s misappropriation of a Platonic form. To say that is to say that God is an ideal, and as far as those go—what are they if they are not characteristics of God that emanate from his person? The work of Nietzsche suffices to assure us: they are nothing. Such an idea—that God is the good—might lead you to think that you could achieve moral perfection on your own—which is what Tolstoy tried and failed to do. It might also be the sort of idea that motivates you to rewrite the Gospel without any of its supernatural elements, like miracles and resurrections and whatnot—Jesus was divine like Buddha was, only more so, but he wasn’t the Son of God—that kind of thing.

Tolstoy said Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal, and Nietzsche surely would have resented Tolstoy’s clamoring for universals. But both, Shestov says, failed to achieve ataraxia and instead succumbed to despair. I suppose it proves nothing, but Nietzsche went insane and spent the last ten years of his life in bed in a vegetative state. As an old man, Tolstoy fled the strife of his home, contracted pneumonia, and died in a stationmaster’s house.

Dostoevsky, Shestov argues, achieved ataraxia. This is what the Stoic philosophers were after in their resignation and virtue: it means something like imperturbability. However, in linking ataraxia to the ability to say hallelujah, praise the Lord, Shestov distinguishes it from the Stoic conception.

No human life is without suffering, but these three men each suffered exceptionally in their own way: sensitive, they suffered great loss, physical sickness, and the cold breath of despair. Tolstoy, though rich, grew up without his parents. Nietzsche suffered from a terrible disease (probably syphilis). Dostoevsky was an epileptic, spent four years in Siberian jail, and lost a young son. To some extent, I agree with the Tolstoy of War and Peace that suffering is relative—though that statement, if always true, is stunningly flat in the face of the deprivation of basic human needs and desires (family, community, food, shelter, clothing, etc.). I say that to add—that though Dostoevsky arguably experienced the most pain and the worst catastrophes, he didn’t necessarily suffer more than the other two. (Many, I suspect, would find it hard to sympathize with Count Tolstoy, who was rich—and maybe even with Nietzsche, who may have brought his sickness on himself. Although, you could also blame Dostoevsky for his time in Siberia, depending on your evaluation of Czarism and revolutionary politics).

Whoever suffered more, it is interesting that Dostoevsky, as troubled and melancholy as the other two, ended with ataraxia. Apparently, St. Paul uses the root for this Greek word when he says, “I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am” (Philippians 4:11). To extrapolate from the circumstances of material need or want of Paul’s context, this applies to Dostoevsky in spiritual and philosophical terms. The real problem each of these men faced was the meaninglessness of all things and the predominance of injustice, suffering, and death in all human experience (though Nietzsche didn’t care much about “injustice”). These are the circumstances of life on the earth. There may be grace and goodness in places for certain people—but entropy and death ultimately swallows it all, and in most cases, that grace and goodness was purchased by violence and injustice.

When Shestov says that Dostoevsky was finally able to say “hallelujah” and thereby achieved ataraxia, he means that he found faith that gave him hope for the redemptive conclusion of the narrative of the world. No matter what happened, it was God’s world for Dostoevsky, and His will would be done. Some see this as a despicable exemption made possible by self-deception and material prosperity. And indeed, by the end of his life, Dostoevsky had emerged from his hardships as an indebted writer, a gambling addict, and the survivor of a failed marriage, into financial security, a happy marriage, and, apparently, self-restraint from the roulette table. Was it dumb complacency or the fruit of the struggle to conform the soul to objective reality? Or was it merely the stupid, pragmatic effects of successfully convincing yourself of a consoling construction?

Somewhere, I heard Dostoevsky’s writing described as Romantic Realism, the contradiction of which was lost on me at the time. I understand now. His novels depict with brutal honesty the reality of pain, injustice, poverty, sickness, death, and meaninglessness. You could say the same for Tolstoy, but what you get more of in Dostoevsky is what accounts for the “romantic” in the genre I’m discussing: instances wherein his characters say, in their own way, “hallelujah.” Andrei and Pierre in War and Peace have similar experiences, and Levin at the end of Anna Karenina seems to find something like it, but in Dostoevsky you have men falling to the ground and kissing it out of love for humanity and faith in God—Zossima, Alyosha, the Ridiculous Man, Raskolnikov, and Shatov (I think each of those characters actually falls on his face and kisses the ground). There’s also Stepan Trofimovich in Devils, who, if he doesn’t kiss the ground, only fails to do so because he is bed-ridden (the circumstances of whose death bear uncanny resemblance to the Tolstoy’s). The “Romantic” aspect of this genre unavoidably refers to the style—effusive sentences and extravagant emotional experiences—but it also has to do with what is characteristic in Romance—hope and the experience of knowing and loving something beyond the self.

Dostoevsky found in Christ, his life, death, and resurrection (the part Tolstoy left out) the means by which to look at reality on earth and the portions of God’s metanarrative before him and behind him and to ultimately say “hallelujah,” praise the Lord.

Read the Bible and see that it speaks to the problems these men faced: suffering in Job, meaninglessness in Ecclesiastes. Read the chronicles of violence and injustice in the Old Testament—witness the kindness and cruelty of God’s chosen people and also of their enemies. And then see the Bible’s simultaneous message, announced throughout the Old Testament (from Genesis 3 to Malachi 4), revealed and realized in the New Testament—that God loves humanity in spite of its evil, that meaningless and evil are symptoms of our alienation from Him, and that God himself, in the person of Christ, came to earth, took on flesh, lived perfectly, and bore all the penalty of our sin on Himself, and then rose from the dead to secure his victory and ensure the final consummation of grace and goodness. If you can believe it, you might be able, with Dostoevsky and a host of others, to heed the essence of this Psalm:

 

Praise the Lord!

Praise God in His sanctuary;

Praise him in His mighty expanse.

Praise Him for His mighty deeds;

Praise him according to His excellent greatness.

 

Praise Him with trumpet sound;

Praise Him with harp and lyre.

Praise him with timbrel and dancing;

Praise Him stringed instruments and pipe.

Praise Him with loud cymbals;

Praise Him with resounding cymbals.

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.

Praise the Lord!

The Song: Psalm 100 and Exodus 15:1-21

I wish every entry wasn’t some kind of dialectical quarrel with Christianity. It would be nice to have fewer confessions of doubt and discomfiture at the beginnings of my reflections. But I’ve got another set today.

It seemed this morning that this song (about God destroying the Egyptian army and the descriptions of how the Canaanites are trembling in their sandals at the oncoming Israelites) was utterly human. I thought of Leopold Bloom telling someone in the Cylops scene in Ulysses  he thought Moses was a stone carver. We all know that reinterpretation of the story by now, don’t we? It’s gotten into me, too, and so I must choose to believe or not.

Clearly, there is less of a problem with God taking out the Egyptian army—Pharaoh had just reneged on his agreement to let the people go and they were bearing down on them to kill them. The Plagues? Well, that was pretty heavy metal. God doesn’t always seem like a good humanitarian. And that’s a major source of my doubt—he gets the Israelites to be bad humanitarians towards the Canaanites, too. I see how it seems for all the world like some ancient, violent culture needed to invent God to unify them and justify their imperialism.

Have you heard the explanations of this? The Canaanites were a bunch of child-sacrificers and all that? And if anyone was going to steal land, isn’t it a little more justifiable for a people who have (somehow) just gotten out of 400 years of slavery? They were Others! Come on! Still…genocide? That okay for them to do?

I’ve thought about this too much to rehearse it all here: it would be tedious. But David embodies the problem for me: it could be that he was a religiously self-justifying villain, something utterly natural and violent. But if he was—there is no grace anywhere in history—only violence and deception. I wrote a poem about it once.

Back

When night was insuperable,

And bronze death was cancer

The word ‘enemy’ had real meaning,

And the High King was as certain as death.

When no one was tricked to expect life,

When the wilderness was like space

And isolation was a real possibility,

When the only variety was

The fickleness of alliances,

Murders were common wares.

When the difference among men

Had acknowledged connection,

And it was known how wretched

All would always be,

Life was to be struggled for,

Righteousness and lawlessness

Were familiar ways.

No gray echelons of virtue

When tolerance was a crime

And sin had to be paid for in blood:

Israelite interminably annihilating Amelikite,

Monkey perpetually cracking skull,

Swords caused impotence,

Worn close to the groin;

Manhood was respected and expected,

While anything less was crushed.

Then mystery was certain—

The sky was a curtain,

Flung open to reveal our irrelevance at night.

The paragon of virtue, crowned with sense?

No—rather a doomed vapor,

Sentenced to misery then death.

Pits existed to receive men whole,

The Pit was life, languishing there—Sheol.

A poet, a warrior, sentenced to run,

A croucher in fields,

Sought by spears,

Claimed citizen by no nation—

By another borne: anointed.

A man of bloodshed

In the midst of slaughter,

Giving righteous voice to rage,

Extolling sheep-hood,

Praising weakness,

A prophet,

Musing by the fire,

Asking for numbers to his days,

Stealing the wives of men he meant to kill and killed.

Surely, no goodness could guarantee

This Natural thing—

Nor Sovereign forget such

Banality of sin;

But, back then, where else

Could God have been?

Unless you’re going to rebel against all that is—supernatural or natural—you will see that humanitarianism is a provision (albeit a good one, and better than nihilism). Christianity is more humanitarian than anything, and its solution to violence is utterly unique, though Christians have often ignored it (c.f. Crusades, Inquisitions, etc.). The heart of the religion is a man dying on an Imperial instrument of torture and execution, praying for his murderers, dying for his enemies. Christianity is violent—but the violence is cosmic: Satan against God, Satan against people, people against God, then people against people. At times, God poured his wrath on man, and one day, there will be a reckoning for the enemies of God. But “‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord,” and the Lord solved the problem of violence by inflicting it on himself. In doing so, he restored cosmic peace. With that cosmic peace, mundane peace is possible.

Awakening: Psalm 28 and Mark 8:1-30

Mark is so terse. Though Thomas Jefferson called him a babbler, he’s so good at showing instead of telling, that when Jesus says, “Do you not yet understand?” I wonder hard if I’m missing something in the passage.

This miracle, multiplying seven loaves and a few fish to feed four thousand, contains a lot I might miss. However, here’s what I can pick up: Jesus shows Himself to be Jehovah Jireh, the Provider; He foreshadows the communion sacrament; and He probably chooses specific amounts of leftovers for symbolic purpose.

One of the greatest challenges God presents for faith is the challenge not to worry about our material well-being, concerning food, drink, and clothing. In this world, people starve to death—nature doesn’t care about us and will send us famine as soon as wink at us. With this miracle, though, Jesus not only demonstrates that miracles exist, and, therefore, God exists, but also that He Himself is God and thus has the authority to deal us such challenges.

The language Mark uses evokes the communion sacrament, which evokes the crucifixion. Jesus “breaks” bread and provides people with it, just as he allowed his body to be broken as spiritual sustenance for those he came to save. Paradoxically, Jesus tells us that God knows about our material needs while also telling us to pick up our crosses and follow him. God, at different times, calls us to prosper and calls us to suffer. It is hard for us to embrace the latter calling. What he never calls us to suffer, however, is any deprivation of his love and grace. When a believer does starve to death, He may feast on God’s presence, love, and joy. And we may be sure: when we are hungry—famished— Jesus has compassion on us as He does for this multitude.

Finally, what I only suspect: God loads reality with symbols. One can’t be sure, but can’t avoid suspecting, that Christ’s Socratic session with the disciples on the boat attempts to lead them to glimpse this symbolism.

“How many baskets were left over when I multiplied the five loaves?”

“Twelve.”

They stare blankly.

“And what about when I broke seven for the four thousand?”

“Seven.”

He raises his eyebrows. They frown.

“Do you not yet understand?”

I don’t think any account of these miracles says what they did with the leftover bread. Nor do I recall (or pick up here) any direct indication that the disciples themselves ate. But I can’t imagine that they didn’t get a heel or two themselves, or that they couldn’t have taken a husk if they’d have wanted to. When Jesus responds to them their fretting about the fact that they forgot food, He’s suggesting that they don’t need to worry. He could turn the boat into a floating ginger bread house for them, or cause a falafel stand to materialize on the waves. I think it’s significant that, the first time, there’s a basket for each of them; the second time, the number, though lesser, signifies perfection.

And He warns them to beware the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod. Again, Mark does a maddeningly good job of showing and not telling. What is the leaven of the Pharisees and Herod? I take the Pharisees’ to be the spirit of religiosity, which thinks it can get God in its debt and force Him to provide for their good deeds. I take Herod to represent materialism, sensuality, and perhaps just plain over-eating. The Pharisees discredit God’s grace; Herod discredits His will. To keep Christ’s company is to be provided for, not paid, and to steward well, not glut.

I have to confess: Mark seems to string together a bunch of non sequiturs, or at least to make Christ’s life look more like  Don Quixote, a picaresque of adventures united only contingently by time and the hero’s character, rather than an intentional progression wrought by an Artist. But then again, I suspect myself of missing something—surely this blind man episode consists with the thematic unity. Though, if it didn’t, I suppose it wouldn’t really matter.

Jesus uses strange means to heal people. Here, He spits in a man’s eyes–twice, for some reason; on another occasion, He spits in mud and applies it to a dude’s eyes (though Jesus did that to break a specific law in the Mishna). Again, I must be missing something: why does Jesus have to heal the guy in two moves? Why not just one? You’ve done better, after all, Jesus.

This is just a weird episode. First, “they” bring Him a blind man and ask Him to touch him. He takes the guy out of the village—for a great reason, I’m sure. Then, He spits in the guy’s eyes—which actually makes me laugh—probably at something gravely serious, dignified, beautiful and over my head. Jesus asks him if he sees anything—always so Socratic! (You’d better believe—great teachers and counselors ask questions and let their learners and patients discover the truth themselves). The guy says what was surely Tolkien’s inspiration for the Ents: “I see men, for I am seeing them like trees, walking about.” What!

First of all, are there even any “men” around? And even if there were, wouldn’t they be standing around watching Jesus freaking spit in the dude’s face? It seems at first like the guy just has a murky view of his immediate surroundings. They’re outside of the village, and I can’t imagine crowds milling around as in a marketplace. But the guys sees men walking around like trees.  Which channel did Jesus tune this guy to? It’s almost like the transmorgrifier episode in Calvin and Hobbes when Calvin’s first few transmutations are less than suitable.

“Woops, blind man. Let’s try that again.”

I think not. I almost wonder if Jesus didn’t give the guy a glimpse into a spiritual reality for a moment. Maybe he was seeing angels. Maybe they were demons. Hell, maybe he showed him Fangorn Forest. I don’t know.

Then Jesus takes the guy and, like a 1950s dad, squatting in front of a television, smacks the side of the thing and tilts the antennae. Or not. Mark says He just “laid His hands upon his eyes; and he looked intently and was restored, and began to see everything clearly” (8:25). Sometimes, and perhaps more often than not, Christ heals us gradually. And while He has us in process, He shows us things He wants us to see that we would miss. But He does ultimately meet our needs.

Why Jesus tells the guy not to enter the village, I don’t know either—but I suspect it has to do with why He instructs the disciples not to reveal His identity in verse 30. And only now as I write this sentence do I realize the connection between the feeding of the thousands, the exchange on the boat, and the conversation on the way to the village in verses 27-30: Jesus is the best teacher, and His most important lesson is to make us realize the essence of His own identity. Again He uses questions (“Who do you say that I am?”), and again He doesn’t give the answer—they already have it: Peter says, “Thou art the Christ.”

Verse 30 teaches a strange truth. Once the disciples awaken to the highest truth—and really, Jesus opened their eyes to what they half-guessed—He tells them not to tell anyone about it. Obviously, at other times, He commands them to tell everyone they can about Him—indeed that would become their careers. The lesson He teaches them, then, is that He is the Master of timing, of Time itself, and He sets the time for His students to learn the truth. Not everyone is always ready–though that doesn’t mean we are to suppress the Gospel. But we must keep our audience in mind.

What are you student’s needs? Where are they in relation to the truth? Are they totally blind? Do their eyes need to adjust to the shadows before you set them in the sun? Do they not yet understand though they’ve been learning for a few semesters? Ultimately, you cannot force the learner to the moment of truth; he will come to it in his own time, which is God’s time.

I learned a lot writing about this passage. I’m tempted to pat myself on the back—but that would only prove how little I knew. Instead, I’ll thank God for his grace in teaching the truth, and I’ll ask Him to bring me to His knowledge in His time.

Awakening: Psalm 28 and Luke 24:13-35

This passage delights me. What Cleopas and the other disciple experience on the road to Emmaus is good beyond hope. When Jesus asks them what they’re talking about, Luke says “They stood still, looking sad” (24:17). This indicates to me they don’t really believe the resurrection reports. Later, when they realize who’d been with them, what they hadn’t dared to hope becomes a reality.

In addition to bursting with joy, this passage is comic. Of course, the entire incarnation is ironic, but in this appearing, Jesus plays it up—which is kind of mischievous of Him and, therefore, funny. It’s hard for me to imagine this scene without seeing a suppressed smile on Christ’s face.

“What are these words that you are exchanging with one another as you are walking?” (Verse 17)

Cleopas heaves a sigh:

“Are You [excellent that they capitalize the second person pronoun in this instance] the only one visiting Jerusalem and unaware of the things which have happened here in these days?”

Christ’s suppressed smile widens imperceptibly.

“What things?”

The two disciples stop in their tracks and look at one another with mouths half-open. Jesus’ brows rise half a millimeter and he loosens his smile, letting them interpret it as embarrassment.

“The things about Jesus the Nazarene, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word in the sight of God and all the people…”

He knows what he’s about to do to them. He’s not only about to blow their minds with what has to be the most interesting sermon in history (which I fully expect to be on podcast in heaven); he’s also about to open their eyes—which further demonstrates God’s mischief. Verse 16 says, “Their eyes were prevented from recognizing Him.” This is some artful cunning. One might even conclude from this episode that God has a flare for drama.

And once they explain to Jesus what they’re on about, He chides them:

“O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?”

How would Cleopas and his companion have responded to this? I imagine a frown and parted lips. Jeeze, dude. You may be right, but uh…how about a little bedside manner?

The summary of the lecture he gives them cracks me up:

“And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures” (verse 27).

All the prophets and all the Scriptures. I imagine them walking as He talks, getting close to Emmaus before He finishes, and stopping, standing with crossed arms, leaning on one foot, frowning and nodding.

And then! When they near their destination, Jesus acts like he’s going on further—acts like he’s going on further. Mischief. But in addition to the mischief, He’s got a purpose: He wants them to invite Him in. He tells them everything they need to know, but then leaves it to them to respond. They choose well: they ask Him to stay.

I don’t know if Cleopas and his bro (Jesus calls them “foolish men,” so I’m assuming they’re both dudes), were there when He multiplied loaves and fishes, or at the Last Supper, but when they sit down and He blesses and breaks bread, it certainly evokes those two occasions. And that’s when “their eyes were opened and they recognized Him; and He vanished from their sight” (Verse 31).

I really want a Wes Anderson rendering of this moment–the whole scene, really, but this moment especially. I imagine Zero from Grand Budapest Hotel (Tony Revolori) as Cleopas and maybe the Jason Schwartzman of The Darjeeling Limited as the other guy… Okay, I wasn’t thinking about race when I thought of those two guys. But I didn’t say we had to put Adrian Brody in there, too–though he would do a great job. Just as long as Owen Wilson plays Jesus… Help me today, God. I’ve derailed this meditation, but do you see what I did? I started with an expression on Tony Revolori’s face at a certain point in a Wes Anderson film, wondered which Anderson associate would play the other guy, and realized there was a race thing going on. Gosh. Cleopas may have been Greek, for all I know—the name the story gives him certainly is (his name apparently means “glory of the father”). However, for better or worse, my immediate, first notion was to cast a Guatemalan man (no foul, I think), a Jewish-American (thin ice—or the only appropriate choice?), and a Scandinavian-American. I’ll let you guess which one I think would be an absurd choice. Come to think of it, what about Willem Defoe? He was in Budapest, too, and he’s already got some Jesus acting experience.

Goodness. My point was that the moment when Jesus disappears could be really comic—I read it that way almost automatically. I can’t remember the scene in which Zero makes the face I’m thinking of, but the timing here in Luke 24 can’t be far off from the timing in Step Brothers:

“Without thinking about it, name your favorite dinosaur”

In unison: “Velociraptor.”

“What!”

“Did we just become best friends?”

“Yep!”

“Do you want to go do karate in the garage?”

“Yep!”

Compare:

“And he vanished from their sight.

And they said to one another:

“Were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road, while He was explaining the Scriptures to us?”” (31-32)

Okay, the dialogic cadence diverges a little, but the moment of recognition, the timing, had to have been the same. But instead of doing karate in the garage, they get up and walk the seven miles back to Jerusalem—probably fist pumping and doing that thing where you walk around and kick out your stiffened legs, saying something like, “I knew it! Man!” Know what I’m saying?

But they go back to the eleven disciples, and find them saying—and here it’s a little unclear to me who says this, but I think it’s the eleven—“The Lord has really risen, and has appeared to Simon” (34). Cleopas and Co. then relate their encounter on the road, the lecture they got, and the vanishing act they witnessed.

“Did we just become best friends?”

“Yep!”

“Did Jesus show up to you guys, too?”

“Yep!”

Have you had an experience like this, when you realize that the Lord has really risen—and that, in time, at an actual point in history, in physical form, Jesus appeared to Peter and these other disciples—that he actually went stealth-mode on these guys on the road to Emmaus, and then disappeared before their eyes? When you do have it, it can be quite powerful.

In my own experience, as powerful as it is to have this awakening, it is easy to cool off and half-forget. This last Sunday, Easter Sunday (of all days—the day Jesus appeared to Cleopas and his bro), I had such an experience. My church made a video called “When God Has the Last Word,” and it consisted of Christ’s sayings from the cross, spoken in various languages. By the time they got to “It is finished,” in ancient Greek, I was in tears. Not to show you how devout I am, not to brag about how religious my affections are (not only those things), but (also) to communicate what it’s like to realize you really believe. Right after the video, the worship team sang a song (with really full instrumentation—with about seven voices singing Gospel harmony) called “Don’t Cry.” As the title came up on the screen, I did.

Don’t cry

Wipe your eyes

He’s not dead

I realized again, in that moment, that it was true. He had really risen. My eyes continued to well over as shivers coursed my spine through the whole song.

Honestly, I’m highly suspicious of Charismatic stuff (as in the denomination—not the technical term “charismatic,” which means the opposite of cessation), though I’ve nothing against Charismatics and little interest in arguing with them. I’ve been there, faked that. But I’m sure most Charismaniacs—Charismatics! Charismatics!–are more sincere than I was when I was one in my callow youth–not that there’s something essentially callow about being Charismatic. But! Emotion for emotion’s sake, feeling based on feeling, is not worth much to me. Emotion based on fact, however–on reality—that compels me. Religious experience for experience’s sake is likewise not worth much to me—but if it produces action and character, then, well…

I will inevitably cool off to the reality I felt on Sunday, the fact that lit me up–I know. But that only reminds me how essential it is to remain awake—if not to continually wake up.

 

Awakening: Psalm 28 and II Kings 6:8-23

I wonder if such realities as Elisha’s servant sees are always happening. My awe is accompanied by the subdued doubt that chariots of fire are extremely rare exceptions—much more the opportunity to see them. My Presbyterian friends would sympathize with that doubt (as I do), and my charismatically inclined friends would revolt.

As I often mention, the old apparent dualism in Christianity has troubled me. I’ve found, however, that the dualism is not so much in Christianity as it is in humanity, what Walker Percy calls angelism-beastialism. Christianity, rather than being strictly transcendent or totally immanent, is incarnational—which is what humans must be. I suppose the problem is that we polarize between one and the other, probably many times in the course of a day. On the other hand, without the message of Christianity, immanence would prevail, and the brand of transcendence available to naturalism—i.e. that of science and art—would ultimately be an exalted form of immanence. So, as incarnational as it is, Christianity also saves us from utter immanence, and offers our imaginations a vision of transcendence that we, mired in immanence, cannot see. To the naturalist, this is Don Quixote positing enchanters to satisfy the mundane message his senses send him; to the Christian, it is a probable antidote to the hopeless situations in which we find ourselves.

So, on the one hand, we are called to be incarnational, neither angels nor animals, but men: sovereign wanderers, lordly exiles, and pilgrims, to borrow again from Percy. On the other hand, immanence overwhelms us and motivates us to seek transcendence. Fallen, we look for it either in socially authorized or unauthorized places: science is safe and the achievement of that transcendence is usually rewarded; art is dangerous, and more often than not, its transcendence is punished. The problems with the transcendence of drugs and drunkenness are well known. Are the problems with the transcendence of sex well known or not, these days? I can’t tell, but I know them myself. Of course, religions offer transcendence, or ways to deal with immanence, but they all differ in their conceptions of the two.

I propose that a good litmus test of a religion is to see how it deals with this dualism. Is incarnation at its heart? Does it denigrate immanence beneath an unattainable transcendence? Or does it deny transcendence, saying all Being is one? Does it motivate legalism? Does it motivate mercy? Does it establish a sane tension between heaven and earth, or does it deny one at the expense of the other?

As for Christianity, I used to think it was intolerably transcendent. However, my view has changed. It establishes a tension between heaven and earth, and it has a place for both. Everything on earth has a place on earth, and every good thing on earth has a place in heaven.

I can hear the objections at this point:

“You sound like you want God’s gifts more than God himself, creation more than the Creator.”

To which I say, “And you sound like you want to refuse the gift out of a pious pretension to loving the Giver more than you do.”

“I do not love God as much as I should, true. But you, in your immanence-mongering, have little hope of ever loving the Giver as much as you should.”

“The gifts, for me, are evidence of the Giver, and they make me grateful to Him.”

“You’re an idolater. God is holy and transcendent, and because you cannot bear it for your sinfulness, you bury your head in immanence like an ostrich.”

“You are right. I could not bear God’s transcendence. But rather than frying me with lighting for it, he became immanent himself, marrying the Word with the flesh in the incarnation.”

“You’re a closet Catholic, aren’t you.”

“Was that a question?”

“Ne…No.”

“Catholics do seem to have less trouble with incarnation than we do.”

“If you love them so much, why don’t you go worship Mary with them?”

“I don’t know who worships Mary, but I believe Catholics venerate Mary. However, I do think I will go have a glass of wine with them.”

“Oh, you’re probably going to tell me to enjoy my grape juice  next, aren’t you?”

“No. But since you are my creation,  I think I’ll just put that sentence in your mouth, along with the distasteful use of italics to indicate your sneering tone.”

“Not fair. I’m going to return to the desert to fast and pray in my burlap bag.”

“Hmm. John the Baptist pretty much did that… Honestly, he was pretty righteous…in addition to being pretty ascetic.”

“Exactly.”

“But Jesus really wasn’t, so I’m ‘a still go have that glass of wine. Later.”

For all my dithering on the issue, all my past confusion, all my plunges into utter immanence and launches into unauthorized transcendence, this passage calls me to believe in a reality I cannot see yet. Without spiritual reality, our situation would be hopeless. I must believe: God, who is invisible, really exists; that his heaven is real, and that it is filled with his angels; that those angels have business on earth; that that business has to do with other, dark spiritual forces; that my life is hidden with Christ in God; and that God is present, and that Christ and the Spirit dwell with us always.

When our immanent circumstances overwhelm us and we can see no way out, the Gospel tells us that God is stronger than our problems, wiser than our adversaries, and richer than our deprivations. We have to listen to the Gospel’s message that even suffering works to build and eternal weight of glory for us, that death itself—the last immanent experience—is not the last experience. We have to believe that Jesus is coming back, though we do not see it yet. If chariots of fire do not now surround our surrounding foes, they one day will, and we will be delivered.

I have to address the way this story in II Kings ends—very un-Old Testament. God answers Elisha’s prayer to blind the Syrian army, and somehow, Elisha manages to lead them to Samaria where, apparently, the king of Israel waits. There, he says something hilarious:

“My father, shall I kill them? Shall I kill them?”

You get the senses that he’s freaking out, excited that a massive contingent of his enemy’s army has been delivered helpless into his hands. He sounds like a little girl who has just seen a fluffy puppy: “Can I pet it? Can I pet it?”

Elisha’s response is incredible:

“You shall not kill them.”

Stop. This is the Old Testament, right? Shouldn’t you tell the king to cut them with saws and sharp instruments (I Chronicles 20:3), or to kill them and go murder their womenfolk, children, dogs, cats, and grandmothers (I Samuel 15:3)?

“You shall not kill them.”

“What?”

“Would you kill those you have taken captive with your sword and with your bow? Set bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink and go to their master.”

“What!”

The next verse (23) says, “So he prepared a great feast for them; and when they had eaten and drunk, he sent them away, and they went to their master. And the marauding bands of Syria did not come again into the land of Israel.”

As far as endings go, this one is anticlimactically—and hilariously—happy.

Postscript: Immanent and Transcendent Violence

The issue of violence is crucial for everyone, especially when it comes to worldviews and values. Violence has always been caught in the tug-of-war between immanence and transcendence. Human history and texts like the Bible prove that violence has always had to do with religion; the 20^th Century proves conclusively that it has just as much to do with irreligion and secularism. This tells me violence is neither religious nor secular: it is human. What does your worldview say about violence, then, and what resources does it give you to deal with it?

Thankfully, a vast contingent of human society is categorically against violence and bloodshed, and, in their own way, perhaps all people are. Unfortunately, violence  is nearly (if not absolutely) universal, and the response to it consists usually of more violence.

If you are a Christian, you have to deal with the fact that God commands and inflicts violence in both Testaments (even though you know the heart of your faith is God’s refusing to use violence and rather suffering it unto death for the sake of peace–the cross). The violence in the OT is particularly distressing, and many people use it as occasion to dismiss the faith. I think such an objection to violence in general is commendable. However, I would ask, if you think you’ve avoided it here, how do you expect to avoid it elsewhere? I mean, if you reject this history, which history will essentially and effectively free you from violence? Naturalism and evolution? Sorry. Even if you buy the zen bonobo, Pax Pleistocene history, even that rosy age was brief, and as soon as agriculture came around, humans turned from using their clubs on tapirs and tigers to each other.

Is violence at the heart of Christianity? Yes. But keep in mind, “Thou shalt not murder.” How could it be then? First of all, Judaism and Christianity say violence is at the heart of human nature. In Scripture, the first brothers on the planet, Cain and Abel, prove it. Is God ever violent against humanity? Yes. But why? I think, if you investigate, you’ll soon see and find something you may not have expected. Has God’s attitude towards violence or his stance on human violence ever changed? His use of it seems to have changed. And this is one of the things that make Christianity unique among the great world religions.

God flooded the earth violently to kill every one but Noah and his family; Genesis 3-9 (4 and 6 in particular) shows why. The rest of the Old Testament shows God using violence and commanding people to use violence. But right after the flood, he indicates a progressive change in his and our use of it.

For the first time, God’s explicit interdiction against murder is explicit in revelation: “Whoever sheds man’s blood,/By man his blood shall be shed,/For in the image of God He made man” (Genesis 9:6).

And then he gives the rainbow: God’s promise that he will never annihilate humanity with a flood again. But in addition to being a reminder, it also indicates how justice would make this possible. I used to associate the “bow” in “rainbow” with the frilly things you wrap around presents and which girls tie in their hair. Of course, to an ancient audience (and perhaps to most people—more sensible than I) the “bow” refers to a bow of war, as in bow and arrow. I’m sure he wasn’t the first to do so, but Spurgeon points out (which I caught via Tim Keller) that the bow points up—not at earth, but at heaven.

When God married immanence and transcendence in the incarnation, he did it to show us what a righteous man looked like and to solve the problem of violence, both transcendent and immanent violence. For our rebellion, for our murders, for our wars, for our genocides, we deserve flood and fire. And individually, participants in Satan’s war against God via Adam, we deserve God’s violence. In the incarnation, however, he smote His Son instead of us. And because He died in our place, he cancelled our sentence; and because He rose from death, He made available to us His life and His peace, His shalom. In the crucifixion, God condemns human violence. Violence is His prerogative, and, mysteriously, He poured it out on himself. On us, he pours out mercy. Though there won’t be another flood, the New Testament tells us that fire is coming. But God made us an ark–Christ; in Him, we have free passage

Until we enjoy the full fruit of Christ’s resurrection in heaven, we must live in a world full of violence. God’s transcendence, revealed in scripture, is a resource to us. He surrounds our enemies with chariots of fire. He tells us to leave vengeance to him (Romans 12:19–also, the epigraph to Anna Karenina). Though we were his enemies, and surrounded him with the Romans and the Pharisees, he vanquished us by letting us slay him. But once he pulled the wool over our eyes (and his archenemy the devil) and led us away, instead of killing us with swords and bows, he prepared a great feast for us and returned us to our Master.

The immanent world is a history of violence and a faint promise of peace, but the transcendence of the Gospel promises that God causes all things to work together for good for those that love him. Until then, He, in the person of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit, gives us the resources to be properly incarnated, peaceful people.

For more on violence check out C.S. Lewis’s essay, “Why I Am Not A Pacifist,” and Derek Webb’s song, “My Enemies Are Men Like Me.”

 

Letting Go: I John 2:15-17

Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. If any one loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God abides forever. 

First notion: bummer. The truth is, I like a lot of things in the world—I might even love them. This “hate the world” stuff sounds dualistic, and the main reason I’m still a Christian (from the angle of my experience) is that I discovered the difference between Christianity and Manichaeism. And then, John just plum damn trashes the world, saying it consists entirely of “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life.” Come on, John. What about fly-fishing? What about the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, football in the fall, the films of Federico Fellini? What about the tinsel-thin sheets of paper, the top grain cowhide binding, and the intricate mechanisms of publishing and distribution that got the very words you’re writing to me? In light of all that, you’re going to reduce the world to lust and pride?

“Yes,” he would say. “But I’m talking about the world; you’re talking about the earth and the common grace that’s on it.”

Ah. So,  by the ‘world,’ you mean the social matrices of fallen powers, vocabularies, and values that corrupt what’s on earth?

“Yeah. Traces of heaven remain, but there’s a whole lot of hell abroad.”

Fair enough.

After all, I have plenty of experience with the lust and pride. Pride and lust take matter (the good things I alliteratively mentioned above) and puts them to their worst use. As Milton says, “So little knows/Any, but God alone, to value right/The good before him, but perverts best things/To worst abuse, or to their meanest use” (Paradise Lost IV.201-204). Pride doesn’t come from the earth—it comes from us who walk it.

Lust goes from fishing to devouring waters, fighting over shoreline, and ignoring barbless hook regulations. Pride turns football into a barely suppressed gladiatorial competition and covert imperialism. The flesh rejoices in Fitzgerald’s descriptions of decadence and doubts the final tragedy of Gatsby’s life—it’s the same with Fellini’s descriptions and diagnoses. Finally, lust and pride forget literature, film, and publishing, and goes straight to making pornography and exploiting the rest of the world with it, souls tied to dying animals.

So—do you love that matrix? No. No, John, you were right.

It is good news, then, that the world is passing away along with its lusts. God made the earth and we who make the world on it; but he didn’t make our pride, our lust, and their matrix. That’s on us.

I often feel that most of my trouble comes from being strung between realities: time and eternity, finitude and infinity, necessity and possibility. I’m bound to my body (and really, I have no problem saying that I am my body—among other things); my body is bound to space and time; and I have to live each day in the world. At the same time, I’ve subscribed to this worldview that tells me the world’s view is wrong. But it’s not just the world’s view—it’s mine, too. Being my body, my first inclinations are rarely aligned with God’s will. In Emerson’s words, “The soul says, the man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only” (“Compensation,” Emerson’s Essays, Harper Perennial p. 75). So would I join the flesh only—and often.

“But the one who does the will of God abides forever.” There it is—the Bible’s positing the eternal again—the old unbearable burden.

Or is it a blessing? It’s not too hard for me to accept that eternity is in our hearts. That component of Kierkegaard’s description of the self, then–a synthesis of temporal and eternal–seems unavoidably valid. My honest doubt is whether or not the eternal even exists for anyone. John says it does. Huh. That thing in me—a longing for timelessness—has its reason, you say? Yes. But only for the one who does the will of God.

John begins with the love of the Father. This love is the differentiator between the world’s and the Lord’s. Do you love to fly fish but find yourself fist-fighting anglers interloping on your secret stream? Do you secretly love the parties and affairs in Gatsby more than it’s final squaring to reality? Do you really love watching corners get crack-blocked more than you like to see receivers lope directly under forty-yard passes and into end zones? Do you covertly cherish Guido’s harem-fantasy though Fellini exposes it’s absurdity? Does that disturb you about yourself? If yes, then—good. Perhaps the love of the Father is in you. Do you know that about yourself, resent it, but find your shameful penchants incorrigible? Welcome to life (for most—maybe there are genuine incarnated angels out there who can’t relate–along with purely carnal people, devoid of conscience).

Do you want out of the matrix, though? There’s no easy way—but there is a way. God came into the world, “became flesh” (John 1:14—which proves the Bible’s equivocal use of “flesh,” along with Genesis 2:24), and made the way. He became the conduit for the Father’s love into our lives. In accepting Christ as the way, we receive new natures, new marching orders, and new values. And though abiding by those values is supremely hard, God is gracious and has made it so that we succeed in Him, irrespective of our performance. We receive his performance record and inherit a wealth the world cannot contain. Thus, the things on earth preserved by his grace become ours to enjoy and share as gifts rather than worldly artifacts for consumption.

And abiding in Christ who fulfilled God’s will, we abide forever.

Grasping (Sunday)–Philippians 2:1-11

If therefore there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of he same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore also God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father

I’ve never been easy about commands to love others. I’ve always thought it was a beautiful idea, but the supreme difficulty of it never encouraged me. Perhaps I am coming to it—maybe there is some affective engine I simply don’t grasp when it comes to love. No doubt, I am mightily, almost comprehensively selfish. Nevertheless, I’m not in despair of ever loving—of becoming more like Christ in this.

The idea of loving your neighbor is simple enough—in fact, it may be the most easily understood thing in the world. But actually doing it might be the most difficult thing in the world. And yet God calls us to do it. So I’m struck, not by what Paul calls us to do, here, but rather by what he uses to motivate us–at the beginning of the chapter.

He speaks in a sincere—or insincere—subjunctive mood, using “if,” when he knows very well the conditions are fulfilled. What are the conditions? Because there is encouragement in Christ, because there is consolation of love, because there is fellowship of the Spirit, because there is affection, and because there is compassion—we can make his joy complete; we can be of the same mind as him; we can maintain love; remain united and intent on one purpose. We can imitate God in the incarnation.

Paul offers no dry, painful stoicism. He offers a positive, affective reason for obeying God, deferring to other, denying our selves, taking our crosses, and ultimately dying to our selves. This encourages me. I believe it really happens that when we look to God and cast all our hope on him, staring at Christ’s work, and attend to the people around us—their struggles, their joys, their pain, their projects—I really think we can forget about ourselves, degree by degree, and come to love them. Moreover, I think we will find ourselves happy in doing so. It is one of the great ironies of life that only by forgetting about your happiness—forsaking it—do you really become happy. I’m not talking about conditional, circumstantial happiness—I’m talking about gladness, deep, perhaps unknowing, satisfaction. What else could it be to be in harmony with our good, strong, loving Father’s will–to retune to the songs of Eden?

That’s not to say that it won’t involve pain. To carry a cross is to embrace pain. But for the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross. And I don’t think it was just some future, unrealized joy that motivated him. He wasn’t just dying for people he never met, for some abstract cause, for an ideal principal—he was dying for his friends. Do you think he wasn’t aching for the men and women with whom he’d spent every moment of the last three years, whom he—God himself—had come to call friends? Do you think his heart wasn’t broken for Peter, who plunged out of boats to be with him, who tried so hard and failed so often to love him, this friend of friends? Do you think his bones didn’t ache for love of his mother, whose heart he was breaking, for the disciple who would identify himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” whom he would charge with caring for his heart-pierced mom—his mother, from whom he’d come, bleeding and crying (surely he cried)?

Jesus loves you as much as he loved his contemporary friends. He died for you just as he died for them—because he needed you. Can you imagine someone willing to die that you might live? It happened for you. God did it for you.

May he stoke this love of his in our hearts.