To the side of me that all this chosenness business offends, and to anyone who sympathizes with my offense, some prolegomena:
Can chosenness be avoided? Can exclusion be avoided? What worldview is without it? Is any world-scheme without some kind of damnation?
The religious varieties of these offensive doctrines are well known. But how much have the secular varieties been discussed? The prevailing secular worldview seems to be that the universe, the world, is most likely an accident and that human nature is the result of a blind process of evolution in which the fittest organisms passed on their genes through the generations. The process may have been “red in tooth and claw,” but now we have to capacity to reflect, make judgments, and organize our lives and societies around rational, humane principles. Tenderness, mercy, sharing, and cooperation are valid, evolutionarily programmed…sentiments, I suppose—even if traces of our simian ancestors still linger in our blood, we aren’t bound to obey their dictates, which are the id’s urges. Overall, things are pretty fortuitous for us.
However you feel about this, imagine for a moment that the forgoing is true: life is an accident. Now think about all that is marvelous about human beings. Think about handsome people: the symmetry of their features, the harmony of their frames, the splendor of strong, healthy bodies. Consider the powers of human intellect and its products: the Sistine Chapel, the automobile, ballet, the Internet, Ulysses, airplanes, iPhones. Beauty and sophistication. But how much of humanity gets to enjoy any of it?
What percentage of humanity is physically beautiful—or receives adoration from the beautiful? What percentage of humanity has the god-like experience of creation? How many possess the convenience and freedom of personal transportation? How many have had the high pleasure of reading and decoding James Joyce? How many people have an iPhone? To us, these things may seem commonplace. But even in our own day, the majority of humanity is without any of this. My armchair analysis of beauty might succumb to a critique along the lines of subjectivity, but the rest remains.
Of course, you could relativize the value all these phenomena (to some extent their value is relative), but then I’m just going to start talking about more basic goods. How many people don’t have the provisions Westerners consider basic to their physical wellbeing? How many people go hungry each day? How many die an early death? Nature herself bestows her blessings rather selectively, and human distribution tends to be no better. The Universe itself dumbly damns cattle-cars of us to the inferno of unredeemed suffering.
If you accept this (which would be rather honest for an atheist, I think), and if you find yourself privileged to possess beauty, intellect, resources, and aesthetics (in other words, if you are approaching self actualization), don’t you see the contradiction between your worldview and objections to the apparently cruel features of God’s will?
Here’s another tack. Objecting to Christianity on the basis of its exclusivity is a little like objecting to the NFL or the Academy Awards on the basis of their exclusivity, with one glaring difference: these institutions tender merit-based favor—Jesus tenders unmerited grace. However, one feature of this comparison holds. We might question their judgment, but no one objects to the NFL on the basis that thousands of aspirants to its ranks don’t make it; no one objects to the Academy on the basis that not everyone in Hollywood gets and Oscar. For that matter, not many think to object to evolution on the basis of its elitism. The Academy is perhaps more subject to criticism, but the comparison holds if we accept that not all films are created equal and that, each year, a few at least might qualify as the best (I have beef with the Academy myself, actually: The Tree of Life ought to have won Best Picture in 2011). Nevertheless, the world is full of institutions that exclude, and the Universe itself is the most exclusive institution of all.
And if we’re objecting to Christianity on the basis of its exclusive truth claims, consider the greater exclusivity of atheism’s truth claims. Most of the world—most of humanity through history, in fact—has believed in God. If atheists are the enlightened ones, you’ve got an elite 1% with the truth, and the rest of the race condemned to benightedness and, probably, oppression at the hands of manipulative religious institutions. No matter what you believe, Hell has to figure into your worldview somehow.
So much for prologues. Now what about John 6? Peter spoke of the “kindness of the Lord” in yesterday’s passage. To the same doubting, offended side of myself (and to anyone who sympathizes), I want to offer some encouragement. Once you get inside Christianity, once you see who Jesus is, God’s character, his engagement with his people through time, and the dynamics of his story—you truly will be amazed. But for better or worse, Tarkovsky’s dad is right—for the unbeliever, there might as well be no God; for the believer, though, the worldview gels.
Reading John 6 from my perspective of faith (the truer side of me), I marvel. The way Jesus engages his contemporaries, the way he engages the Exodus narrative, the claims to divinity he makes, and the embedded reference to his substitutionary sacrifice on the cross—I see how comprehensive, brilliant, and beautiful God’s will is.
In verse 36, Jesus calls a spade a spade (as my friend Jay would say): “But I said to you, that you have seen Me, and yet do not believe.” I don’t know—this might have been obvious his audience.
“Thanks, Captain Obvious. We were worried that we were all simultaneously hallucinating this conversation.”
Or it might have been an offensive remark, something like Peter saying that unbelievers fail to believe because they disobey the word (I Peter 2:8). After all, what had they seen of him? These are the same folks who, in the last chapter, saw him turn a few loaves of bread into enough fare for five thousand. They might have connected the dots and realized the meaning of his arrival on the other side of the sea in a boat, which had embarked without him (the meaning: he walked on water to catch up).
I’m inclined to think Jesus’ straight shooting about their unbelief was more of a challenge. They knew he was something special. They had seen the signs.
And here, Jesus affirms the same offensive ideas pertaining to God’s choice that Peter and Paul do. But he doesn’t do it just to be offensive; he simultaneously encourages us, saying something that should make us marvel. In verse 37, immediately after calling them out on their unbelief, he says, “All that the Father gives Me shall come to Me; and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out.” He makes God’s will sound pretty inexorable—he used the words “shall” and “will.” Restating this idea, he adds something awe-ful to it: “And this is the will of My Father, that every one who beholds the Son, and believes in Him may have eternal life; and I Myself will raise him up on the last day” (6:40).
I have to stop here to question myself. Do I really believe this? Do I functionally have this? Do I really expect this—the resurrection? I’m reminded of the utter other-worldliness of God’s Word. If Hell seems impossible to understand, if it seems alien—how equally hard to grasp, hard to accept, is this—eternal life, a last day, the resurrection. Think of the people you love who have gone on before you to death. Is there a resurrection for them? At the end of The Tree of Life (a film I cannot recommend enough), Terrence Malick pictures a beautiful, other-worldly reunion of lives, previously alienated by death and relational distance—estranged father’s and beloved mothers returned to sons, drowned children restored to the air, broken families made whole.
Do you know the feeling of waking from a horrible dream? Do you know the relief, the gratitude, of returning to a better reality? Can you imagine the joy of a condemned man, awaiting the blast of the firing squad, hearing the commutation of his sentence?
The Handsome Family wrote a song called “Tin Foiled” (C.f. Andrew Bird’s cover on the album Things Are Really Great Here Sort Of). Feel the weight of these words:
Late New Years Eve, paper hat on your head,
It was hard to believe that you’d ever be dead
That dream that you’re falling you’ve had since you were five
Is a bird on your shoulder that whispers goodbye
Goodbye
What is moving will be stilled
What is gathered will disperse
What is built up will collapse
All of your dreams, they’re all fulfilled
Uplifting, huh? They should play it in the morning on CCM stations everywhere. When I had my sophomores analyze Handsome Family lyrics last year, the response was:
“Do you actually listen to this stuff?”
“Yes…But I like life and joy and even sunshine sometimes!”
What I like about Handsome Family songs is that, in one way, they are ineluctably right. Who isn’t going to die? How is death unlike their portrayal of it? From a human perspective, it isn’t. From God’s perspective, though—in light of the absurdly good news Jesus came to share and actualize? In light of Christ’s resurrection, we might rewrite “Tin Foiled”:
Early January second, rising from a hung-over bed
What happened to that paper hat on your head?
That dream of your mother you’ve had since she died
Is a hand on your shoulder and a whisper—alive
Alive
He will quicken what is stilled
The Reaper will gather the dispersed
What collapsed, He will rebuild
All of your dreams, they’re all fulfilled
Do we believe that God spread bread in the desert like dew on the grass so his people could eat? Do we believe that He sent Jesus as the Bread of Life so that we could have life and have it forever? In the face of a generation’s rejection of Jesus, are we reassured by his words? “Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day” (6:44).
How could any one have conceived of one Gospel, much less three others and a remaining 62 books that reinforce the message? Look how Jesus alludes to his death and its accomplishment:
I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he shall live forever; and the bread also which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh. John 6:51