No matter how much we give lip service to the notion of free grace and dying love, we do not like it. It is just too...indiscriminate. It lets rotten sons and crooked tax farmers and common tarts in the kingdom, and it thumbs its nose at really good people. And it does that, gallingly, for no more reason than the Gospel's shabby exaltation of dumb trust over worthy works. Such nonsense, we mutter in out hearts; such heartless, immoral folly. We'll teach God, we say. We will continue to sing 'Amazing Grace' in church; but we will jolly well be judicious when it comes to explaining to the riffraff what it actually means. We will assure them, of course, that God loves them and forgives them, but we will make it clear that we expect them to clean up their act before we clasp them seriously to our bosom. We do not want whores and chiselers and practicing gays...thinking they can just barge in here and fraternize. Above all, we do not want drunk priests, or ministers who cheat on their wives with church organists, standing up there in the pulpit telling us that God forgives such effrontery. We never did such things. Why, we can hardly even bear the think...
Do you see now? We are second sons, elder brothers, respectable Pharisees, twelve-hour, all-day laborers whose moral efforts have been trampled on by the Feet beautiful upon the Mountains. We are resentful at being the butts of the divine joke of grace that says nothing matters except plain, old, de facto, yes-Jesus faith. And when we institutionalize that resentment by giving the impression that the church is not for sinners and gainsayers, we are a disgrace to the Gospel- a bushel of works hiding the Light of the world. We are under judgment. Oh, yes; we say we believe. But what we believe is largely an ethico-theological construct of our own devising. a system in our heads that will make the world safe for democracy, and for thrifty, brave, clean and reverent ex-sinners like ourselves.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Some thoughts on Judgment
I've finally finished some books!!
The last third of one of the books I've been reading deals with judgment- here are some introductory thoughts:
As a preacher, I can, with the greatest of ease tell people that God is going to get them, and I can be sure that they will believe every word I say. But what I cannot do, without inviting utter disbelief and serious doubts about my sanity, is proclaim that he has in fact taken away all the sins of the world and that he has, accordingly, solved all the problems he once had with sin. I cannot tell them, as John does, that he 'did not come to judge the world but to save the world'. Nor can I ask them, as Paul does, to believe the logical consequence of that statement, namely, that 'there is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus'. Because if I do, the same old question will come pouring out : 'What about Hitler? What about child molesters? What about my skunk of a brother-in-law?' Their one pressing worry is always, 'What have you done with the hell we know and love?'
It is a mistake to come to them (Jesus' parables on judgment) as if we already understood what judgment is all about and were simply trying to see how they can be made to confirm what we think. Come to them that way and you will get only what so many preachers have gotten: a Messiah playing cops and robbers, a vindictive God bent on putting all the baddies under flat rocks. But come to them as the words of a Savior who has just spent weeks or months making death the principal device of his parables of gracious love- and which is now, under the compulsion of the same gracious love, about to die in order to activate the device once and for all- and you will see something new. You will see Gospel, not law; good news, not bad; vindication, not vindictiveness.
If I have anything to contribute to the interpretation of the parables of judgment, it is my steadfast refusal to separate them from the rest of Jesus' parables...Therefore I am convinced that anyone who interprets them as if Jesus had decided simply to abandon his previous palette...is making a crashing mistake.
As a general rule- and especially in his specific parables of judgment- Jesus is at pains to show that no one is kicked out who wasn't already in.
The last third of one of the books I've been reading deals with judgment- here are some introductory thoughts:
As a preacher, I can, with the greatest of ease tell people that God is going to get them, and I can be sure that they will believe every word I say. But what I cannot do, without inviting utter disbelief and serious doubts about my sanity, is proclaim that he has in fact taken away all the sins of the world and that he has, accordingly, solved all the problems he once had with sin. I cannot tell them, as John does, that he 'did not come to judge the world but to save the world'. Nor can I ask them, as Paul does, to believe the logical consequence of that statement, namely, that 'there is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus'. Because if I do, the same old question will come pouring out : 'What about Hitler? What about child molesters? What about my skunk of a brother-in-law?' Their one pressing worry is always, 'What have you done with the hell we know and love?'
It is a mistake to come to them (Jesus' parables on judgment) as if we already understood what judgment is all about and were simply trying to see how they can be made to confirm what we think. Come to them that way and you will get only what so many preachers have gotten: a Messiah playing cops and robbers, a vindictive God bent on putting all the baddies under flat rocks. But come to them as the words of a Savior who has just spent weeks or months making death the principal device of his parables of gracious love- and which is now, under the compulsion of the same gracious love, about to die in order to activate the device once and for all- and you will see something new. You will see Gospel, not law; good news, not bad; vindication, not vindictiveness.
If I have anything to contribute to the interpretation of the parables of judgment, it is my steadfast refusal to separate them from the rest of Jesus' parables...Therefore I am convinced that anyone who interprets them as if Jesus had decided simply to abandon his previous palette...is making a crashing mistake.
As a general rule- and especially in his specific parables of judgment- Jesus is at pains to show that no one is kicked out who wasn't already in.
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