Backward-Thinking

1.  I am not conservative.  I am traditional.  There is a difference.  Tradition can be the most radical force in the world.

2.  On Catholic radio yesterday I heard a priest downplaying God's role in the slaughter the Canaanites in Deuteronomy.  "The Israelites thought that's what God wanted - but that's not what he really wanted."  For some reason this explanation does not sit well with me.  We can't simply write off the parts of Scripture that we think are incompatible with human understandings of justice by saying that the Israelites "didn't know any better."  Perhaps they didn't, but they had a theological reason for saying that God ordered the deaths of the Canaanite women and children, and we can't dismiss that reason.  Nor does it sit well with me to argue that, "Well, the Canaanites had it coming, they were so sinful!"  Perhaps the Canaanites were sinful, but God also declares His ongoing love for the sinner throughout Scripture.

So what can it mean?  What is the lesson?  There is the lesson that a sinful people will call down the wrath of God.  There is a lesson that God's will takes precedence over human judgment.  There is a lesson that disobedience to God is not to be tolerated.  It is not a story for Canannites, but a story told to Israelites to warn them about the cost of straying from God.

But perhaps, fundamentally, there is no lesson.  Perhaps it something meant to disturb us, shake us up out of our notion that God will always be good and kind to us no matter what, so that we can then dismiss Him from our minds and lives.  Perhaps the story was meant to sound a note of discord, to shake us out of complacency.  The story of the Canaanites sits heavy upon us, undigested and unassimilable.  Reminding us that we can never understand fully the mind of God.

We want God to be rational according to our notion of reason.  We want God to be just according to our notion of justice.  We are shocked when He isn't.  We are reminded that He is the source of reason, He is the source of justice, and when He seems to break the rules He has established it is only because we have failed to truly understand them.

3.  Imagine: you have a friend you know very well.  This friend is always a good and kind person.  But one day he begins to act in a shocking way, a manner out of conformity with his previous behavior, a manner that seems cruel and unfair.  What is your first assumption?  That the kind person you always knew is actually a vicious and evil person - or that there must be a good reason for this shift in behavior?

Why can we not offer the same benefit of the doubt to God?  And to do so without cooking up false reasons to explain His behavior.  To accept God as He is, entirely in His inscrutability.  Is that not, finally, the lesson of Job?

4.  What does self-determination mean?  I am so tired of hearing about it.  The pressure to "determine oneself" is an awful pressure.  It is not freedom.  It is entrapment, deprivation.  It is awful and confusing and chaotic and miserable.

No one determines themselves.  The self is determined in relationship to others, and especially to God.  And we all have a god, whether we acknowledge it or not.  (Chesterton said: There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are dogmatic and know it, and those who are dogmatic and don't know it.)  The self is forged in a dialectic between the individual and the world around the individual.  It does not exist except in relationship to others.

What is this notion of not wanting to foist your pre-conceived notions on others?  You don't have to color within the lines, you don't have to play by the rules.  It makes me want to pull out my hair.  There is no real creativity without some sense of structure.  And rules exist to provide structure.  They pass on the wisdom of those who came before.  They give us something to test ourselves and our ideas against.  Why deprive our children of that benefit?

5.  What can I say to justify myself?  Nothing.  I can only say: I am sorry.  I did not do enough.  I did not love enough.  I did not try hard enough.  I did not give enough.  I could have done more, I should have done more.  I can only point to Christ's wounds and say: do not reject Your Son's sacrifice.  He loved me though I did not deserve it.  Let me hide behind His wounds.  Let me bathe them in my tears.  I am sorry.

6.  I am grateful today to be alive.  I thank God that He has kept me alive this day.

Who Has Eyes to See

We tend to see God in good, pleasant, pleasurable things.  The glorious rainbow my son and I saw last week driving home from the grocery store.  Sunsets, flowers.  Peaceful, gentle, loving feelings.  

And God is there, it is true.  But Scripture isn't there to teach us that easy message of finding God in the beautiful.  (Don't get me started on the 'spiritual but not religious' folk who claim they find God more in rainbows and sunsets than in churches.)  Scripture's radical message is that God is also present - and perhaps even more present - in painful, difficult, terrifying, awful, hideous things.  In death, decay, despair.  In barrenness and sorrow.  The grain of wheat that must die.  The yeast that makes bread impure.  The vinegar that only increases thirst.  In the Crucifixion - the broken and beaten man who hung bleeding on the cross.  God is in the midst of all these things.  How do we find Him there?

The message of Scripture - the message of the parable of the grain of wheat and of the leaven - is not only the (rather trite) moral that "small things can make a big difference," but also that those small deaths, those moments of sorrow and thirst, are small compared to the abundance of life God's creative grace can yield out of it.  The point is just as much about the death of the mustard seed as it is about its size.  When we are suffering we can feel so small.  We feel that our pain exists in a vast and empty and desolate place where no one can reach, no one can care.  We find no meaning for any of it.  It is lonely, comfortless chaos.  We are tiny specks in the universe, and we are dying.  Where is God?

God does not minimize human suffering.  He does not deny or negate its reality.  Yes, the death is real.  The dark night is real.  The corruption and the sorrow and the decay: they are real. But He invites us to recognize His powerful creativity in the midst of those moments: those moments when we feel there is nothing but death and barrenness, when we are most hopeless and despairing.

St. Clement points to nature as containing hints or clues - signs of God at work in the natural cycle of destruction and creation.  Behold, I make all things new!  The Old Testament itself reflects this dynamism: salvation is not a linear event, but an upward spiral of falling and rising and falling again.  Christ Himself points to nature as revelatory of God's plan for all the world.  And, as St. Paul tells us, nature, too, waits - hopes - groans for salvation.

How to be content with hope?  Hope is the opposite of satisfaction, yet God tells us to be satisfied with it.  Hope is not the certainty of sight.  How do we live on hope in the absence of certainty?  We see the signs.  We trust.  But there is always the seed of uncertainty.  Not doubt - but uncertainty.  It is as fallacious to equate doubt and uncertainty as it is to equate knowledge and belief.  I believe, but I am uncertain.  I am uncertain, but I do not doubt.  If I were certain, I would not hope.  If I were certain, my heart would not pound with anticipation, I would not turn my eyes to God with joy-filled eagerness.  I am not certain: I hope.  But hope, too, is a thing far more profound than ambivalence.  It is a thing backed up by faith, buttressed by love.  I hope because I have faith; I have faith because I love.  One must love God first before one can believe in His promises, and one must believe before one can hope that those promises will be fulfilled.

The question of Genesis: will God be faithful to His promise?  Will we be faithful to ours?  The question is answered: God is always faithful, even when we are not.  But in the midst of every human life in every age, the question must arise again.  The drama of salvation must unfold.  It is not a boring event with a foregone conclusion.  It is a living thing.  Our future with God is an open-ended event, and we press forward with excitement to see its conclusion.  Can you feel the enthusiasm of the early church?  Waiting, singing songs of joy, groaning with anticipation, full of the heady flux of feelings that stir in the breast of anyone asked to wait patiently before being united with the thing - the ONE - they love most in the world.  Maranatha!  Come Lord Jesus!

Unanswered Prayers

St. Anthony Mary Claret

From St. Augustine's Letter to Proba:

     When, to prevent [Paul] from becoming swollen-headed over the greatness of the revelations that had been given to him, he was given in addition a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet him, he asked the Lord three times to take it away from him. Surely that was not knowing to pray as he ought? For in the end he heard the Lord’s reply, telling him why even such a great saint’s prayer had to be refused: My grace is enough for you: my power is at its best in weakness.      So when we are suffering afflictions that might be doing us either good or harm, we do not to know how to pray as we ought. But because they are hard to endure and painful. . . [we] pray to have our afflictions taken from us. At least, though, we owe this much respect to the Lord our God, that if he does not take our afflictions away we should not consider ourselves ignored and neglected, but should hope to gain some greater good through the patient acceptance of suffering. For my power is at its best in weakness.      Scripture says this so that we should not be proud of ourselves if our prayer is heard, when we ask for something it would be better for us not to get; and so that we should not become utterly dejected if we are not given what we ask for, despairing of God’s mercy towards us: it might be that what we have been asking for could have brought us some still greater affliction, or it could have brought us the kind of good fortune that brings corruption and ruin. In such cases, it is clear that we cannot know how to pray as we ought.
      Hence if anything happens contrary to our prayer, we ought to bear the disappointment patiently, give thanks to God, and be sure that it was better for God’s will to be done than our own.

Prayer is not a test of God.  Our attitude should not be: If my prayer is answered, then I will believe in Him, but rather I believe in God, therefore I know that He hears me when I pray.  The starting assumption must be faith.  Not blind faith, but faith based on what we know God has already done for us.  Because of that faith, we owe it to God to believe, without fail, that He hears us, that He is looking out for our best interests.  For God does everything for us.  Christ said and did nothing that was not for our benefit.  Even when God acts for the sake of His own glory, it is so that we can see and know the source of all our blessings and joy.    

When we begin from the assumption that God exists and hears our prayers, the question then becomes what are we to think if our prayers are not answered?  We know God hears us, so why does He not answer?  It must be because what we are asking for is not good for us.  Paul provides an example of an unanswered prayer, as does Christ Himself.  Augustine reminds us that God always answers our prayers - just not always in the way that we want.  When we make our faith conditional on answered prayers, we are really setting up ourselves as God - making idols of ourselves.  

I am a very impatient person.  I can begin the day in quiet solitude and prayer, but as soon as I encounter other people I find myself easily irritable, upset at being distracted from my own thoughts.  I have prayed for this impatience to be taken from me.  But I wonder sometimes if I am praying for my own sake - so that I can be proud of being a kind, patient, gentle person.  If so, then it is better that my prayer not be answered.  

I hope to learn to pray on behalf of others.  Can I pray that my impatience be taken from me so that those around me are not hurt?  I rejoice that my vices keep me humble, keep  me turning to God every day to help me through.  God, give me patience.  God, give me strength.  God, give me kindness.  My vices remind me that I cannot overcome the imperfections in my soul through my own efforts.  But I do not want to hurt those I love.

What good can come "through the patient acceptance of suffering"?  Perhaps God is trying to teach me to be patient with myself.  The smallest vice sends me spiraling into despair: I will never be good enough.  I am not worthy to be loved.  I am not worthy.  How can I learn to cast my imperfections onto Christ, let them be hidden in His wounds and cleansed by His blood?  It is not that my imperfections "don't matter."  They matter very much indeed.  It is not that I should feel free to ignore my own vices.  But the solution is not to keep chiseling away at my imperfections by my own efforts.  The solution is to actively, by conscientious offering, give my imperfections to Jesus.  To be willing to submit to His purifying fire, over and over again.

In a moment of impatience, perhaps instead of looking at myself, beating myself up for that vice, perhaps it might be better to look to Christ, to say: My God, I offer You this moment in humble gratitude.  Forgive me in Your mercy.  Do what You will.  

Slaves to Righteousness

St. John of Capistrano

Romans 6:12-18: A reminder that freedom does not equal license.  It seems that some of Paul's listeners, having heard that they were "free" from the law, believed that they no longer had to obey the law and could do whatever they wanted.  If Christ's grace alone is what saves, then what does it matter if we behave badly?  

Paul teaches that we have three choices: we can be bound to sin, we can be bound to the Law, or we can be bound to Christ's grace.  The Law offered a way out of bondage from sin, but the Law was impossible to follow, leaving us again in sin's snares.  Christ provided another Way out of bondage from sin, one that fulfilled the promise of the Law to free us from sin.  But we cannot be free of both the Law and of Christ's grace and expect to be free from the bondage of sin.  A Christian must choose.

Secular freedom rejects this choice.  It upholds autonomy and individualism.  You make your own rules; you "think for yourself"; you obey no one.  You are told that you can and should be both free from the Law and free from Christ's grace.  Christians, however, recognize that such freedom is not freedom.  It makes us slaves to sin.  The only true freedom is freedom in Christ.  And this freedom means obedience to God: it means following God's rules, thinking as God thinks.  

Yet what does "slavery to righteousness," bondage to Christ, mean?  We were not redeemed by Christ so that we could abandon God - although of course God in His goodness allows us to make that choice.  We were redeemed by Christ so that we could offer ourselves back to Him in gratitude for being "brought back to life."  

Medieval notions of chivalry understood this concept.  Read any Arthurian legend: when one knight rescues another, the rescued knight owes a debt of allegiance to the one who saved him.  To renege on that debt was an act of treachery, a grave offense.  We were rescued by Christ; we owe Him our allegiance.

Do we have any metaphors in our own culture for such loyalty?  Paul used the metaphor of slavery: no longer slaves to sin, but slaves to righteousness and obedience.  I am afraid I cannot think of any ways to "inculturate" such a notion into our own setting.  We live in a legalistic, bureaucratized society.  We do things because we are legally or contractually bound to do so, not out of a sense of moral obligation or duty.  We tend to do the bare minimum to fulfill the demands of our contracts, rather than offering our all.  A contractual society has its benefits, to be sure: it is more stable, more dependable, more predictable.  But it also tends not to make moral demands on its members.  It tends to require less.  

This requiring less is seen to serve the cause of freedom.  We do the bare minimum, so that we can be free to engage in our own pursuits independently of our obligations to others.  But, again, Christian freedom is antithetical to such notions.  Freedom is not to be found "independently."  Freedom is found in relationship - in fulfilling our obligations to others, in being bound to serving others.    

Paul reminds us that we are never truly free.  A promise of absolute freedom is a promise only Satan makes; when we accept that false promise, we fall into Satan's trap and away from the source of our life and joy.  We fall into alienation and atomization.  The freedom promised by God, like the freedom given to Adam and Eve, always requires obedience, because this freedom is predicated on love.  And love can only exist in dynamic relationship: when the wishes and needs of all parties are respected and fulfilled.

Our freedom in a fallen world is always hedged with snares.  The best way through is to follow the One who can lead us safely through.  Otherwise we will, inevitably, fall into sin's trap.

Curse, Bless Me Now

The book of Esther: a reminder that when good fortune comes my way I have a duty to use it for the benefit of others.  "Who knows?" Mordecai asks.  "Perhaps you have come to the throne for just such a time as this."  

When bad things happen to us, we are quick to ask: "Why me?"  We often fail to see God's providence in our bad luck: sometimes what we see as a "bad thing" might in fact be preempting an even worse thing that may have happened otherwise.  Getting pulled over for a speeding ticket, for instance, may have prevented a fatal accident further down the road.  This should not be taken to extremes, however.  Sometimes tragedy strikes us and it is, quite simply, tragedy.  No use saying, "Well, it could have been worse."  At those moments when we ask, "Why me?" perhaps we ought to remember that Christ stands with us.  Not to compare miseries with Christ, or to feel guilty about being upset, but to remember that Christ too asked, "Why me?" in the face of his death sentence.  He knows what it is to feel those things.  At those moments we have the honor to stand with Christ in Gethsamane, that garden made holy by Christ's blood and tears.

But when good things happen, we should be equally quick to ask: "Why me?"  How will this good fortune help you to serve others better?  How will it help draw you closer to God?  I mean this in no simple "pay it forward" sense.  I mean a willingness to accept the challenge and the risk attached to every blessing we receive.  Esther's good fortune turns into something that seems like a curse: Mordecai tells her to use her high position to risk death for her people's sake.  In Scripture blessings are always tinged with curses.  Cain receives the blessing of God's protection, but is forever marked as a sinner.  Jacob receives his father's blessing, but is driven from his homeland.  Moses leads the people to the Promised Land but cannot enter with them.  Then: Esther, blessed with beauty, rank, and wealth, now being challenged to use her blessings in self-sacrifice.

It is of course an irony.  Esther is in a position to use her rank to save her people, but in using her rank she risks losing it.  To save one's life one must lay it down.  To receive, one must give.  The blessing of God is a fearful thing.  It is always hemmed with uncertainty.  We must approach it with awful hope.  We must accept the curse of uncertainty if we are to accept the blessing also.  Nor can we hold onto the blessing rigidly.  We cannot hide it in the dirt, hoping to preserve it.  (How silly to interpret that parable as meaning such a trivial thing as one's "talents" and abilities!  As if in our day and age people need more encouragement towards individualistic exhibitionism and self-promotion!  Let your light shine, indeed!)  We must be willing to risk our blessing, risk our inheritance, give away what we have been given.  Such risk requires tremendous faith.  It means taking your most prized possession - the thing you love most in the world - and giving it away without certainty that you will receive it back.  It means being Abraham, ready to sacrifice Isaac, hoping against hope that "God will provide" an alternate sacrifice.  The blessing of God means wrestling with those terrifying fears, that anguish, that despair.

How easy to rationalize away such a decision.  "Why would God give me such a blessing," one would be tempted to ask, "if He only wanted me to risk its destruction?  How is that being a good steward of God's gifts?"  But remember such words are the words of the devil.  The man who hid the coin thought he was being a good steward as well.  The blessing of God comes with the demand that we be willing to give it up when called.  We cannot receive the blessing without that willingness.   

To say, "I have been blessed" means to stand with Noah and Job on the other side of their trials even while we are in the midst of our own.  The blessing of God hounds us as it hounded Jonah was - hounded into the belly of the whale, hounded despite our own prejudices and narrow-mindedness and small-sightedness.  Often we will find ourselves resenting God's blessing when we see the apparent curse attached.  Often the curse will be much more real than the blessing.  "Why me?" we will ask.  "Why did God choose me?"

To be a person whom God blesses take much courage and much strength.  It may even take a certain desperation - a certain recklessness.  It is no job for the cautious and timid-hearted.

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Psalm 40 says: "Sacrifice and offering you do not want; you opened my ears.  Holocaust and sin-offering you do not request; so I said, 'See, I come with an inscribed scroll written upon me.  I delight to do your will, my God; your law is in my inner being!'"  Or, more poetically: "You do not ask for sacrifice and offerings, but an open ear.  You do not ask for holocaust and victim.  Instead here am I."  God wants us to open our ears to Him so that He can pour His Word - which is His life - into them.  Thus His word will be "inscribed upon us"; His law will be "in our inner being."  Then we stand before Him - "Here am I" - and offer Him back to Himself.  He fills us with Himself; we offer the Him that He has filled us with back to Him.  We must ready to be filled with Him so that we can give Him back to Himself - for He Himself is the perfect sacrifice, the perfect offering.  The offering must not be something outside of ourselves, something external to ourselves.  It must come from the depths of our very being.  In fact it must be our being.  

To Mary: A Love Letter

I did not have to do it.

            I could have stopped at any point along the way.  I did not have to enter Jerusalem.  I did not have to come at all. 

            The angels would have rescued me from the garden if I had asked.  Do you think my father would not have sent them?  Do you think he did not burn with indignation when they spat on my face and insulted me and whipped me?  Do you think he did not want to strike them down?  Do you think he did not wail with rage at the sight of the blood on my back and on my head?  He would have saved me if I had asked.  But I did not ask.

            In the beginning it was not too difficult to bear.  They whipped me: I could withstand that.  They put the crown on my head: I could endure it.  All right, I thought at every step, if this is the worst they can do – surely I can endure. 

Then: the cross.  No one can know how heavy it is.  So much heavier than it looked, impossibly heavy.  But even when they laid it on my shoulder and it pressed against my spine and crushed my lungs and made it impossible to breathe, I thought: I can do this. 
How strange it seemed, to die by wood.  I had worked with wood all my life; it had been my livelihood, had fed my family, had kept me alive – and now wood was to destroy me.  Does it sound odd to you, Mary, that I pitied the tree?  It could have been forged into something beautiful: a table for a meal, perhaps, or a chair, or a chest for a bride.  Instead it had been roughly hewn into this hideous instrument of death.

As I began to walk with the beam on my back, I found myself praying for the tree.  For my father to bless the tree, forgive the tree.  It knew not what it did.  Then, as though rebelling against my prayer on its behalf, the tail of the beam caught on a stone, and I tripped and fell.  The pain - oh Mary, I tell you I did not want to rise. 

            My mother came.  She watched me fall.  When I saw her beloved face, so full of pain – I thought I could relieve her pain, if I were to die now.  Would it not have been an act of mercy for her, to pray not for deliverance, but for death?  I thought to spare her the sight of my suffering.  But she too had suffered, had sacrificed so much.  Her youth, her reputation.  Do you know what poverty she endured for my sake, just so I could be born?  Very few know.  She rarely spoke of it.  Even I only knew in bits and pieces – a reference to a stable, a manger, a voyage to Egypt.  Her hunger and her hope.  Her face was full of grief, but also full of strength.  She was the strongest woman I ever knew, Mary – she had endured so much.  They will not defeat you, my son, her eyes said as they found mine through the dust.  They will never win, not against you.  She willed me to stand, and I had to obey. 

            Simon came.  Ah, that man – he does not know how holy he is.  He looked so terrified, Mary, when they asked him to help me.  Forced him, I should say.  He had come just to watch the spectacle – just for something to do on a Friday afternoon.  He had no idea what would happen to him when he laid his trembling hand on that cross – he thought he was being asked to rescue me, but in the end it was himself he saved.

            There were others, too, who came – the woman who washed my face, the women who wept for my sake.   My friends did not come – Peter, Andrew, Philip, James – all gone. 

I did not blame them for running away.  I wanted to run too.  Imagine, Mary: you’ve been sentenced to death, you are stuck in a prison, and all the while you hold the key to the prison gate!  You are innocent – it is a travesty of justice that you die – you have every right, every right to escape!  And you hold the key!  You finger the key, hefting its weight, sliding your fingers along its grooves, testing it, slipping it into the lock, preparing to turn it – then taking it out, throwing it aside!  Why?  What sane or rational person would do such a thing?    You see it gleaming at you from the filthy prison floor. You pace back and forth, back and forth, but it stares at you, it calls to you. . . That, Mary, that was the greatest temptation: to flee the prison, to take up the key that lay so close. . .

            The irony, my dear: to use the power of God would have been to deny the power of God.
            
Mary, I fell again. 

            I will not say that my agony at that moment was incomparable.  I see so much suffering, Mary; I do not know how to compare.  I see children who are starving with a hunger that I never knew on earth.  I see men and women who are crucified for decades on crosses of cancer and disease.  I see the visions in the minds of those who are haunted by war.  I see destruction and death spreading like wildfire around the world and I look into eyes deadened by suffering and violence and I hear the silent screams of desperate pain aching for salvation.  My hour climbing that hill – my three hours on the cross – yes, they were torturous beyond endurance, but so many are tortured too beyond endurance.  And still they endure.

            I did not want to endure.  I fell, and wood of that rough cross splintered into my bleeding back and my shoulder broke and the thorns were driven into my head and the dust flew into my eyes and I couldn’t see, couldn’t see why I was doing this anymore.  I heard the crowd laughing and I felt the whip on my shoulder and the kicks to my stomach and I could not hear the voice that I used to hear, the one that reminded me why I had come.  Oh Mary, I wished I had not come at all.  There was a drunken man laughing nearby, and I could hear him say: “Look, ladies and gentlemen, he wanted to be a king and have us bow to him – now see, see how he bows to me!”  And in that moment, Mary, I saw the gleam of the key to my escape lying in the dust and I wanted to pick it up – its voice was the only voice I heard. . .

            Then I looked up.

            You know, my love, whom I saw.  Fifty paces to my right, hiding your face behind your shawl – not because you were ashamed and did not wish to be recognized, but because you did not want me to see you weep.  I remembered how that face looked when I first saw it – how disgusting others had found it, tormented and twisted by unknown demons.  You knew only one thing about men, and you sought only one thing from them.  Do you remember when you came to me, offering yourself to me in the only way you knew how?  Oh Mary, even then you were generous, selfless – you wanted to give yourself to something, to someone, but no one had shown you the way!  I took your offer, but not in the way you expected.  I took you, body and soul, and I knew you.  I touched you, and you knew then that love could mean something greater, something better, than what you had ever known before.  And your face became beautiful, Mary – radiantly beautiful, beautiful beyond all reckoning.  I remembered your face as you knelt before me, your tears flowing over my feet.  Your tears - your gift to me - what a precious gift.  They wanted to stop you, to take that moment from you.  But I put my hand on your hair.  I claimed you for my own.

            Mary, I saw your face.   

            In the midst of my loneliness – in the midst of my father’s rage and my mother’s pain, my friends’ abandonment and Simon’s terror, the weeping of the women and the jeering of the men – in view of that gleaming key, waiting for me to snatch it up from the dusty road – Mary, I saw your face, and it was the only face in the world that mattered.

            I stood up, Mary.  I stood and dragged that cross the rest of the way up that cruel hill, I let them strip me naked before your eyes, I let them drive the nails into my wrists – nails thick as branches, nails that cracked bone and split veins.  I drank the vinegar, I let them pierce my side – because I had to save you, Mary.  I saw your face, and I remembered why I had come.  I had come to save you.

Mary – it was because of you.

A Holy Family

St. Luke, Evangelist

My son is dealing with a bully in his kindergarten class.

Perhaps I should not be so blunt.  I am still trying to work out whether Thomas is annoying this other child and provoking his wrath, or if this other child is going out of his way to be cruel to Thomas.  But it does seem that the other boy has spoken to Thomas in an inappropriate and violent way.  

Last night Thomas fell asleep in our bed.  He is going to be too big to want to cuddle soon, so I am soaking up every minute of affection I can get.  As I lay beside him and watched him sleep, I felt a surge of protectiveness and indignation well up in me: how could anyone be cruel to him, tell him that they wanted to kill him, threaten him?  How could anyone exclude him or insult him?  I can't fathom it.  It fills me with anguish. 

My son is my heart embodied.  When he hurts, my heart is replete with pain.

Then it occurred to me: this is how God feels towards us.  When He sees any of us excluded, insulted, threatened.  God is father, God is mother, to each and every one of us.  He is not generically a father or mother, distantly and vaguely.  He is my father, personally, intimately.  He is your father.  We are, all of us and each of us, God's heart embodied on earth.  His adopted children.  When we hurt, He hurts.  

His anger towards sinners is because sin hurts the children whom He loves.  It is no different from my anger towards this bullying child.  God gets angry when His children are in pain.  He gets angry when His children hurt each other, insult each other, exclude each other.  

When we hurt, God wants to gather us in His arms.  He wants to console us.  He wants us to turn to Him.  Imagine the pain, as a parent, to have a child who does not trust you, who will not confide in you.  God feels that way too, when we refuse to share our sorrows with Him.  He longs for us to lay our heads on His chest, to unburden our souls onto Him, to tell Him all our worries and our anxieties.  He hungers and thirsts for us to come to Him, so desperately.  Come to me, all you who labor and are weary, and I will give you rest.  He does not speak these words idly.  They are words of longing.  He wants us to let Him care for us, as tenderly as any mother cares for her children.  

This is the Good News.  God as our Abba.  We do wrong to God when we withhold our tears and our pain from Him.  He wants to share them with us.  This is what He sent His Son to do.

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If God is our Father, then of course Jesus is our brother: the elder brother, perhaps, who shares His birthright with us, though we, rebellious younger siblings, do not deserve it.  Jesus is the older sibling in the tale of the Prodigal Son: the one who stays home, serves His Father - but who, instead of arguing when the Father welcomes back the wayward son, rejoices with the Father, celebrates and shares with us what is rightfully His.  

Elder brothers get short shrift in Scripture.  Cain and Abel: it is the sacrifice of the younger brother, Abel, that is arbitrarily accepted by God.  Cain has to decide: to accept God's will - "to do what is right."  God's acceptance of Abel's offering is a test to Cain: if  you let go of your jealousy and anger and "do what is right," you too will be accepted.  But Cain does not pass the test: he kills Abel.  God, however, does not wholly abandon Cain: Cain is cursed because he is a murderer, but God still grants Cain his protection.  The "mark of Cain" is a sign both of Cain's crime and of God's everlasting watchfulness over him.

Jacob and Esau: by trickery and deception, Jacob steals Esau's birthright and blessing.  Esau wants to kill Jacob; Jacob flees.  But later, Esau does better than Cain: he eventually forgives Jacob.  When Jacob returns, Esau "runs to meet" him - forgives him before Jacob can even apologize.  For Jacob, receiving Esau's forgiveness is like encountering the "face of God." Nor does God forget Esau: his descendants, the Edomites, lurk on the sidelines of Jacob's family. They too are part of God's family.

It is in this context that we must understand the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  Jesus is the elder brother.  It is Jesus' birthright that we make claim to when we approach God hoping for salvation.  But Jesus is not Cain: He is not jealous, He does not deny our right to be accepted by God.  Jesus atones for Cain's sin: He "does what is right," accepts God's will.  Jesus is like Esau: when we return to apologize for stealing what is not rightfully ours, Jesus runs out to meet us, welcomes us into His arms.  Jesus is not like the older brother in the narrative of the Prodigal Son: Jesus understands that God's inheritance is broad enough for both children - that God has a place for both Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Israelite and Edomite, Gentile and Jew.  Jesus undergoes the test of both Cain and Esau - and Jesus defeats temptation.