The Last Checkmate

The Last Checkmate--November 16, 2016

"Come, behold the works of the Lord;
   see what desolations he has brought on the earth.
⁹ He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
   he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear;
   he burns the shields with fire.
¹⁰ ‘Be still, and know that I am God!
   I am exalted among the nations,
   I am exalted in the earth.’
¹¹ The Lord of hosts is with us;
   the God of Jacob is our refuge." [Psalm 46:8-11]

There's an image burned into my brain from decades-old memories of watching Star Trek reruns in the basement of my childhood home. Maybe you can picture it, too, if you are willing to own your inner Trekkie for a few minutes on a Wednesday afternoon.  It's that game they would sometimes play on the original series and occasionally on the spin-offs: the three-dimensional version of chess.

To refresh your memory (or to offer a sketch of it if you never indulged in the show), three-dimensional chess has multiple flat game boards of different sizes, each at different heights off the table. And in fact, you can buy 3-D chess games in all sorts of variations and names: Parmen, Raumschach, Tri-D Chess, and so on.  And as much as these games all try and present themselves as some radical new innovation in game-playing, they are really still all just variations on the same old goal: checkmate.  Whether it's the standard flat chessboard or an officially licensed Star Trek commemorative edition three-dimensional set, the game is still based around one side defeating the other by taking your opponent's king, and quite often taking out most of the opponent's pieces in the process. 

And while that is a classic game, and there is plenty of mental stimulation to be gleaned from a good game of chess, that's really not a very "new" kind of game.  Winning by slowly killing off your enemy or cornering their leader is old hat. It is the same game the human race has been playing since Cain decided the only way to deal with the envy he had for his brother was to murder Abel rather than to work on himself.  It is the same old game by which humanity has been amusing itself to death since the beginning.  It always boils down to Team A against Team B, whether the teams are tribes or nations or kingdoms or campaigns, and "victory" is always defined by ridding the game board of your opponent, or capturing their king.  You can add as many game boards as you like, or make the game pieces sleek and futuristic or old and hand-carved, but you are still basically playing the same tired old game that is the only way human beings seem to know how to play, when we are left to our own worst devices.

But... the story of God is different.  God doesn't go for our tedious game-playing.  God has come up with an entirely different kind of victory.  It is there, throughout the Scriptures, but we often do not have the eyes to see it, or we don't realize what radical things are being said about our God.  Perhaps we do not expect so revolutionary a deity, or we are consciously trying to tame the divine so that we won't be challenged ourselves.  But this is the radical way God wins:  God's victory comes by breaking open our old us-versus-them thinking and transforms "the enemy" while embracing them.  God's kind of victory isn't just "I have more swords and spears and shields than you, and so my team is going to win," but rather God snaps all of our spears on the divine knee like twigs, and God destroys all of our weapons of war for killing each other... because God has it in mind to reach everybody.

Everybody.

See, if you can only see the other person as an enemy, you will see the only possible resolution to your conflict as a win-or-loss zero-sum-game, and it will never cross your mind that you could end the conflict not by killing the enemy or beating them in a campaign or a plundering their treasures, but by transforming them into friends.    But God sees the game board differently. Just adding more layers to the chessboard isn't enough for God--God changes the game entirely, by making our wars to end.

God offers us a new way of thinking, a new way of winning, and a new kind of victory.  It will always be a tough go to seek that kind of victory, especially if you are still engaged with folks who don't understand, or won't understand, and can still only think in terms of Cain 'winning' against Abel and one player kill the other player's king in chess.   For the people of God, it will always feel like a struggle in which we have fewer "weapons" than those who see themselves as enemies, because being a part of the Reign of God means we don't use their weapons or fight on their terms.  It means we are not looking to 'get rid' of anybody, but to be transformed together in the likeness of Christ.  I cannot share the news of the extravagant love of God with you if I can only see you as an enemy, and I certainly would not be willing to let you help me see my own blind spots if I can only see you as an opponent.  But the people of God dare to believe that God doesn't just win wars by picking Side A over Side B--the Scriptures talk about God ending wars all together--bringing an end to that kind of thinking.  The Scriptures want us to see the world in a very different way from what we were used to--and the world around us can only think in terms of beating the opponent, rather than being transformed by the victory of grace.

The followers of Jesus are taught to look for a different kind of winning altogether.  We don't plunder from the "losers." We don't gloat over the defeated. We don't use violence or threats to get our way.  We don't even look at ordinary 'wins' and 'losses' as the world sees them as God's way of picking sides--God, after all, has a way of siding with the losers, rather than the so-called "winners" in the story of the Bible.  We aren't looking to solve our problems by cornering the opponent's king on the chessboard--for us, the last checkmate already took place, when our King sacrificed himself to break open the whole old order of us-against-them that had been writing the rulebook since Cain and Abel.  And Easter Sunday is the evidence that God's way of winning worked--instead of destroying enemies, God has destroyed the old order of things so that enemies can become beloved.  And thus Jesus' great prayer of victory is, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do," rather than a gloating cry that God must be on the winning side.  Jesus wasn't, to any outside observer, on the winning side at the cross--but that is exactly the point.  God's kind of victory doesn't kill the enemy; it absorbs death and hate and breaks their power and the cycles of revenge they keep feeding.  For us, the last checkmate has already happened.

Today, how will we treat people differently if we are caught up in God's new kind of victory?  It's your move.

Lord Jesus, let us be transformed by your wonderfully upside down way of winning the victory, and let us love those whom we have seen as our enemies, not to appease or cave, but to return good to them even when we have received evil.