"Drawn..." (Or, Kicking and Screaming into the Arms of Grace)

"Drawn..." (Or, Kicking and Screaming into the Arms of Grace)

[Jesus said:] "Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say--'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.'" Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, "And angel has spoken to him." Jesus answered, "This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. [John 12:27-33]

I was pulled. 

I was hauled. 

I was dragged, so to speak, kicking and screaming into an awareness of the relentless gravity of grace, like the moon is held in orbit around the Earth by sheer mass of our blue-green home world.

And it happened for me, I would like to confess, by daring to listen to Jesus on his own terms, rather than with me bringing my own preconceptions about how Mercy is, or is not, "allowed" to operate.  It happened by listening to words of Jesus like these from John's Gospel, and hearing in the written memory of Jesus' own account, that at the heart of the Christian faith is a cross that draws all people--in fact, "all things" if the Greek text is to be taken at face value--to Jesus himself.

Here's the rest of the confession: for a good long while in my own religious life, I had sort of cobbled together the notion that the Christian faith was rather like a club of some kind.  There were debates, of course, among different Christian groups and denominations, about how one got a valid membership in the Jesus Club--some said you could only become a member as an adult, and others said that you could get a membership as a baby (with the question left open about whether other current members of the Club had to vouch for you in that case, or not).  Some said that you became a member by reciting the Future Dwellers of Heaven Club Pledge of Allegiance (they were not all clear about what had to be included, or what version or edition of the Club Pledge "counted" or not, either).  And some said that you had to not only recite the Pledge but then that you maintained your membership in the Club by ongoing contributions, whether monetary or in volunteer hours to the Club's projects.  Plenty of variations, across the different chapters and franchises of the Club, but all basically still "club mentality"--that being a Christian was basically something you chose, or applied for, and once your application had been processed, a whole world full of perks and benefits were accessible... all because you had made the smart decision to apply for Jesus Club membership.

That model, I admit, sounded appealing to me for a long time.  It felt like it made sense to me, as a denizen of an American culture in which just about every association was like a club, which one might choose to belong to, and which one could terminate belonging with the same ease as changing brands of toothpaste or long-distance carrier.  And I'll tell you what else--the Heaven Club Mentality sounded like Good News while still having a nice and tidy way of accounting who was "in" and who was "out."  The Heaven Club Mentality was an attempt to have its cake and eat it, too--it could say that all the perks you got once you had applied for Club Membership were given for free (this was a way of saying you could call it "grace"), but there was still the satisfying (if unspoken) thought that the Club Members who were presumed to be the sole recipients of that grace had still really gotten it because they were smart enough, or pious enough, or faithful enough, to have initiated the application process and asked to become members of the Heaven Club in the first place.

So to the ears of a younger version of myself, listening to Jesus say things like, "I will draw all people to myself," required a sort of mental gymnastics and editing, until my head interpreted the sentence to mean something that would still fit with the Heaven Club Mentality.  Jesus must have been saying something like, "I will offer application forms for Club Membership to anyone who is bright enough to take one from me and thorough enough to complete the application form." Jesus must have been saying, "I will accept Membership Applications from any willing applicant," I thought.  And the verb, "I will draw" must mean some kind of attempt at persuasive luring like a neon sign "draws" customers to the drive-through, or the "Come hither" stare and wiggle of the finger draws a spectator to a carnival side show.  Yes, I determined, Jesus must be opening the application process for Club Membership, and he is saying that the cross is the starting date for New Applicants to request Membership in the Future Dwellers of Heaven Society.

But the trouble is... I hadn't been actually listening to Jesus on his own terms.  I had, rather, been taking my own convenient mental pictures from the culture around me, a culture full of clubs, customers, and consumer mentality, and tried to shoehorn Jesus' words into a picture I brought... because that made me "feel" better.  Because a Gospel of Heaven Club Membership still lets me think that I am, at root, the one to thank or pat on the back for my salvation.  As long as I get to hold up the claim of, "See, Jesus, you have to let me in because I recited the Pledge so well," then I can still wax poetic about "grace" while still telling myself at night that grace is a spiritual word for "God giving me a reward for making the smart choice of choosing to believe in Jesus."

And it turns out, that's not what Jesus was ever actually saying.  It's not what any of the New Testament, or even the Hebrew Scriptures either, had been saying.  No, in fact, there is no talk of Club Membership in the Scriptures, and Jesus doesn't take applications.  In fact, quite the opposite--contrary to the practice of every other rabbi worth his salt in the first century, Jesus goes out and calls people to follow him who weren't looking for him already, who didn't have faith in him before his calling, and who had never thought to come to him. 

And more convincingly, there are sentences like today's from John's Gospel, which finally pulled me, kicking and screaming, out of the Club Mentality altogether.  Because when Jesus says, "I will DRAW all people to myself..." it is not a word used for a "come hither" stare or a persuasive appeal, or even a neon sign for hungry late-night fast food connoisseurs.  It is the word for "hauling in a net full of fish," or "dragging a load behind you," or "pulling a rope with all your might."

And that meant that Jesus wasn't simply taking applications for prospective members in his club.  Jesus was saying that the cross itself--his act of self-giving love on a Roman execution stake--actually accomplishes something, actually does the pulling, the dragging, the hauling.  Jesus says, in no uncertain terms, that his death is rather like the electromagnet that pulls all the paper clips to its poles the moment the battery is connected.  He says that the cross, like gravity, does the pulling, without and prior to my giving permission to him having a pull on me.  Jesus' own way of talking about the cross, in other words, breaks apart the Heaven Club Mentality and says that before I did a thing, he already drew me to himself, as well as "all things" and "all people." 

Well, I must say, discovering the force of Jesus actual words, and being compelled to actually listen to Jesus' way of understanding himself, forced me to reconsider a lot about the way I saw the Christian faith... and the way I read the Bible.  And all of a sudden, it became clear to me that these words from John 12 were not the outliers or the exception or a fluke, but in fact the main melody and recurring theme of the whole Bible itself.  I just hadn't been willing to listen, or been attuned to hear, that it was there all along.

There's Jesus in John 15, telling his disciples, "You did not choose me, but I chose you..." and blowing apart my old thinking that said my Club Membership began when I had the bright idea to apply in the first place.

There's Paul in Romans saying that Jesus gave his life "while we were still enemies" of God, that is to say, precisely at the point at which we were all turned away from anything God had to offer.

There's Paul in Ephesians saying that even our faith itself is a gift "and not our own" accomplishment, so that "no one may boast."  And with that, I realized that to hear the Bible itself tell it, even my ability to trust Jesus or believe in God didn't come from me... but came as a gift from God in the first place.

There's Paul in his letters to the Corinthians, announcing that Christ will be "all in all" and that in Christ God was already "reconciling the world to himself."  That's not Club Membership talk--that's... well, it's like hauling in a net, or pulling on a rope, or a Mama Cat grasping her kittens in her mouth by the nape of her neck, carrying them to safety.

And in that transition in my own life of faith, a lot of old things began to unravel, and the Spirit started taking the unspooled yarn and making something new out of it.  It became clearer that God had had a hand on me even when I had the boneheaded Club Mentality, because my belonging did not ultimately come from my cleverness, my smarts, my recitation of the Pledge, or even the correctness of my theology.  The baby kitten brings only his blind and ignorant need to be rescued; the Mama Cat not only sees the need, but acts and scoops up her brood while they don't even know they are in danger and without asking their permission first.  The mother cat, in a word, draws her brood to herself, even if it means she puts her own life on the line to save them.

Sounds rather like the cross, actually.  At least, it sounds like the cross if we dare to listen to Jesus' own take on the cross and not our pre-fabricated pre-formed cake pan to try and fit the cross into. 

Let me end with a warning, that is also an invitation to something powerful and life-changing.  If you and I dare to listen to Jesus, and to listen in fact to the whole sweep of the story of the New and Old Testament, we will find our own consumeristic, deal-based, club-mentality picture of the Christian faith comes undone all the way.  It simply does not hold up to the way the Bible actually talks about things, and how Jesus himself describes the relentless, and yes, unconditional, pull of grace... on all people.  If that makes us squirm because we think there should be more rewarding of people with the bright idea to come to Jesus first, or if I don't like the idea of a God who rescues me first and then taps me on the shoulder to help me see that I have been rescued, then perhaps we are free to invent our own religions... but they will not be the Gospel as Jesus speaks about it here, or as the New Testament itself talks about it.  So be fairly warned: if you and I dare to listen to Jesus on his own terms, some of our old faulty theology will come unglued.

But we will find at the same time, that we have been held... gripped... grabbed hold of... hauled and drawn into the embrace of mercy, and into the arms of grace, even before we knew it.

Thanks be to the God who doesn't wait around for me to get my theology right to take hold of me.

Thanks be to the God who uses a cross to "draw all people" to Jesus.

Lord Jesus, speak in such a way that we will listen to you on your own terms, and discover that you have drawn us to yourself before we did a thing.