No Foolin'

No Foolin'--March 15, 2018

"God made you alive together with [Christ], when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it." [Colossians 2:13b-15]

There are two truths on which a great deal of the Christian faith hangs.  

1.  There's no fooling God.

2.  There is no need to fool God in the first place anyhow.

As obvious as those might be (or at least I hope the first one seems self-evident), let's unpack them. Here's why we need to have this conversation about the unfoolable God.  I think somewhere along the way, a lot of us Christians have picked up the bad theological habit of thinking that the cross is Jesus' attempt to "fool" God into accepting sinners.  And even if we don't realize that's what we're saying, it's bad theology, and we need to get things straightened out.

This is what I mean about thinking (wrongly) that the cross is Jesus' clever scheme to pull the wool over God's eyes.  I heard a sermon not that long along (and I'll confess that part of what made it stick in my head is that I heard in it echoes of sermons that have come out of my mouth before, too) that centered on the idea that all of us have these "black marks" on our souls, like stains and mud on your clothes, and that "once you accept Jesus into your heart" he comes and puts a new fresh outfit on top of the old muddy, stained clothes, so that God won't see all the bad marks of all of our bad deeds and the evidence of all the messes we had gotten ourselves into.  The problem, according to the preacher at the time, was that God, being "holy", cannot abide even looking at our sins and stains, and so God must be... (well, here I'm looking for another word beside "fooled")... made not to see that we really do have all these bad marks on our permanent records.   The sermon went on to say that basically, the cross is Jesus' offer to give you a new set of clothes that go over the old ones so that God won't see we are sinners.

And that whole metaphor strikes me as maybe half-right--but just enough off plumb that if you construct anything on it, your building ain't gonna be square, and I doubt it would bear any weight.  See, the trouble with saying that God "can't abide being in the presence of anything sinful or unholy" makes it sound (at least to my ears) like the problem, the deficiency, is in God, like God is lactose-intolerant or something, and that God must therefore be tricked into accepting us by not being allowed to see us all the way down.  And if that didn't sound just plain problematic on its face, it gets more and more heretical the more you pick at it.  It comes off sounding like there's a nice God-figure in Jesus, who is all about sneaking us into his room even though his Dad has a rule against letting riff-raff, troublemakers, and sinners (that is, us) into his house, and then that there's a stern, by-the-books kind of God-figure who gets final say in the divine household, but who can be fooled into thinking that we're not wearing a dirty set of clothes outside our top layer. 

Well that's all just nonsense from a Christian point of view--that makes it seem like the Trinity is a family of squabbling members who cannot agree on a policy toward sinners. It sounds like God needs to be tricked into granting heavenly-gate-passes for us who don't have our own tickets, as though God were some doddering old man with a beard  and bad eyesight who can be distracted easily. And worst of all, it assumes that God is incapable of loving what is unlovely--or of loving us as we are, right here and right now, just as we are.

But what if the solution to our various long lists of stains, messes, and past predicaments was not to hide them from God under an extra layer of clothing, but simply for God to decide to leave our "permanent records" behind?  What if instead of saying that God isn't allowed to see unholiness, whatever that might mean, we listened to these words from Colossians that say God is well aware of all the messes we have been into, and that God can see the stains on our clothes, and that God simply decides to "set them aside" and nail them to the cross so they can't come back?  

This is the way the New Testament really describes the cross--not as some clever cover-up so that the stern fatherly God won't "see" what we really are and so that Jesus, the nice son of the family, can sneak us into heaven--but as the point at which God says, "I know about all the stuff that brings you shame, all the messes of the past, and all the rotten selfish choices... and I love you anyway.  We will put all those things aside."  The Gospel is not the story of some divine bait-and-switch where a sneaky Savior fools the aging Almighty into letting us into heaven when we shouldn't be there.   The Gospel is not about Jesus telling us to pretend we have our papers in order so that we can get past the celestial Customs officer and be allowed in to God's good graces when we are really law-breaking trespassers and transgressors who shouldn't be allowed in.  The Gospel is about God's choice to set aside our rap sheet and list of prior convictions and to nail them to the cross, so they cannot be used against us any longer.  It is God's blanket amnesty for past misdeeds and sins that God well aware of, not a matter of tricking the Father into thinking we are perfect peaches.

And, we should be clear, the New Testament teaches that this is how God runs the whole universe, actually--over against whatever other "rulers" and "authorities" and powers of the day out there might think about us.  Regardless of whether it was Rome in the first century clamping down on those troublesome Christians or present-day powers declaring, "You are not allowed... you are unacceptable... you are not welcome... you are too damaged... you are making trouble," the living God has already made the choice to put all of those assessments that have been dutifully and officiously placed in our permanent record, and to leave them at the cross.

See?  The real living God can't be fooled into thinking we smell like roses when we've really just sprayed off-brand Febreze to mask the rotten eggs in our hearts.  The living God can't be fooled.

But--hurray and good news!--we never needed to fool the living God anyway.  God's the One who, at the cross, took our list of messes and nailed it in place, precisely because God loves us as we are  and sees us as we are.

Lord Jesus, allow us the courage to let you see us as we are, knowing that you already love us as we are and have set our messes aside.