The Gospel Monkeywrench

The Gospel Monkeywrench--October 19, 2018

[Jesus said:] "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that go you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful." [Luke 6:32-36]

The greatest challenge from Jesus is not about moving mountains or crossing oceans.  It's not about walking on water or changing water into wine.  In truth, the greatest challenge of Jesus isn't even about us doing anything in particular--it is a challenge to dramatically revise our definitions of God.  

And this is probably why Jesus' challenge is so hard--we would much rather keep the mental pictures of the Almighty that we have been crafting in our own stingy images, and are hard-pressed to part with them. But Jesus has it in mind to unmask our old pictures of God (or really, of our personally-approved "god") as idols, and dares us to take it on his authority that God is, at the core, the One who "is kind to the ungrateful and wicked."

The reason I say that this is the hardest challenge of Jesus is that we build our lives and our view of the world around the way we see God.  We tend to align our lives with whatever we conceive of as the Ultimate Reality--whether one god or many or none, whether Yahweh or Shiva or Allah or the Force.  The ways we picture the "Really Real" will shape the ways we see and define what is "good," and we will pattern our lives after it in turn.  This means that your theology, far from being the most useless of the fields of study (the way it is often derided these days, as just so much playing of word games and navel-gazing), is actually just about the most practical and most essential thing to get straight.  Because what we believe about Ultimate Reality becomes the way we see and direct our own lives.

Any first century listener of Jesus' sermon here would have understood that importance.  At the core of Israel's self-understanding, throughout the Law and the Prophets and the Wisdom writings, was the idea that God's people are supposed to reflect the character of God.  The ancient shorthand for that idea was God's command, "You therefore shall be holy, as I am holy."  So if it turns out that God cares a great deal about justice, the people were supposed to care about justice.  If the God of the Scriptures was said to have rested on the sabbath day, the people were supposed to rest on the sabbath day.  If the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob liked the color blue, well, the people were supposed to follow suit.  The core idea in the Hebrew Scriptures (what we often call the Old Testament) was that God's character is supposed to shape our character.  

That much was taken as a given when Jesus, an up and coming itinerant rabbi from Galilee, gathers a crowd and starts preaching about God and our practices for living.  Everybody would have assumed a connection between "what God is like" and "how we are called to live."  That much was an already established foundational idea of Israel's ancient faith. 

But the kicker comes when Jesus locates the beating heart of God in love for enemies, rather than in bean-counting judgment or ceremonial purity.  See, if you just take the divine command, "Be holy, as God is holy," as your jumping off point, very quickly you need to get some clarity on what "holiness" looks like.  And to many ears over the millennia, we hear "holy" and assume it's a sort of divine allergy to "otherness."  "God can't be around those sinners," the Respectable Religious Crowd said: "God would be tainted by their wickedness, and God can't be in the presence of sin!"  They talked like the Almighty would break out in hives if God were caught sitting next to someone with an overdue library book. They talked about God's holiness like it was lactose intolerance--a weakness on God's part that made God unable to bear the company of sinners. The Respectable Religious Crowd had a way of putting limits of what was "reasonable" on their understanding of God's love.  "Sure," they thought, "God loves the well-behaved and devout; but God's love does not extend to people who don't pray, don't sacrifice, don't go to synagogue, and don't wear their religion on their sleeves."  The conventional wisdom was that God's love was basically a reward system for good behavior, and that God could not, would not, extend love for those who were dead-set against God.

And conveniently, the Respectable Religious Crowd took that image of God's kind of "holiness-as-allergy" and took it as their guide for how to live "holy" lives themselves.  They assumed that God was more concerned with how many steps you walked on the sabbath than who needed your help on the sabbath.  They assumed that it was more important to keep up with the ritual washing than to enter into "uncleanness" by hanging out with a contagious leper.  In other words, the Respectable Religious Crowd looked exactly like you would expect for people who believed God's holiness was fragile and needed to be protected from coming into contact with "those people."

And then along comes Jesus... who insists he knows the heart of God better than any of those Respectable Religious leaders, and who pushes the boundaries of what God's "holiness" looks like.  In fact, Jesus just outright substitutes "mercy" for the old familiar word "holy" when Jesus says, "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful."  

If that weren't a big enough seismic shift, Jesus fleshes out just how wide and all-encompassing God's mercy really is.  God, Jesus insists, does not merely love those who can "pay God back" (because nobody really can).  And God doesn't just love well-behaved, polite people... but in fact is good and kind even to "the ungrateful and wicked."  Jesus says that the center of God's character isn't the exclusion of the unacceptable, but the embrace of the enemy.  And really, it is this dramatic shock to the system that leads the Respectable Religious Crowd eventually to thirst for Jesus' death.  He is a danger to their system.  He is a danger to their theology.  And if he is right about God, then their whole way of seeing the world, their whole way of living, and their whole system of ethics and conduct and right and wrong needs to be overhauled.  And they surely don't want to have to surrender all of that--none of us does.  We much prefer to clutch our idols and call them "the one true God" than to have someone expose the golden calves are really pyrite counterfeits--nothing more than fool's gold that we have been worshiping out of comfortable routine.

If you think about it, everything else that flows out of Jesus' conflict with the Pharisees and Sadducees (as well as the Romans and Herod-supporters) flows out of this essential difference of theology: Jesus acts and lives in accordance with his deep conviction that the Holy One of Israel is kind to the ungrateful and wicked--that God's greatest power and strength is the capacity to love enemies of God.  Seeing that love at the core of the Really Real explains why Jesus heals people on the sabbath while others quibble about whether it is allowed.  It explains why Jesus envisions the messianic banquet as a table full of tax collectors, hookers, and undesirables, and the Pharisees are offended at the idea that Jesus would even go to their house for dinner.  It explains why Rome doesn't know what to make of Jesus, too, because the only kind of power the Empire understands is amassing wealth, sending in the centurions to crush opposition, and crucifying those who defy them.  The hardest thing of all to letting Jesus be your rabbi is that he insists on redefining God in terms of radical mercy for those who least deserve it... and we don't want to let him do that, because we know that if he redefines God that way for us, we will not only lose our idols but have to practice that kind of radical enemy-love, too.

And, of course, that is exactly what Jesus sees as the logical consequence of his theology.  Because he believes that "the Most High is unkind to the wicked and the ungrateful" rather than just the perfect peaches, Jesus expects that we will grow in such extravagant love, too.  We will be good to those we least think are worthy of it.  We will extend kindness to those who have not extended it to us.  We will forgive the people who are still holding grudges against us.  And we will no longer set our course of action in terms of "What can I get in return if I do this?"  All of that flows as a logical consequence of accepting Jesus' theology: if God loves enemies, I cannot hold out from loving mine.

If this realization doesn't make us squirm, we're not hearing it correctly.  So let me say it again.  Jesus insists that the essence of God's character is unconditional grace--not simply a second chance to the people who are trying hard, but kindness to the people who aren't even trying, and generosity to the people who have crossed their arms and turned their backs on God.  And if that is anywhere close to correct, then we are bound to practice the same kind of love that puts others first, regardless of what we will get in return, and regardless of whether the ones to whom we are kind "deserve" it.  The entire notion of "deserving" dissolves out of the equation--it cancels out altogether in the presence of divine love.

I cannot stress enough how profoundly different this is from the thinking we hear all around us, all the time.  "We can't let those people in--they'll taint our collective holiness and moral rectitude!" or "We have to get more out of our deals for ourselves--we can't let someone else get something good in the trade that isn't more beneficial to us!" or "It has to be Us First--me and my group!  Do good only to the people who will prop up your power and position, and never help people simply because it is right. That's for suckers."  You can't deny that the prevailing logic of the loudest voices in our times shout out that you have to look out for yourself first, that you are only loyal to the people who will pay you back, and that it is a sign of weakness or being a "loser" to be generous if you aren't getting something back in return.  And accordingly, religious folks in our day want to remake their image of God in that same image--insisting that God rewards people who do "favors" for religious folks, and that God sees the world in terms of worthy winners and unacceptable, expendable losers and sinners. "Why care about one person's life, if it will jeopardize billions of dollars in profits?" I heard one such Respectable Religious leader say on TV this week.  That is exactly the kind of theology you get when you throw your lot in with the "Me-and-My-Group-First" thinking.  It doesn't surprise me any more when I hear those kinds of words on television... it just disgusts and disappoints me.

And into all of that way of seeing the world, Jesus throws a Gospel monkeywrench.  Jesus insists that we have built our theology around the wrong picture of God, and our false god instead has led us into fake lives.  The real and living God, Jesus insists, loves with a reckless disregard for what profit God will "get" out of loving us, without any concern for "worthiness," and with no conditions about politeness or manners.  Jesus insists that the real and living God loves enemies and shows kindness to the ungrateful and wicked... which includes me.  And you.  And a whole world full of us hard-hearted stinkers.

So today, let us take Jesus up on the hardest dare of all--the challenge to allow him to redefine our pictures of God in light of radical grace toward all... and then to let that new picture redefine us as well.  Let's allow Jesus' picture of God to replace all the gold-framed caricatures and counterfeits we have put up in the chapels of our hearts, and let us then hear Jesus' revision of the old commandment to be holy as God is holy.  Today, let us be holy in the way that Jesus says really matters--let us be merciful, as the beating heart of God is merciful.

Lord Jesus, come and remake our way of understanding God... so that you can remake our way of living in the love of God.