The Root of the Problem--August 11, 2021

The Root of the Problem--August 11, 2021

"Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who approach. Otherwise, would they not have ceased being offered, since the worshipers, cleansed once for all, would not longer have any consciousness of sin?" [Hebrews 10:1-2]

Let's say we have a rule in our house--say, something like, "Don't jump off the stairway, because you could fall and break a leg."  And then let's say that someone in the house does the very thing that the rule says not to do--someone jumps off the stairway onto the ground floor.  Do they avoid a broken leg just because we have a rule that told them not to do it?

No.  Obviously not.  Just having a rule against something doesn't prevent the hurt that can happen when the rule is broken.  You can't say, "But my leg CAN'T be broken--I've been told a thousand times not to jump off the stairs!"  The existence of a rule doesn't give any protection from the consequences that inevitably flow from breaking that rule. And at the same time, a rule cannot fix or reverse those consequences once they happen,  just by reciting its words.

Now, to take this a step further, let's imagine that you are a child in the household and you have now jumped from the stairway and--not surprisingly--broken your leg.  Will the parents be upset?  Certainly--they will be most urgently concerned to get you to the emergency room, first off, and they will also be frustrated and sad that you have caused yourself additional unnecessary pain by this avoidable error.  And, sure, they will be miffed that you couldn't trust them enough to simply abide by the rule, which could have saved an awful lot of tears (and money in medical bills, probably).  

But--and this is a pretty important point here--it is not their anger at you that is keeping your leg broken.  The problem is not primarily with the parents holding some kind of grudge, which then in turn keeps your leg broken until you make up with them or win them over.  The problem is not the parents' anger that keeps your leg broken--the problem is in you, in your leg.  And maybe a bit deeper, there is something inside all of us that has gone wrong when a wise, good, and fair rule like, "Don't jump off the stairway," can be given by the people who love you and are worthy of your trust, and yet we do it anyway.  We are all a bunch of stair-jumpers, we humans, wondering why we are all limping on broken legs caused by our own choices.

But the problem is not that God is mad at us and keeps inflicting pain on us out of divine spite.  The source of the dis-ease is within us, not with a cranky deity looking to dole out punishments.  Like the old Switchfoot lyric puts it, "the sickness is myself."

Honestly, this is something we need to be reminded of, because an awful lot of the time, we Respectable Religious folks speak and think like the problem is with God and God's accounting.  We have a way of thinking that the primary problem with the human conditions is that our rule-breaking racks up more and more fines against our accounts in the divine ledge book, and that God keeps punishing us, or threatening to punish us, for the rule-breaking.  In other words, we tend to operate (and implicitly teach others) that the human problem is a bean-counting god who wants satisfaction or payment or restitution, and that if we could only cook the books in our favor, all the problems and pains of life would go away.

No wonder, then, that we end up talking about Jesus and the cross like it's about paying a debt racked up by our sin, where we imagine every broken commandment and every crossed line adds a price to our payment plan. And no wonder our ancient ancestors thought that killing animals was like making the minimum monthly payment on an overdue credit card with a high balance due.  All of that thinking makes the same fundamental mistake at the beginning--namely, assuming that the human problem is primarily about God's bookkeeping, rather than our brokenness.  It assumes that if only we could please a vengeful and angry god who is mad that we broke the rule about stair-jumping, then our leg would stop being broken.  And it assumes that the keeping of rules is what earns us healing from fractured bones, while the breaking of rules merits the broken bones as punishment.

The writer of Hebrews is here to disabuse us of those mistaken notions, because he reminds us here that there is a problem in each of us that can't be fixed with sacrifices or reciting rules.  He points out that if sacrifices were all it took, our crooked hearts would have been set right after the first goat.  If all it took were having rules, our broken legs would be fixed.  And if all it took were a matter of changing God's accounting for our sins, God could just call us square and leave us as terrible jerks with jagged edges in our souls.  

What we need is someone who can tend both to the brokenness in our legs (that were fractured when we jumped off the stairs) and the brokenness in our wills (that refuse to trust God's instructions for how we live together in this household)... and also the brokenness in our relationships with everyone else in the house.  We need something that heals us, not just a way to fudge the divine accounting in our favor.  We need someone who can mend the things in us that make us crooked and heal what is out of joint in us, not someone to ease the temper of an angry deity who is mad about the medical bills we have racked up.

And that is just what Jesus is really about, according to Hebrews.  Jesus hasn't come to bribe God to stop being mad at us, and thereby to stop punishing us with broken limbs.  Jesus has come to deal with the sickness inside us--to heal our dis-ease and our distrust. It was never that God was mad and demanded payment to stop punishing us. It has always been that God is committed to actually healing the places in us that are broken, all the way down.

That means God is neither grudging nor vengeful, in need of persuading to be kind to us again.  God is the One who has sent Jesus to mend us, and along with us, the entire universe, so that we will no longer be the kind of people who jump from the stairs in the first place.

Thanks be to such a God for touching and healing our broken places.

Lord God, help us to let go of our old picture of you that imagine you are miserly and mean, and help us to see the face you show of yourself in Jesus our healer.