A Second Sentence--October 19, 2021

A Second Sentence--October 19, 2021

"But you have come... to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel." [Hebrews 12:22a, 24]

If the last word to be spoken condemns us for our rottenness and hatefulness, it might be the truth--but it wouldn't be good news.

And if the only word to be spoken covers over the crookedness of our hearts rather than dealing with it, it might sound pleasant to our ears--but it wouldn't be the truth... which is necessary for news to be good.

In so many words, that's how the Gospel's story goes--first, with the truthful (but painful) announcement that there is blood on our hands, and then as a second act of the plot, the declaration that our worst is not the end of the story, but that we are beloved enough to die for anyway.

The tension here is so powerful in these verses from Hebrews.  Like Abel's blood in the ancient tale from Genesis, crying out from the ground to God to accuse his brother Cain of killing him, the truth cries out that all of us are guilty of rottenness in our hearts, apathy in our spirits, and violence with our hands.  Often we do not want to face that truth.  Often we want to skip over that first sentence and its need of naked truth-telling, and just hear "Everything's fine, and God will look the other way while you step on your neighbor."  We want to hear the word "grace" as divine permission for me to take from others, exploit others, consume endlessly, ignore the damage I'm doing to the world around me, and tune out the needs of neighbors apathetically.  We don't want the truth that says, "No!  These things are NOT ok, and you cannot continue in them!" We don't want to own up to our responsibilities toward the needs of our neighbors, the care for the world in which we are placed, or our obligations to the people who come after us.  There is some part of us that--understandably, but not excusably--does not want to have to hear from Abel's blood crying out from the ground against all of us.

But we need to hear that first word. We need the truth of it. Like James Baldwin wrote, "Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again." Abel's blood refuses to let us off the hook for the ways we harm one another, or for the ways we simply try to ignore the way our choices affect others.  Abel's blood crying out is the voice won't let us get away with saying, "I'm not my brother's keeper--you can't make me care for the needs of other people!"  Abel's blood forces us to come face to face with all the ways we have treated others as expendable--as acceptable collateral damage--in the name of me keeping some illusion I call my "freedom" or the idol of my own insatiable greed to consume. And each of us need to face that truth. Each of us needs to own our complicity in the brokenness of the world and our role in harming neighbors near and far.

And yet--that cannot be the last word spoken, or else we will give up in despair.  If Abel's blood alone is given voice, all we will have is the unchanged record of ways we have hurt each other and tried to abdicate our responsibilities for it.  We need there to be another word to be spoken--a "better word."  We need there to be a second sentence.  We need to be able, as Baldwin says, "begin again."

That, I am convinced, is what the writer of Hebrews means when he points us beyond Abel to Jesus.  We cannot skip over the truth-telling of Abel's blood.  We cannot pretend we do not have its stains on our hands and on our lives.  We cannot run from the responsibility he places squarely on our shoulders for caring for one another.  But responsibility is meaningless if it does not also include the possibility that things gone wrong might yet be set right.  And so we are given "a better word" and a new covenant--a new possibility of relationship.  We need, not divine permission to ignore our past rottenness and present entanglements, but to know that our condemnation is not the end of the story.  Like Abel, Jesus too is an innocent whose blood was shed by anger, hatred, and power.  But Jesus offers a power that Abel's blood did not have--Jesus offers the possibility of transformation, that we do not need to endlessly repeat the same old cycles of violence and greed that lead brother to rise up against brother, communities to rise up against communities, or nations to rise up against nations. Jesus' new sentence can only come second, only after Abel compels us to see what we had wanted to ignore.  Jesus' new beginning does not pretend our past wrongs have not happened--but rather (again, to paraphrase another line of James Baldwin's), make possible a change because those things have been faced. 

If you find yourself looking at the brokenness and hurt of the world around us and sometimes feel it is too overwhelming to know where to begin to make things better, Jesus' blood speaks the hope that we need.  Jesus, after all, knows the truth about us and loves us anyway, without pretending we are perfect peaches and yet without waiting for us to improve ourselves enough to become "worthy" of love first.  Jesus refuses to let our hatred, our violence, our greed, and our rottenness be the last thing said about us. And Jesus refuses to let our indifference toward the needs of our neighbors be the last word spoken of them, either. His love, even in the full face of our unloveliness and lovelessness to others, initiates a new creation. Jesus brings us a second sentence, day by day, so that even right now, we might begin again.

Lord Jesus, help us first to face our failures and own our responsibilities.  And then speak your new beginning over us, and make us new.