The Last Enemy--October 13, 2023
"For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed in death." [1 Corinthians 15:22-26]
God has been playing the long game, all along.
Sometimes I think we church folks get upset at God for not moving faster... or not acting as we wish God would act... or not immediately zapping the folks WE have decided need to be zapped in order to fix things in the universe. But maybe, just maybe, we just can't see God's endgame strategy. We're all thinking one move ahead in checkers, and God is playing five-dimensional chess. No wonder we sometimes get upset or frustrated or angry when God seems to be taking God's sweet old time to move in the world. We often aren't on the same page--we're likely not even in the same book!
Quite often, and especially in days like these when there is such horror and violence in the news, we find ourselves angry and distraught that God doesn't immediately send a bolt of lightning to just take out whoever we have identified as "the problem." The solution to whatever troubles are unfolding in the world seem so blatantly obvious to us ("If only we could just get rid of THAT leader, or THOSE folks over there, or THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE HERE... everything would all be fixed!"), and we can feel like God is letting us down by not taking our proposed action right away. We don't know why God won't follow our orders or take our suggestions for putting the world right. All it would take, we are convinced, is just a flick of a divine finger to remove some tyrant or troublemaker from existence (you know, like God taking on cruel Pharaoh in the Exodus story, or arrogant old Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon), and then we could all get on with living our best lives now.... right?
Of course, part of the trouble with that line of thinking (as delicious as it can be for us to savor the idea of God wiping out the folks on my personal hit list) is that none of us would be safe from the zapping. If God were my personal cosmic mercenary, taking out the targets I have decided are the "real problem" because of their sinfulness and wickedness, of course at some point whoever is left will start looking "unworthy" and "troublesome" and I'll want God to get rid of them, too. And meanwhile, other people will see that I'm a sinner as well, and maybe they'll decide that my crooked actions and worst moments require immediate zapping as well. (This, by the way, is actually the point of the Flood story from back in Genesis--at the end, when God hangs up the old hunting bow and says, "Never again!" it is a policy decision that God is no longer just going to zap the whole world as a means of getting rid of sinners and evildoers--God instead chooses to work within the world, through the family of Abraham and ultimately in Jesus, to redeem and mend it all from a cross.) So at some point, the world would be free of sin and wickedness... but only because it would also be an utterly empty ash heap, because we'd all be zapped. I suppose God could do things that way, but God seems to have decided it's better to have us in the world and deal with our sinfulness some other way than to wipe us all out, sinners that we are. God has apparently decided that even when we act as enemies of God, doing rotten things to each other and defying God's good will, God refuses to be an enemy to us (see Romans 5:6-10 there). Instead, God has bigger fish to fry, and a Bigger Bad to defeat as the real culprit in all of this. God has determined to take out the real last enemy, death itself. And thus, as I say, God has been playing the Long Game all along, not merely looking to zap one sinner doing sins, only to have more sinners take their place doing more sins, but rather dealing with death itself as the ultimate enemy.
And this, I am convinced, is possible only because of the enduring nature of God's love. (There's a reason we've been looking at how God's love, and ours, as something that "endures" so far this month. It turns out, the enduring nature of Christ-like love is our only hope!) If God were only focused on the short-term, immediate-gratification-thinking of our checkers-minded strategy, God might well just start zapping sinners to death instead of dealing with the deeper, systemic problem at the root of it all--death itself. A short-sighted God could fling lightning bolts at us sinners all day long, and still we'd keep harming each other out of fear of dying, of not having enough, or of envy.
But that's a little like cleaning up the water on the floor under the sink without ever actually fixing the leak in the pipes--you haven't really addressed the problem if you're only cleaning up the visible mess rather than the cause of the mess. Sure, it's fast to take a towel and wipe up a puddle by the vanity, but you're only setting yourself up for more puddles and more messes if you don't address the real source of the water--the leak itself. But if you are the one getting out your wrench and plumbers tape to fix the pipes, you need to be ready for the possibility that your work will allow more of a mess and more water on the floor for a while as you get to the source of the problem. And not only that, you have to be prepared for other people in the house offering their unsolicited criticism that you're not fixing it fast enough or too their liking while you are in the middle of doing the job. It is harder to get to the actual problem, and it takes longer to fix a leak than it does to wipe up a puddle and ignore the deeper issue. God, it would seem, is a patient sort of plumber, and God is willing to do the difficult work, the deeper work, of addressing our ultimate problem: death itself.
If our hope as the people of God is for anything smaller than that, we are settling for too little. If we confuse the Christian hope with just the shortsighted wish for my personal list of enemies to get zapped, we've failed to see God's universal, cosmic intention to mend all of creation, make all things new, and to destroy death once and for all. Our hope is always Long-Game confidence that at the last, as Julian of Norwich said, "all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be made well." But that does not mean that God has signed on to my agenda of who should get a divine smiting today (nor does God have to go along with anyone else's prayer that I be the one to get zapped when someone else thinks that I am the one deserving a zap). Part of accepting that God is God is the corollary truth that I am not God... and that therefore I am going to have to live with God's policy of not immediately obliterating sinners even when I think they (never me, of course!) deserve it. And that also means that I am going to have to live with God's chosen goal of mending all of creation and destroying death itself, even if that takes longer than the short-term fixes I would propose. That's hard, and it means sometimes I am going to get mad (with God, with the world, with other people) if more bad things happen tomorrow that I think warrant a show of divine wrath that doesn't come before the day is out. But God can take it. God can bear my disappointment, and God can withstand all my attempts to backseat drive the universe. That, too, is part of how God's love endures--it holds on even when I am complaining about the water on the floor while God is getting the leaky pipes fixed.
Today, let's just face it--it's going to be hard sometimes to watch terrible things happen in the world and to commend the work of zapping and smiting to God rather than to my personal vendetta list. It's going to be hard to see God's work move more slowly than I might wish, and it's going to be hard to admit that maybe God isn't the problem, but rather that God ain't just playing checkers and thinking only one move ahead. But we can do that hard stuff, and we can face those hard realities of faith, because we know we are held in God's enduring love--a love that is so committed to our well-being and life that God is both going to destroy death as the last enemy and going to bear with our complaining along the way when we don't think God is doing it well enough to our liking. That's how we are loved--all the way, until the last enemy, death itself, is destroyed.
May we have the courage to believe that good news.
Lord God, make good on your promise to make all things new and to destroy death, and give us the wisdom to trust your agenda and your timing to do it.
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