AS FAR AS I CAN SEE

“Getting even” only gets you even. It never gets you ahead.

Consider how the responses of Zachariah and Mary differed to the promise of a miraculous child.  Zachariah asked, How can I believe you? (Kata ti gnosomai touto?), where Mary asked, How will this transpire? (Pos estai touto?).  The first was an expression of doubt, the second of curiosity.

Mary’s faith was already manifest. 

When Jesus said “All things are possible to the one who believes”, the one he’s referring to is himself.  The desperate father has appealed to him to save his son where Jesus’ disciples had failed, and Jesus then demonstrates his own power.  He’s not advising us to cultivate our abilities; we’re not being instructed to rely on ourselves at all.  We’re being told to trust in him.

You cannot reason your way from the world to a morally just and loving God.  The world is through and through unjust and fundamentally tragic.  Of course the world contains beauty and innocent pleasure and kindness in abundance, but they are flyspecks on the scale compared to its weight of brutality and grief and catastrophe and evil of endless variety.  If clearheaded reason were our only guide to a final assessment, we must necessarily arrive at either madness or despair. 

Faith does not change the reality of the world, although much of what people call ‘religion’ claims it does.  The things that are horrors when there is no God remain horrors when there is.  The grief of a mother over her dying child is indelible.  It is a permanent element of reality.  It is not lessened if the mother and child are reunited in some afterlife; it is simply succeeded by a new reality.  Pain, sorrow, and tragedy are real and, once real, eternal.

The essence of faith, the relationship God asks of us, is not the belief that God will somehow make things right.  Wrong is never made right.  The essence of the relationship God asks of us is summed up by Job: Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.  Though the world really is unjust and tragic, not just seemingly so, though no amount of apologetic will ever reduce its evil by the slightest weight, though all our attempts to defend God are really attempts to flee from our own fear, though every avenue of rational rescue is eliminated and I am utterly exhausted of hope…and then…and then…at the end of all justification…even though He slay me…   

For most people, politics is like dieting: the more successful you are, the more you lose of yourself.

The law (self-reliance) is the moon. Grace is the sun. The moon illuminates the night, but once the sun arises, it disappears.

A friend is someone who doesn’t question your taste in friends.

Time molds the fit of the shoe, and of friendship.

The three petitions of our Lord’s prayer seem severally and appropriately – even in their order – addressed to the Three Persons of our dependency: to the Father, as the source of our lives and all their requisite provision; to the Son as the redeemer of our sin debts; and to the Holy Spirit as our guide and protector on the journey to our true home.

It’s a commonplace human reality, emotional and psychological, that there’s an inverse relationship between gratitude and familiarity.  To that generation new to indoor plumbing, every turn of the faucet would early on have occasioned an appreciative response.  As time passed and familiarity with the blessing grew, that response would naturally diminish; and for the subsequent generation, never having experienced its lack, the response would not even be a memory.  Try to imagine duplicating within yourself an experience of gleeful gratitude at taking a shower or flushing a toilet!

The generation evidence of this human reality is obvious, but a moment’s reflection will discover to anyone examples from his or her own evolving experience.   Who remembers the original joy of driving a car around the block after thousands of subsequent miles?  What opera singer still experiences the prideful glee in matching her voice to the sounds emerging from the piano?   The blissful relief of exchanging confidences evolves into a very different experience as the fortunate marriage evolves.

And that’s why it’s so misguided to expect of subsequent generations of Christians the same experience of liberation and wonder of those first drawn out of pagan culture; why it’s also misguided to expect habituated and well-behaved Christians to experience the emotions of the degenerate ‘coming to Jesus,’ or even of that same regenerate to bask daily in the joy of his salvation.   Asking such things of the people involved would be as bootless as asking oneself to burst with pride at being able to read the words on this page.  That’s just not how humans are built, and no amount of spiritual lecturing, however eloquent, however dynamic, can wring tears from a stone.

Which raises the extremely interesting and not at all simple question of what non-evangelical ministry should be about.