AS FAR AS I CAN SEE

Rewards are relative, in the sense that what might serve as a reward for one person might not do at all for another. To an illiterate, a set of encyclopedias would be a burden, not a reward. What makes a response a reward is that it speaks to something in the individual’s horizon of actual desire. “My kingdom for a horse!” dramatizes this elemental human truth, as does “Hunger makes the best sauce,” and, in a different way, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Worldly rewards are, so to say, parasitic on worldly desires.

Heavenly rewards have the same relationship to heavenly desires, but it is extremely important that we not do not confuse the vectors, and imagine heavenly rewards being parasitic on worldly desires. This way of thinking leads to the demonic picture of heaven as a harem filled with virgins.

The truth is that before anything available in heaven could be experienced as a reward, our desires must first conform to heavenly desires.

In the Talents parable, Jesus teaches that the heavenly reward for doing well is the opportunity to do better. In the Sermon on the Mount, He teaches that doing well in secret is something heaven rewards. Combine those two teachings, and we learn that one heavenly reward is ever deepening anonymity in charity.

Wouldn’t most of us, as presently constituted, find that about as rewarding as an illiterate receiving a set of encyclopedias?

When Jesus taught that the first will be last and the last first, he wasn’t teaching that the occupants of certain positions will be switched, that the poor, for example, could look forward to being elevated to the status of rulers, while those who had ruled heretofore could expect a sharply reduced role.  He was teaching something much more fundamental and difficult than that.

It’s important to understand that Jesus didn’t work in disguise, like the conscientious royal heir who dons commoner clothing and wanders the realm as a peasant for a time.  Jesus rather revealed the nature of true royalty as service.  It is not ‘acting the part’ of a servant.  True royalty is service, not something existing behind or above service…that’s what Jesus reveals.  Not subservience but service, not sacrificial obedience but sacrificial love, what Paul is referring to when he speaks of knowing Christ by sharing his suffering, (Philippians 3:10).

The only ‘power’ in heaven is the power of love, and it’s not a power at all, in any sense we understand the term.  Love is by its nature a giving, not a receiving, an emptying rather than a filling.

“But that’s absurd!  I can’t imagine a place like that!  I can’t imagine thinking that way!”

And of course, that’s true.  If we could, we wouldn’t need Christ.

In dying, the incarnate God paid the sin debt of every human being. There is no confusion at that level.

The confusion sets in from a misunderstanding of what the debt of sin actually is, and what it meant for Christ to pay it.

Sin is acting contrary to the will of God, and that means acting contrary to the will of Love. To sin against someone is to act towards that person in a way other than as Love would act. The other is therefore deprived of what Love would have offered him. And Love itself – that is to say, God – is diminished by the disappearance of the love I have withheld from the other. That is the twofold result of sin: “What you do to others, you do to Me.”

In that way, two spiritual debts are created by every sinful act (Such acts of course may also incur a material, worldly debt, but that isn’t our present topic.) There is a debt incurred towards the other, and a debt incurred towards God.

In both cases, the so-called sin debt is more meaningfully to be understood as a love debt.

The love debts we owe others can only be cancelled by the ones we harmed, and only by a self-sacrificial act of forgiveness. Christ’s death did not pay down those debts.

The death of Christ, that is, the death of the incarnate Son of God, was infinite Love exhausting Itself – and dying – to pay the incalculable love debt of all humankind to God.

When I walk by a bank, I don’t feel the slightest temptation to go in and rob it. The thought doesn’t even cross my mind. I don’t resist the temptation, because there’s nothing to resist.

When someone behaves rudely towards me, I’m strongly tempted to alter my behavior towards that person, perhaps to retaliate in some way, at least to become more inward in the relationship.

When I walk by a bank and continue down the street, I don’t relive the encounter over and over in my mind, the way I do when I have deliberately walked away from some rudeness without retaliation. In the latter case, I sometimes retaliate over and over, in my mind.  I experiment in imagination with different forms and degrees of retaliation, and get satisfaction just from the fantasies.  Often, for a while, I can scarcely think of anything else.

(It’s probably like what the seasoned bank robber must go through who walks away from what would have been an effortless heist!)

Why the difference? The worldly reward of successfully robbing the bank would be substantial, while the worldly result of a successful personal retaliation would probably only be further damage to the relationship. Yet the latter tempts me, and the former doesn’t.

When our Lord advises us to ask our Father not to lead us into temptation, I read that as the implied request that we rather be led from or out of temptation. In other words, what we are working towards, with God’s assistance and by God’s grace, is the state of being indifferent towards pernicious temptation, just as I currently – by God’s grace – am indifferent to the thought of robbing banks.

Which are the pernicious temptations? As many as there are people, I suppose. But if we look at our Lord’s own prayer, surely what is striking is what comes immediately before this particular petition: “…forgive us as we forgive others…”

The temptation to refuse forgiveness, in Christ’s way of thinking, is the most satanic of all.

The Gospel writers share memories of Jesus talking on a number of occasions of spiritual judgment being a part of the life of everyone. (Although it is worth noting that judgment and judgmental separation play less important roles in post-Apostolic Christian writings until reinvigorated by Augustine, and that Paul himself makes very little of the matter.) The most common error made in trying to understand these remarks of Jesus is the same one made in addressing so much of what He said: we bring our ordinary, worldly understanding to Him and expect Him to conform to it.

This way of approaching our Lord can lead to cartoonish caricatures of the divine discrimination: a black-robed Jurist towering over an anxious defendant, studying the facts of the case – the Book of Life! – and then bringing the gavel down and pointing magisterially, either towards the public exit – Heaven! – or towards the divine bailiffs to take the poor soul away in chains.

This of the Jesus whose forgiveness has no limit.

The way to understand divine judgment is to abide in Christ, to dwell on how infinite love and endless forgiveness might deal with moral obduracy, using only the tools love itself could fashion or wield.

As far as I can see, the alienation from God that Jesus occasionally refers to as the consequence of leading a certain kind of life is very much like the alienation one might experience on moving to a country with a profoundly different culture. The food is different, the language is strange, the rituals and manners and customs are all very unlike those with which we’ve lived all our lives.

Those who have spent time in a radically foreign culture or who have read about the experience will understand what I’m referring to. There is an absolute sense of being an outsider, a stranger in a strange land. People regard you with bemusement, act towards you with impatience sometimes, sometimes with special generosity, sometimes with pity, but always with the awareness that, whatever else may be true of you, you don’t quite belong there the way they do, the way someone born and raised there does.

That’s the sort of separation Jesus is talking about. The heaven from which He came and which He teaches about will be an extremely foreign environment to those of us raised in this world, imbibing from birth this world’s culture, comfortable with and even proud of this world’s problems and our responses to them, accustomed to thinking and finding reward and, yes, judging, in this world’s ways.

Being born again is like being a foundling in a foreign culture.

In God’s creation, everyone is born into different circumstances. Some have loving parents, others don’t. Some are born into wealth, some into poverty. Health accompanies many, disease many others. Some are native to one country, some to another; some to one religion, others to another or none at all. This is obvious.

But what is very frequently overlooked is what that implies: it was not God’s gift in Christ to address or somehow ‘rectify’ circumstances, to level them out or erase their variety or purge them of their seeming unfairness. God’s gift to creation in Christ was the possibility, not of transforming our circumstances to accommodate us, but of transforming ourselves to bring God into those circumstances.

Our responsibility as Christians is not to pine after different circumstances; it is to offer ourselves to God as means of bringing God’s love into those in which we find ourselves. God may call us and enable us change our situation, but we must avoid both pride if that happens and guilt if it does not. Our circumstances do not affect God’s assessment of how we’re doing. The only thing God measures is our response to them. That’s why Paul tells the Thessalonians to be grateful in all things, for they are the will of God in Christ Jesus for us.

When I sin against my neighbor, I subtract something from him; I subtract what he would have received, had I acted in love towards him, that is, had I acted in a way in accordance with God’s will for him.  In this sense, I diminish him.  That is my debt towards him now.

God’s own nature, which is love, is also diminished by the amount of that debt. What we do to others, we do to God. (Matthew 25:40)

When God forgives me, God accepts that diminishment. Love accepts its own diminishment. My obligation for what I’ve done to God is dismissed, and God is diminished.

Christ died for the forgiveness of all sin. What does that mean? It means that the divine in Jesus – that which was incarnate God, the Son of God – accepted His own diminishment to the point of extinction. The Son of God – God’s creative Word, the creative power of Love – accepted His own death.

It was Jesus who was resurrected on the third day, not the Word who was with God in the beginning. It was Jesus who was glorified, Jesus who sits at God’s right hand, that is, who is the power of creative love.

And the reason for all this? So that God’s love may be shed abroad in our hearts. (Romans 5:5)

Christians very often picture God’s relationship to the unfolding of history – whether human or universal – on the model of an author’s relationship to a finished novel. Themes and morals have been thought out in advance, a plot concocted, characters introduced and developed to play their parts in the unfolding drama. Seasons and locations and climate have all been arranged to suit the author’s purpose of bringing the plot to its satisfying conclusion.

In fact, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that this or some variation of this has been the prevailing background paradigm for Christian theology from the very beginning. We find it even in New Testament scripture, where it is rooted in the same Jewish model. It is what justifies the thought of predictive prophesy in both testaments. It is what we have in the back of our minds when we speak blithely of God’s omniscience extending over time, of seeing the end from the beginning, of knitting, not just the child’s being, but the child’s life together in the mother’s womb. It is blunt in unqualified Calvinism, more subtle but still the paradigm in the many less uncompromising alternatives.

The problem, of course, is that it makes human freedom problematic. The best theology can muster to deal with the problem is to call it a “mystery”, and sweep it under a rug.

Well then, suppose we modify the model. God is no longer the author of a finished novel, but now the playwright who allows the actors the right to improvise. They may speak their own lines, fashion their own characters, invent their own plot devices. We have salvaged human freedom!

But the playwright has still provided the actors with the denouement and the conclusion. The playwright requires of the actors that, whatever they do, they must still serve the determined final end. They are still tools of the playwright’s intention, just tools of a more elaborate design. The freedom the revised model offers is illusory, like that of a caged bird to fly from one perch to another.

Well then, we go to the extreme. Someone gathers people together, then sits back with no further involvement to observe their behavior, opens the cage door to let the bird fly away.  Possibly creates a hell to deal (harshly) with the wayward.

But this is not God. This is a voyeur. A birdwatcher.  Possibly a sadist.

The problem is the model itself.

God is not like an author at all. God does not see the end because God has not determined the end. Jesus Himself told us what the best model is: that of a loving parent. Parents do not see or know their child’s “end” (whatever that might even mean.) Loving parents can be shocked, disappointed, even appalled, without yet ceasing to love. Parents are always there to help, and always willing to forgive.

Begin with that, in thinking about God; extend those qualities to infinity instead of might and intelligence and ubiquity.  And feel sympathy for all those good men and women who have squandered their gift thinking about God as an author.

Forgiveness is not the name of an emotion; it does not flow from an emotion; it is not associated with any particular emotion or feeling. It is the name of an activity; it flows from the will; and it is normally associated with emotional resistance.

When someone sins against us, we are morally instructed in Christ to forgive that person. This instruction is not directed towards our emotions. How could it be? Emotions are not voluntary, and moral instruction only belongs within a context of compliance or rejection. There can be no meaningful instruction to ‘Be less chagrined,’ any more than there can be a meaningful instruction to ‘Feel less pain in your toe.’ Those words can certainly be offered – any words can be offered – but they are meaningless as instruction, and Christ’s words are never meaningless.

So what are we being instructed to do, when we are instructed to forgive? We are being instructed to act towards the other as if the harm had never occurred. For most of us on the Christian walk, this is the most difficult instruction we will ever receive; and that, of course, is why it lies at the very foundation of Christ’s curriculum. It is so fundamental, in fact, that it underpins everything else, almost the way arithmetic underpins the rest of mathematics. But there is this difference. Arithmetic is simpler than the things built upon it, whereas forgiveness is more difficult than the rest.

And this is typical of the Christian way. It does not begin with the simple; it begins with the impossible, and goes from there.

“Through him all things were made”

People tend to regard the cross as if it were simply a short episode in a well-plotted story, as if it represented the three-day loss of something that was then restored when God’s eternal plan fell into place.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The Word who was with God in the beginning is the potency of love. That is what God sacrificed on the cross. God sacrificed creative power. Why? To offer it to others, to us. That power is our inheritance. We are not simply vehicles of God’s love; we are the creative agents of God’s love. The Child of God – the Word of God – died so that we, through Jesus, might receive a portion of that responsibility. Since the cross, God’s creative work is entirely in our hands. God still owns the field, but we are the only laborers in the field. Since the cross, God, alone, can accomplish nothing.

This was God’s will. This was the price God was willing to pay.  The price God paid.