AS FAR AS I CAN SEE

Love doesn’t protect us.  That’s not its essence.   The essence of love is that it offers to guide us.  And if we accept the offer, it guides most of us into unfamiliar country.  It takes us to where there is very little shelter and survival is not guaranteed.  It points towards a precipitous path, and gives direction in a strange language.  It offers its own failure as the reason to try again.

Love is not a shield.  If this is the imagery, then love is laying the shield aside, and advancing towards an implacable enemy.

And God is love.

Jesus did not come to teach about the world and how to succeed there; he came to teach about the ways and means of heaven. Efforts at interpretation that fail to realize that, however well-intentioned and ingenious, are fundamentally misoriented.

Still, there are occasions where what Jesus teaches about heaven finds echoes in what others teach about the world. When that happens, it isn’t because Jesus has now shifted His attention to the world; it’s because the world contains – or perhaps retains – elements of heaven.

One of these is His instruction concerning trust and confidence in the future. Regard the lilies of the field! Worldly writers also often encourage an optimistic attitude – The power of positive thinking! – and their evidence is how often it leads to worldly success, sometimes far exceeding reasonable expectations.

The difference is that the worldly writers are not claiming – unless they’re very foolish – that positive thinking invariably brings success. The world clearly and sometimes tragically can disappoint optimism. (That’s why many people choose pessimism as a life attitude, so that they’re never disappointed.) These writers are simply advocating a positive attitude as a very useful tool in one’s worldly dealings, along with discipline, self-control, energy, and so on. It increases the odds of success.

But Jesus is not talking about the world at all, except in the sense that there is something in the world that is a mirror – or perhaps residue – of something in heaven. And isn’t this amazing? There is so much we don’t know about heaven, but one thing we can say for certain is that, based on the Word of God, there is no pessimistic thinking there!

So we are encouraged by our Lord to cultivate a positive attitude in ourselves, not because it will help us get ahead in life or get the most out of life – although it very well may do both those things, and other good things besides – but because it will make the transition from here to heaven much more natural.

The Hebrew Scriptures at the foundation of our faith often speak of God as a king. But the king is a very poor model for thinking about God. Unlike the Old Testament writers, Jesus never uses it. The closest he comes is in talking about the kingdom of God, but the phrase has the meaning of moral authority rather than a physical place or political arrangement, and Jesus is always teaching about the nature of that authority, and always contrasting it with our normal understanding.

The models Jesus uses instead to guide our reflection are the father and the shepherd. The quality those models share is the obligation of self-sacrifice, and that is the opposite of what defines a king (or a dictator, or an emperor, or a president). The quality that defines a king is that others are obligated to him for self-sacrifice.

When we kneel in prayer, we are not kneeling in deference to power. We kneel in deference to weakness. This is the fundamental mystery of Christianity (and what Nietzsche, who fully understood Christianity, railed against): it worships weakness. We submit our will, not to a more powerful will, but to a will that abjures power altogether, and asks us to do the same. Asks, not orders. When we kneel in prayer, we are not signaling our acceptance of a command or a ranking, but our acceptance of an invitation to serve, rather than be served.

Jesus knelt to wash the disciples’ feet.

The most difficult thing for Christians to accept – I do not say ‘understand’ – is that there is nothing of the worldly king in God. There are no castles with impregnable walls. There is no throne room; there are no fawning courtiers or sumptuous meals. There is nothing grand at all.

Behold, your king is riding on a donkey.

There is no inherited rank or wealth, no special privilege, no insignia of office.

Look, your king is bruised and broken, wearing a circlet of thorns.

There is nothing of royal power in God. No generals, no armies, no district courts. God distributes neither rewards nor punishments, offers no resistance to invaders, would sooner die than rise above servitude.

Behold, your king, Christians, on the cross.

When someone acts towards a neighbor in a way that runs counter to the will of God, the name for it is sin. Sin has three consequences. It shortchanges the other, it hardens the self, and it thwarts God’s will, which is love.  The last in turn lessens God, Who is love and its expression. Outside of Christ, when I have sinned, there is nothing I can do to reverse or repair any of those consequences, because they are spiritual, and spiritual damage is irreversible.

And that is the true magnitude and horror of sin. God risked love itself in our creation.

And God is love.

When we think of love in human terms, we think of it as an attribute or trait, one among others. She plays the piano; she speaks Spanish; she gets along with everybody; she loves to dance. Even when we are being romantic, when we elevate it among the attributes and speak of it more reverentially – Her love for him set the tone for her life! – we are still thinking of it as an element of her personality, only now one that overshadows the others.

But love is not an attribute of God. There is nothing that is God outside of love. We speak so glibly of God’s power and God’s omniscience, but God has no power outside of the power of love, no understanding outside of what love knows.

At this very time of year, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. A donkey. Luke tells us that before he entered the town, he sat down and wept, because he had an understanding of what was going to happen to his beloved city, and to the people in it.

He wept, because he acknowledged the weakness of love.

He was acknowledging the weakness of God.

The Scriptures often picture God as the sun. Even our Lord uses the imagery when speaking of Himself.

From the human perspective, the sun gives light, warmth, growth, the comforting sense of regularity, and many other blessings.

But there is another perspective – let’s call it the non-human. From the non-human perspective, the sun is rather something to be measured and probed, situated with respect to other objects of its kind, and so on.

God is pictured as the sun from the human perspective. From the non-human, the picture is useless, and the expressions offering it are meaningless, because they are not part of the non-human vocabulary, and do not comply with the non-human rules of grammar.

The dangers posed by the non-human perspective are dire. It is seductive and aggressively seeks to supplant the human, and to the degree it advances, the human perspective is marginalized, and its language increasingly comes to be regarded as quaint and metaphorical, most distressingly, as ‘merely’ subjective. This is a great loss and a great error, with many consequences.

But there is also a great danger lurking when we hallow the human perspective, the phenomenon we call idolatry. The sun is a picture of God, it is not the reality. There is little inclination any more to worship the sun, but there is a great, almost overwhelming inclination to worship – under other names, of course – the qualities of the sun, just because they are so agreeable.

The Christian way is surrounded with perils.

If there is no God, then the explanation for dreams lies in the realm of materialist psychology:  they are repressed memories clothed in regret, disguised desires, or perhaps  just ghostly emanations of neural activity.  Or something else, but nothing more.   Whatever the explanation or explanations, dreams remain wholly interior, products of nothing beyond the self.

But if there is a God, then we have it on the best authority – God’s own word – that dreams can and do contain reliable communications from God to us.

What then are we to make of bad dreams?

I believe bad dreams are ordinarily evidence that God’s Spirit is still working on us.  They are a form of divine therapy.  Someone with no bad dreams is someone whose complacency has become so thick that God’s voice cannot penetrate it.  So we should very much be grateful for bad dreams, and study them for what they are or at least may be: important communications from God.

The most therapeutic type of bad dream is the one that features someone – not oneself, but someone else – doing something terrible.  Why is that therapeutic?  Because in it God is showing us how we still appear from God’s point of view, whatever our high opinion of ourselves.

If there is a God.

The day we accept Christ is not the day of our redemption. That day was when Jesus died on the cross, accomplishing the redemption of all. The day we accept Christ is the day of our salvation, the day we recognize our redemption and enter into the life of Christ, and welcome His life into our own.

Through Jesus, God opened the way of freedom and divine harmony to everyone–His tender mercies are over all His works. The day of my salvation is the day that awareness moves from my head, as a generalization, to my heart, as a lived-in reality.

That the Lord is good to all is the wisdom of a prophet; that the Lord is good to me is the wisdom of a redeemed sinner.

If I say that I could take a trip to France, if I wanted, I mean I have sufficient resources to cover the cost and that there are no conflicts of time or circumstance that might prevent me.

But if I say that I could want to go to France if…then what am I saying?

Nothing about my circumstances, but something about myself.

But what about myself?

What I want to do is not a single, simple thing, isolated from other things. It’s not like a green jelly bean in a jar of reds. If I were to wake up tomorrow and think about going to France, and find myself savoring the thought, embellishing it with things I find attractive, imagining myself, the me I know, sipping wine in a sidewalk cafe on some bright Paris morning…and if, after checking my bank account and other potential obstacles, an aura of intentionality begins to clothe the idea…we might call that now wanting to go to France. But it has not been a thing I discover ‘inside’. It is a reorientation of my whole being.

If we question – in faith, not in skepticism – whether God could have created a world without suffering and sorrow, are we wondering whether He could have done so, if He wanted? Or whether He could have wanted to do so, whether His wants could have been different?

If the latter, then I’m afraid the answer must be: Yes, certainly, if God were not God. For God’s wants are not transient and variable and contingent like mine, like my wanting to go to France. God’s being cannot experience reorientation. Hebrews tells us that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and while I think that’s misleading in important ways, I do think it captures a truth: that the character that gives foundation to God’s will never changes.

And yet there is evil and suffering, and sorrow.

And so the question is narrowed down. Now it becomes: Could God have created a world without these awful things? And the answer is, trivially, Yes. He could have created a brick.

But could he have created a world like the one we have, with all its joys, but without its many sorrows?

That is one of the things God cannot do. Not because it’s impossible, but because it would be evil.