Forgiveness

Score

We live in a world of dizzying complexity. From birth till death, our massive universe refuses to relent from its determination to confound us. But our human minds are not strong enough to grapple with all this complexity and confusion; even from a young age we learn that it is much safer to define the world by our own categories. With bold cognitive dissonance, we refuse to acknowledge the terrifying mystery of the universe and instead impose upon reality our own ideas of how it should be. Eventually we forget that there was ever any difference at all between the objective universe and our subjective assumptions. It is only natural, then, that we treat God the same way. We assume that God, though greater even than the physical universe, will amiably agree to work within the parameters of our worldview. Even the most cursory reading of the Bible, however, reveals that nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, at the heart of the gospel is God’s divine impropriety: his holy insistence on defying our proper, logical and sensible expectations about his kingdom.

What does this kingdom look like? We can begin to understand by examining the ways God's embarrassing, surprising kingdom breaks open the worldviews of three different cultures—the first-century Jewish culture depicted in the Gospels, our own modern Western culture, and the Greco-Roman culture addressed in the Epistles. Each will give us a different insight into the impropriety of God’s kingdom. 

 The Availability of the Open Kingdom

The Palestine of Jesus' day was a region alive with religious activity. This was not born out of a widespread concern for spiritual health or an interest in the state of the soul after death, however. The Jewish religion in the first century was a deeply social, cultural and above all political ideology. The political and military might of Rome and the cultural and religious influence of Athens had combined to subjugate Israel, God’s chosen people. The Jewish theology that emerged out of this period was one of liberation: the "kingdom of God" was the future that God had promised, a future of vindication for Israel over her oppressors. However, God’s act of redemption was contingent on Israel’s proper behavior. Thus religious issues in first century Judaism were not problems of abstract theology but issues of the greatest importance to the nation of Israel’s political independence, cultural legacy and religious survival. Questions of who was in or out of God’s kingdom—who was contributing to the arrival of Israel’s deliverance, and was therefore blessed by God—were of utmost importance. Everyone had assumptions about who was in and who was out.

            When Jesus began his ministry, he took it upon himself to explode these assumptions. In his proclamation and praxis, he lived out a surprising—and shocking—message: the kingdom was available to all, even those who in conventional wisdom were assumed to be ineligible for it. He lived this out in his unrestrained contact with the ritually unclean and his "open commensality" with those outside the Pharisaic program, proclaiming in all this in his universal message of God’s favor to the economically and spiritually bankrupt.

            Jesus consistently shocked his contemporaries by getting into the presence of the ritually unclean and touching them, rather than strictly avoiding them as was expected. Ritual impurity was avoided by all devout Jews, regardless of specific kingdom program; Jesus alone took it upon himself to declare God’s favor to them. He also directly confronted the most popular ideological program of the day, that of the Pharisees, who focused on personal holiness through extreme ritual purity and loyalty to Israel. The Pharisees would have no issue with Jesus simply associating with traitorous tax collectors and "sinners"; rather, it was because he made the embarrassing claim that this association was a "vital part of the kingdom" that he came into conflict with them.[1] It was in Jesus insistence that it was to these that the kingdom was available that he lived out in his action the message of God’s divine impropriety.    

The illogic of Jesus' proclamation of good news to the poor in the context of first century Judaism is clearly illustrated in the story of the rich young ruler.[2] After Jesus has sent the man away with an order to give all his possessions to the poor, he makes an offhand comment that totally perplexes his disciples: "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God." Though millennia of exposure to the gospel has made a statement like this understandable to us, to the disciples and their broader cultural context it would have been paradigm-shattering. As N.T. Wright points out, many Jews assumed that material wealth was a sure sign of the blessings of God.[3] Thus the disciples were "astounded" at Jesus teachings, wondering, "Then who can be saved?" Jesus’ message totally shattered their (apparently) logical and sensible assumptions about who was in or out of the kingdom of God.

            Jesus didn't just stop with the economically poor, however: he extended his message of kingdom availability to the poor in spirit as well. The first Beatitude, which opens his famous Sermon on the Mount, declares that "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God." If we set aside thousands of years of theologizing and examine this and the other Beatitudes in context, we find an embarrassing redefinition of who is and isn’t sharing in the kingdom blessings of God, a redefinition that scandalizes our modern notions of spiritual propriety just as much as it shocked its original hearers. It is not, Jesus proclaims, just the spiritually together whom God’s kingdom is available to, but everyone and anyone. The kingdom is open to those who are impoverished in spirit—those with no kingdom program, those who "really can’t make heads or tails of religion."[4]  Jesus put the kingdom of heaven within their grasp.

            Jesus' kingdom message radically expressed God’s divine impropriety. He refused to accede to the cultural norms of first-century Judaism and instead exploded their assumptions about who was in or out of the kingdom. And just as Jesus assaulted the cultural norms of his today, his message continues to have stunning implications for us today.

 The Absolution of the Guilty Soul

 For better or worse, individualism has given modern men and woman a unique sense of personal guilt for sin. The Reformation, with its emphasis on justification by faith, both was influenced by the proto-modern Renaissance and itself influenced the developing modern worldview. Justification, that action of God in which he removes the guilt of the individual sinner and imputes to them Christ’s righteousness, provided the foundation for the Protestant gospel for nearly five hundred years, finding its contemporary expression in modern evangelicalism. Something about this message—this liberating message of grace freely extended to the sinner—strikes at the heart of the modern spirit.  

            While we can examine the cultures of the first century with a critical eye, it is harder for us to examine our own culture in such a fashion. We stand in the middle of it and are inseparably immersed in it; a discussion of why we think so consistently couch the Christian message in terms of law and grace is beyond the scope of this essay. We can only accept the fact that for modern humanity, it is the message of God's undeserved and unconditional love for sinners that shocks and scandalizes us so. I write here not as a historian or theologian, but as a direct participant, one whose proper, sensible ideas about law have been consistently shattered by God’s stubborn insistence on grace.

            Even though my soul is enamored with a gospel of performance, my heavenly Father has a greater imagination. Too often in modern thought we see God as waiting for us across a raging river, and religion as the dangerous fording to cross to the other side. We find the prevenience, the "previous-ness" of God’s love, to be illogical and improper and wholly inappropriate to the life of true spirituality. We can readily recognize that the forgiveness that God demands we give requires us to act first—as Philip Yancey writes, "breaking the cycle of ungrace means taking the initiative"[5]—but yet we cannot attribute this initiative to God. Maybe it’s because of the influence of Enlightenment Deism that we continually—in practice if not in theory—treat God as if he were far off and it is our job to reach out to him. Whatever the cause, nothing could be farther from the Biblical truth: John insists "not that we loved God but that he loved us."[6] It is only God’s divine initiative that allows us to love him in return.

            Conventional wisdom teaches that, even though we must profess our sins to receive God’s forgiveness, in practice we must be as discreet as possible about them. If anyone were to know our "real selves"—well, the consequences would be unthinkable. And of course, when this kind of thinking has permeated our thought on social relationships, it’s only natural to begin to assume that we must hide our sins from God as well lest he realize what horrible sinners we are and the game be up. But Jesus attacks our conventional wisdom with his story of the Pharisee and the tax collector.[7] It is not the Pharisee, who is thankful for his righteousness, but the tax collector, who is aware only of his total inadequacy, who goes home justified. In Jesus’ eyes it is only those who have illogically abandoned their spiritual defenses who will find safety in the embrace of God.

While my Christian heritage and personal beliefs are firmly rooted in Protestantism, my spiritual habits seem to flow out of a sort of caricature of medieval Roman Catholicism. I insist on paying penance for my sins, sure that I must make myself feel bad enough about my transgressions to be forgiven. God’s story of the prodigal son shatters this safe assumption.[8] The prodigal son has a speech prepared for his father, alright, a speech that he is only allowed to deliver once the father has run out to him and embraced him. "God wants us back even more than we could possibly want to be back," Brennan Manning says. "We don’t have to go into great detail about our sorrow. All we have to do, the parable says, is appear on the scene."[9] God makes a point of loving us with embarrassing extravagance.

            While the message of justification by faith, of God's love freely extended to undeserving sinners, is for many the most scandalous element of God's kingdom, I do not believe it is the whole of the gospel message. For the ultimate expression of God's divine impropriety, we have to go back again, back to the world in which Christ Jesus went to be crucified.

 The Authority of the Crucified Lord

 At the foundation of every systematic theology, every catechism and confession, and every church creed is the original Christian profession of faith: "Jesus Christ is Lord." It is this profession, the affirmation of the authority of Jesus, which provides the basis for all Christian work in the world. But the very phrase "Jesus Christ is Lord"emerged in a specific cultural context and carried with it powerful connotations. Two important streams of first century Greco-Roman thought fed into this confession and gave it its connotative strength.

            The first is the terrible reality of crucifixion. Two thousand years of familiarity—of ceremonial standards, giant roadside edifices and personal jewelry—have dulled the Christian mind to the full meaning of the Roman cross. While modern Christians have done their best to emphasize the physical pain of the cross—evidenced by, among other things, Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ—the real terror of the cross is in its shame. The cross was a tool of degradation, a way for the Roman Empire to discredit, shame and embarrass their enemies.  Crucified rebels would die "naked, in bloody sweat, helpless to control bodily excretions,"[10] exposed for every passerby to see. As humiliating as this may seem to us, the reaction would only be magnified in a culture like that of the first century Mediterranean, influenced as it was by a strong honor/shame dynamic. None of the modern methods of capital punishment—save maybe lynching—have the same element of humiliation that the cross possessed. Implicit in any proclamation of Jesus Christ would be the message of his death—a shameful death upon a Roman cross. 

            The second cultural stream that feeds into the confession "Jesus Christ is Lord" is the very idea of lordship in the Roman Empire of the first century. In the Roman Empire, one institution claimed total authority over all other cultural, religious, and political institutions: the Roman emperor, the Caesar. In his person, Caesar embodied the cultural, economic and, above all, military might of Rome. So absolute was the Caesars' claim to universal dominion that began to be spoken of in divine terms. Caesar was a "savior," a "son of God," who proclamations of military victory were known as "gospel."  The Romans permitted a plethora of cultus privatus, or private religions, to flourish across the Empire, allowing each person to express personal, private devotion to the god or gods of their choosing. Every religion, however, was required to make sacrifices to Caesar as supreme god. In the public lives of Roman citizens, Caesar alone was Lord, and none dared challenge his authority.

            These two streams of first century flow together to create the culturally unparalleled declaration of the early church: "Jesus Christ is Lord." Such a message would boggle the ancient mind. How could a crucified rebel—a man with no honor or dignity or worth—be the savior of anyone? The message of the first Christians, that a crucified man was Messiah, king not only of the Jews but the Gentiles as well, lord of the universe and of Caesar himself, would have been scandalous. That God’s special servant—indeed, as the Christians claimed, God himself incarnate—would suffer the embarrassment of the Roman cross would have shocked any denizen of the first century Mediterranean. But the Christians continued to preach "Jesus Christ, and him crucified"[11] as Lord of all. Why? They believed not only in a God who had the audacity to make such a claim, but in a God who possessed true wisdom about the way the universe works—a wisdom impractical and improper by human standards but a wisdom which is, "to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God."[12] This is the heart of the gospel message: the world you know has been turned upside down, for the crucified one now has authority.  

 Participating in the Divine Embarrassment

 As we have seen, in God’s wisdom his kingdom is open to the poor and the downtrodden, his grace extends to the unworthy and the undeserving, and his power is displayed most fully in one who was shamed and humiliated. If that were not enough, God doesn't just permit us to stand back as voyeurs and watch his gruesome humiliation. He demands us to join in as well—to become participants in the divine embarrassment. "Repent," Jesus implores us, "And believe in the good news."[13]

            First we must repent. Repentance is not a sense of guilt for sin but a "change of mind"—an abandonment of our own wisdom. Repentance is not a single act but a daily and momentary action. The conventional wisdom of the world is too deeply ingrained in our minds and hearts to be set aside all at once; it takes years of discipline, of immersion in God's subversive Word and diligent pursuit of his holy will, to grow in us a constant awareness of the impotency of our own wisdom. God promises that we can repent without fear of judgment, for he is not "unable to sympathize with our weakness."[14] Repentance is always the first step, for we cannot serve both the wisdom of God and the wisdom of man.

            Next we must believe. We must embrace God’s program for the world—not just as a mental construct but as a living reality. As Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, "Man who was given a share in His wisdom is called to responsible living and to be a partner of God in the redemption of the world."[15] We must bring God’s divine wisdom to bear on the whole world, proclaiming to all of creation the presence of God’s kingdom, the promise of his forgiveness and the power our risen Lord. We are not just throwing in our lot with a new conventional wisdom but are declaring ourselves citizens of a whole new world. For when Jesus rose from the dead, "God’s whole new creation emerged from the tomb, introducing a world full of new potential and possibility."[16] Our human assumptions about how the world works are no longer valid: new creation is taking over. To see the world as it really is, and to help bring that world to bear in our lives and in the lives of others is what it means to believe in the kingdom of God.

             Deeper Magic

In his classic children's novel and subversive allegory The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis writes of "Deep Magic" and "deeper magic": when the so-called Queen of Narnia, the White Witch, puts the lion Aslan to death, she claims to be following the Deep Magic which has ruled the world from the dawn of time. But Aslan, the true king of Narnia, knows a deeper magic—a magic from before the very dawn of time itself—and thus even death cannot contain him. In the same way, the kingdom of God is governed by "deeper magic": a wisdom that goes beyond the wisdom of the present world. If we desire to be part of that kingdom, we should remain humble and remember that true contact with the living God will never leave our conventions unscathed. We should always be thankful for the way God challenges our assumptions. We should always be grateful for divine impropriety.

I am scholar; hear me roar!

"August Winterman" by Dead Poetic