Tag Archive - judgment

Forgiveness, Blessing, and… Wrath?

May 26, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 1 Comment

Yesterday I shared some thoughts about the importance of resurrection in our understanding of the call to forgive. The economy of the world is not the container within which justice will be done. God must intervene. God must reverse the judgments of the world.

The powerful must be thrown down from their thrones.

The dead must be raised.

This brings up one particularly challenging dynamic in the story: the idea that our forgiveness and blessing of those who have wronged us might play into an economy of reversal. Paul puts it like this in Romans 12:

Do not repay evil for evil to anyone, respecting what is right in the sight of all people…. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. But “If your enemy hungers–feed him! If she thirsts–give her something to drink! For doing thus you will heap burning coals upon his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Some of this is more palatable to us than other parts.

The idea that our calling is never to get drawn into the game of retribution is crucial. Echoing the sermon on the mount, where Jesus tells people to go the extra mile and give tunic as well as cloak, Paul says that defending ourselves in kind is out, and repaying evil with blessing is a vital element of our calling.

As Paul contextualizes Proverbs 25:21 in the letter to Rome, he writes it into the narrative of the cross by which he believes God has saved the world. Through the goodness of self-giving love, the sin and death of the world have been overcome.

But then there’s the other part.

The bit about heaping up burning coals on their heads.

Here we perhaps catch a glimpse of something that reminds us of the peculiar position we are in, most of us, as people with access to computers and internets, and education, and money. We forget that the Bible was written in a time when only a few could even hope for the sort of freedom we enjoy. We live in a time when justice is assumed to be the norm from which only a few deviate.

The space we are called to leave for God’s wrath seems unbecoming because the reality of injustice is an idea that we are too far removed from to know deep in our bones.

Of course, there is another reason many of us don’t like the idea as well: we hope that God’s capacity for forgiveness is larger than ours. We hope that our own failures to give up a grudge don’t reflect the truest intent of the heart of God. We hope that the capacious forgiveness and reconciliation on offer in the cross will break even the hardest of hearts and that God’s work of reconciliation will outstrip all our own feeble attempts.

But there seems to be a storyline in this world in which the powerful and the true enemies continue to see the very work of God before their eyes, continue to see the cross of Christ embodied in a blessing, persecuted people–and continue to pour out their evil upon this incarnation of good.

The people of God, in forgiving and blessing in the midst of persecution, are reenacting the Jesus story, the Jesus who offered forgiveness from the cross. This is our calling–to renarrate the life of Jesus in our lives, in our communities.

And, it is possible for this incarnation of Christ to be spurned and treated with contempt–and for the wrath of God to be kindled, a wrath that will be made known in the end.

This is tricky.

If we bless in hopes of bringing condemnation, it is no blessing but a curse. So our gifts must, it seems to me, be offered as genuine offers of forgiveness and blessing–even as Jesus’ own cry on Golgotha; an offer that can be embraced in repentance or spurned unto judgment.

Judgment & the Story of Israel

May 22, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 0 Comments

Atonement is tricky. On Thursday I was wrestling with the giving of Jesus by the Father in comparison to the self-giving God of more developed Trinitarian thought. Part of the challenge is that the language and larger theological framework of God giving God’s beloved for the sake of the world is larger than just Jesus’ self-giving.

Jesus’ becomes the pattern for believers’. And, tying together earlier posts about Romans 11 and atonement, it seem to be the language Paul uses to describe how God is currently postured for Israel: “If their rejection be the reconciliation of the world…”

Karl Barth places the whole idea of judgment on God’s people within a much larger biblical story.

As the bearer of the revelation imparted to it, Israel only too clearly means catastrophe for the surrounding world. But even more clearly Israel itself as the recipient of revelation has to suffer in this world. It encounters in its history incomparably much more evil than good. (Dogmatics 1.2, 86)

Prophets can’t advocate the cause of the nation AND YHWH, but must always advocate for YHWH, and so are rejected. The constant rebellion and rejection of God means that its only hope, continually, is in deliverance and salvation, unmerited, by its God: “Between covenant and its fulfillment there is suffering and death for those in whom it ought to be fulfilled.”

And as if Barth insists on saying in its most dangerous form what is most dangerous to say, he continues about the faithful ones in Israel:

They are themselves the first to have to suffer, and they are themselves the ones who have to suffer most, for the truth of their proclamation, for the fact that the God who has ever loved Israel is such a hidden God. And the same order is repeated again in the figure of the single righteous man, who, without special office, simply lives concretely the existence of Israel before his God… Thus the end of the world, or the judgment of the world, is seen above all in Israel. To it especially God is a hidden God. It especially, the beloved, chosen, sanctified nation, the house of God, must be the place where the old aeon begins to pass in face of the coming of God and His new work. (88-89)

From the NT we might remember the saying that it’s time for judgment to begin with the house of God, or we may think of Jesus’ prophetic ministry about the coming destruction of Jerusalem–and then, also, we must think of the cross.

This is, of course, all quite dangerous. It can lead to the problem of thinking that Israel bears all of this judgment, or is the place of all this judgment, because it is especially bad and thus especially worthy of judgment.

But there are two very good ways of heading this off.

The first is to recognize that in this pattern of giving the beloved in judgment, Jesus does stand at the middle. Jesus becomes the curse of the Law, death, thus ending the reign of the Law as the curse- and death-bringer. Jesus himself stands in this role of judged with death.

And the pattern does continue out into the church. We are summoned to take up our cross and follow. We are called to be the judgment-bearers. We are called *gulp* to fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.

This talk of being the place where judgment is made known to foreshadow the final judgment is not only about Israel, it is about the cross, and it is about the church. Perhaps getting hold of this is a first key in getting hold of a more biblical understanding of the death of Jesus and our own participation in it.

Here, in this death, in this judgment, the holy God is revealed. Because the holy God must be revealed in a world of sin and death.

Condescension, Condemnation, and the Cross

March 22, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Spirituality & Prayer with 10 Comments

Just an observation, if not one that’s particularly profound.

Different flavors of Christianity tend toward different besetting sins.

For those of us who are more on the conservative end of the spectrum, our besetting sin is condemnation. Our understanding of the gospel is very much tied to what is true–often in opposition to what various heretics throughout history have taught. Thus, we are quick to point out when people have gone beyond the pale, or to erect our own particular slice of Christianity’s “truth” as what is truly “orthodox.” We must beware of condemnation.

For those of us who are on the more liberal end of the spectrum, our besetting sin is condescension. Often, our personal narrative is one in which we have become more liberal as we have lived longer and learned more. This creates in us the anticipation that if other people would leave behind their naivete they would soon agree with us. It becomes easy to look down on those who disagree with us as those who simply haven’t come far enough along. We must beware of condescension.

Of course, what makes both of these sins so enticing is that there is an element of truth in each.

There is a way that education or experience with actual people who believe differently demonstrates to us that the black-and-white either/or of some traditional ways of viewing the world simply don’t work in real life.

There is also an important claim to be maintained that Christians believe certain things and not others, practice certain things and not others–and that wrong belief or wrong praxis puts one outside the pale of Christianity.

But both of these dispositions creep up on us when we’ve allowed a competing narrative to overtake the gospel story that makes us truly who we are. We live the story of the crucified Christ.

To be in the family of Jesus is to be a follower, a cross-bearer, a lover of God and of neighbor–not to be within the boundaries set by a Creed or Confession, not to be educated into right thinking. But to follow the Lamb wherever he may lead.

Are You Sure You Want Him to Come?

December 4, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, blogging with 7 Comments

Today I post the fourth in the series of twenty five stops along the Advent Blog Tour (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3). What we who are not from liturgical traditions too easily forget is that Advent is not Christmas. Advent is the time of expectation. It is the time of waiting. It is the time of hoping.

Advent is the season where we remember the long years of expectation. Advent is when we sing along with Israel of old, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here until the son of God appear.”

In our time of waiting, if we are not careful, we forget that we are deeply involved in our time of exile. We forget that our longing for the presence of God is inseparable from our own spurning of the divine presence when it has been offered to us in the past.

And so in today’s Advent reading, John the Baptist warns us that the coming for which our hearts long is a deeply ambivalent affair. The one who comes to gather the wheat also comes to consume the chaff:

    “I baptize with water those of you who have changed your hearts and lives. The one who is coming after me is stronger than I am. I’m not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The shovel he uses to sift the wheat from the husks is in his hands. He will clean out his threshing area and bring the wheat into his barn. But he will burn the husks with a fire that can’t be put out.” Matthew 3:11-12 (CEB)

John the Baptizer piles up images for those who are waiting. His is a washing with water–but for those whose lives are washed by being transformed so that they follow God. This is no mere marker, no mere symbol. The washing is a picture of someone who recognizes the need to be transformed and purified if he is going to withstand the visitation of God’s powerful messenger.

As the passage unfolds we see that how we prepare ourselves for the Messiah’s arrival is of ultimate consequence. For those who recognize the need for washing and transformation, the Powerful One arrives to bestow the Holy Spirit and gather into the Kingdom of God.

For those who anticipate that this coming is simply to vindicate them as the worthy righteous, or who simply disbelieve the reports of the coming judge, there is a judgment of ultimate consequence.

As we look forward to the arrival of the Christ (both the anticipation of the first coming that we relive each year and the future coming for which we still long), we are called to remember that the End begins with his appearance, and that this Messiah is the one upon whom the ages turn.

The celebration of Advent must remind us that there is no place for complacency. When we assess our lives as not being in any need of transformation and cleansing, we imperil our standing before the Coming One. When we act as though his coming is simply to vindicate us all as those who have always been good enough, we miss the gravity of his visitation.

Advent reminds us that the celebration of the Messiah’s arrival is for those who have prepared for his coming. As Malachai puts it, the Lord is like a refining fire, like a launderer’s soap–who can stand when he appears?

And so… he must purify.

The grace of Advent comes in our remembering that before the Lord comes to judge he comes to offer a saving purification. And that call to be “changed in hearts and lives” comes to us afresh, before the Messiah arrives.

Do You See Jesus?

October 31, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 4 Comments

The last chapter of Luke is exciting, strange, and frightening. Jesus appears to people, walks miles with them even, and they don’t recognize him. He is there, literally, in their presence, and they don’t see him. Not, at least, until he breaks the bread.

Of course, this depiction of Jesus’ followers having eyes to see and yet not seeing is only the same song in another key. We have already heard of the disciples who heard clear as day that Jesus had to suffer and die, yet could not hear this. They had ears to hear and yet could not hear.

These are the marvelous moments in scripture that cause me to assume that most of what I/we know is as likely to keep me/us from faithfully following Jesus as it is to draw us closer and prove to be the means for clear vision. We can know all there is to know about theology, the role of the messiah, salvation, God’s plans for salvation–and still fail to see Jesus.

One way that we fall into this failing to see is tied with the Lord’s Supper. That is the meal of reenactment: Jesus gives his body for us–and we all take it, being made one in the body of Christ. As Paul works out his union with Christ theology in 1 Corinthians we discover, perhaps to our surprise, that the closest we come to seeing Jesus face to face is when we look into the eyes of our sisters and brothers in the church. We are the body of Christ.

And so, this question, is for us in community with one another: do we see Jesus? Are we looking and perceiving his face on the face of the person next to us in the pew? the person who is perpetually needy? the person with whom we are perpetually frustrated? the child who won’t sit still?

The idea that we are the body of Christ, and know it, means that there is the danger of a culpable blindness–the sort of failure to see that comes when we see in the communion, in the self-giving of Jesus, merely a statement about me as an individual before God. If we don’t realize that it is about us, thinking instead that it is only about me, our seeing eyes have become blind.

This idea plays out in a similar vein in Matthew’s Gospel. The famous passage of final judgment, in which the Son of Man is on his throne, depicts a world full of the presence of Jesus–and Jesus’ would-be servants proving themselves too blind to see the face of their master.

The King, who is the Son of Man, to whose Father the Kingdom belongs, invites some in, and sends others away. The standard of admission? Giving food and drink and visitation to the King. When did we see you, Jesus? “Whenever you gave (or not) to the least of my brothers, you gave (or not) to me.”

Here we are still focused on the community, and the needy in the community. And, we are confronted once again with the stark reality that Jesus is embodied in his followers. And, we are confronted with the quite frightening possibility that our eyes may be too dull to recognize that when we look on the family, we see the image of the eldest brother into which we are all being renewed.

Maybe there’s something apropos in all this for Halloween. Masks aren’t the only things that keep us from seeing who someone really is. Sometimes apprehending a person’s true identity is less a matter of seeing their face and more a matter of having eyes to see.

Judge Not? Even People Who Write Books?!

August 28, 2010 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 14 Comments

I have a mixed relationship with “Judge not, lest you be judged.”

Whenever I hear it my antenna goes up, listening intently for how someone is about to tell me that they don’t have to listen to what the rest of the Bible says about how Christians should act since Jesus tells us we’re not supposed to judge anyone. I typically assume that Paul is about to take a beating.

But every now and then it comes back around on me, and I realize that those are life-giving words–not merely for individuals, but for communities. Here’s my latest struggle with it.

I’ve been questioning the value of certain scholars’ work recently. Not that it’s not scholarly and to the point, but I’ve been made cautious because these Christian scholars who have written at length on forgiveness, reconciliation, and sex have had their own marriages end.

I feel a need to know what happened. I feel a need to know how their lives do or do not reflect what they’ve spoken about with such authority in their books. I find myself hesitating about the value of their work because of the lives that don’t serve as glowing endorsements.

If all goes well, it does begin to dawn on me that I don’t know these people at all, not only do I not know the circumstances behind the writing, but I also do not know the circumstances behind the divorce. There is no context of community within which I might wrestle with them, listen to them, and have sufficient exposure to who they are that their personal “witness” begins to regain (or to lose) its credibility.

As the thought process continues, I realize that I have friends who are divorced and remarried, and that in the context of a relationship where I know them, at times worship with them, and otherwise spend time in community with them, I never hear them differently due to their marital status.

I listen to them, honor them, and respect them because we have built a relationship of trust even though both our lives are marked with decisions that we and the other might regard as unwise or unholy.

And so I come full circle to the initial impulse to judge these divorcees who should have been able to avoid it if they were living according to what they wrote in their books. And I am reminded of the stern warning: do not judge, lest you be judged.

And sometimes, just sometimes, I am even able to stop there and let it all go. But if not, there’s always the threat that someone might turn the tables on me and ask me how well I’m doing by the standards I set in my own writing. If I dog these folks for lives that imperfectly mirror the beauty of the gospel as they have been able to see it and articulate it in writing, what will become of me when someone uses my own writing as the canon by which my own life is judged?

I once read a pastor’s narrative in which he was reflecting on his call, especially preaching. He reflected on people calling the preacher a hypocrite for what he says in the pulpit in juxtaposition to the pastor’s imperfect life. But his own feeling was that it was in the pulpit he was his truest self.

I think those of us who write about biblical and theological things can resonate with that. Or, at least, with the idea that in our writing we see more clearly than we might reflect in our everyday lives where old patterns and powers overwhelm us again and again. The failure of the life to live up to the text is not simply the reality of our lives stacked up against the Jesus of the Bible, it’s the reality of our lives when stacked up against the Jesus upon whose ways we reflect in our books.

We will continue to fall short. We will continue to need grace.

And, I think we’re still free to read each other’s books.

Do Not Judge–Except for Pigs & Dogs!

April 21, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

The Sermon on the Mount is full of little conundrums. One of my favorite is in the flow that goes: Don’t judge; after you take out your log attend to the other person’s splinter; and don’t throw your pearls before swine or give what’s holy to dogs.

The jump from “don’t judge” to “don’t forget to judge whether or not a person is a pig or dog” seems rather stark.

I’ve been playing with this passage for a couple of days, noting one thing and wondering another.

The note: the first chapter on judgment is clearly for insiders-how we deal with one another in the “family of God.” In fact, I find that markers of familial ties are one of the most important navigational tools to understand what Jesus is going on about in the Sermon.

In this case, the command not to judge is contextualized within a paragraph that simultaneously highlights the dangers of passing judgment, and the idea that “one anothering” in the church will entail assisting other people with their shortcomings after attending to our own. After removing the log, then one can see clearly the speck in the eye of a sister or brother (and not knock him or her unconscious!). The warning is important, but so is the loving care of helping get the splinter out.

In the warning about pearls before swine, a perennial question is, “What is the holy thing? What are the pearls?” This is an image, a metaphor, so we probably shouldn’t push too strongly for one single answer. The idea that the gospel is both to be proclaimed to all nations is supplemented with the idea that when it is rejected the disciples are to shake the dust of a town off their feet as a testimony against them (so Davies and Allison).

But I wonder if we are not to read it more directly in the context of the admonitions against judgment–which are followed by a “procedure” of sorts for dealing with another’s shortcoming. Is the “pearl” that would be trampled this sort of confrontation with particular matters of sin/shortcoming? Is the “holy thing” the intimate family business of getting up close and personal to remove one another’s eye specks after we have dealt with our own logs?

[Picture credit: Anthony Gonzales]