Create in Me a Clean Heart, O God.

Create in me a clean heart, O God. (Psalm 51:1) 

[And that is exactly what God has done in Christ.]

God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Rom 5:5) 

In a particularly difficult time in my life I had a dream that I remembered the next morning. In the dream I was in a large gathering, robed, and in the Gospel procession to the middle of the large crowd. The Gospel Book was opened and I was about to read and realised that the wrong reading was open. But I spoke the good news of the gospel (it was John 10, the Good Shepherd) to the crowd, but I read it by heart. 

I was talking to someone recently who told me of an occasion when they forgave someone for something most people might bear a grudge over. It was like it just flowed out of her heart. She didn’t need to coerce herself, fight with herself over what to do. I said it sounded like a flowering of her heart, like she knew the good news by heart and lived it. (It reminded me of my dream.) 

The problem was recognised in the Hebrew Scriptures. We are told that God is not swayed by outward appearance, but looks on the heart. (1Sam 16:7) And what is in the human heart? After the flood, God promises to never again curse the ground because of humankind, for evil dwells in every human heart. (There’s no simple solution to evil, like killing off the bad people to leave the good people.) The problem is the human heart. (Gen 9:21) Jesus teaches this too: it is what comes out of a person, from within, from the heart, that defiles a person. (Mark 7:21-23) What is to be done? The Psalmist cries out to God, “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” (51:1) The problem is the human heart, and the solution is for God to cleanse the human heart. The prophet Jeremiah recognises this when he contrasts the old covenant with the new covenant. Instead of the law being written on stone tablets that must be inculcated into the human heart, God will write the law on our hearts, and we will come to know God by heart, and ourselves as God’s people. (Jer 312:31-34. See also Ezek 36:26; Matt 26:27-28; Rom 2:29) Or to put it another way, God will replace our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh. (Ezek 11:19-20) 

The transformation of the human heart is accomplished in Jesus. Jesus knows God by heart. God begins the new creation with Jesus. His heart is God's heart, our heart. But it is not as if Jesus just glides through life serenely oblivious to the temptations and despair of life, as though his heart is insulated from real life because it is God’s heart. On the contrary, Jesus has a true heart of real human flesh. His heart makes him more open and vulnerable, and through him, we are opened to this real human heart. His via dolorosa is the way of a human heart. 

In the same way, the rebuilding of our hearts into hearts of flesh does not insulate us from the world. There are many ingredients necessary for the spread of the good news of salvation in Jesus, not least his disciples opening the door of their hearts to their neighbour and inviting them in.

The Epithet of Sinner (John 6:56-69)

In today's Gospel reading (John 6:56-69) those who follow Jesus are being pared back. They are a remnant of what they were. Jesus collected quite an array of followers, but over the course of his ministry they disappeared. The righteous are being thinned out. Today, they are thinned out because of his teaching about the bread of life and consuming him for eternal life.  And in the end Jesus would lose all his followers, and he, Jesus, would be the remnant, the righteous one. His righteousness covers me, that’s part of being redeemed. Being crucified to my old self, the self that makes crosses and all sorts of metaphorical crosses for others. 

So I like the epithet of sinner. Not just sinner. Redeemed sinner. It’s why Christians don’t mind being named as sinners. We are redeemed. But often we think of ‘sinner’ as a judgment on us. A source of shame, and a state we should escape from. Not being a sinner is preferable to being a sinner. But I prefer to see ‘sinner’ as a way of being that is my identity, how I am in the world. Not as a description that can and should be jettisoned as soon as possible. I think of ‘sinner’ as something almost permanent; this is how I am. Not a layer poured over the top of who I am that I could peel off at some point (if I stopped doing bad things perhaps) and resume being me. I think redeemed sinner is who I am. Sounds negative, and the world rejects and avoids such an epithet. (“I'm not one of those...”) Or sometimes it is embraced as an expression of a deep dislike of self. (“I’m worse than everyone else.”) But for me it is always redeemed sinner, and that changes everything. 

But doesn’t "redeemed" mean that I am no longer a sinner? No, better to keep ‘sinner’ than not. Here’s why. Sinners redeemed in Christ know that they are loved. Not because of their own righteousness (the remnant is Jesus, not Jesus and me), but because of God’s unearned and freely given mercy and love. I receive and therefore my reconstitution comes from gift. That’s what it means to be a redeemed sinner. 'To be' because of gift, the gift of love, or more precisely, the gift of a relationship of love. It changes how I see the world. It’s all gift. I am built up by receiving, in thankfulness, not in grasping or resentment. What I learn as a redeemed sinner becomes a prism through which to see all of life. It is the beginning of joy and the scent of the peace that passes all understanding.