In Jesus we see that God is not a monster of our imaginations

When bad things happen it is easy to say something like, "What did I do to deserve this?" Probably nothing in the sense of the question above. God isn't punishing us when bad things happen. Of course, if we play with fire we get burnt, that is true. But that is not the same as saying that God is the author when bad things happen. This is so important. 'The gods' did bad things, just read Greek mythology! God does not. God dies on a cross for us, we did the crucifying, God did the rising. On the cross God judges human sin by being a victim of sin and raising the innocent Jesus from the dead. The risen Jesus sends out his disciples to preach repentance and forgiveness of sins, not vengeance. It would be wildly inconsistent for the Father of the Lord Jesus to then bring disaster down on our heads. 

People can also have a tendency to misinterpret history in a similar way. An earthquake is not God's punishment. We shouldn't impute to God the disaster that follows the earthquake. People seem to have been (and still are) infatuated with end-of-the-world scenarios. Whether divinely inspired or human-induced, people continue to guess the meaning of events and interpret them as coming from a malevolent or angry god (even secularised people have their own versions of this). In the past people have been obsessed with dating 'the end', and dates still figure prominently in all kinds of secular future dooms. Jesus tells us not to misinterpret the events of history. He knew people would say all kinds of things in his name, and make all kinds of claims. So he explicitly says, don't be fooled by false messiahs, and don't see God as the author of disasters. Disasters, whether human-inspired or not, will come, but don't make God out to be a monster. (See Mark 13:1-8) 

The event to correctly interpret is Jesus, his birth, ministry, death, and resurrection. God's response to suffering, evil, and death is not to make more of it. God’s response is to overcome suffering, evil, and death by surrendering to its power. Jesus, born in a stable, crucified and raised, interprets our history. We are loved, and in Christ our future is secure, even if it doesn't feel that way at times.

Our Poverty Implies God's Fullness.

We are incomplete. As humans. It is our nature.

We see this clearly, as the poet says:

On the Mystery of the Incarnation 

It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:

not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.      (Denise Levertov)

There is a 'taint' in our own selves. The poet recalls for us the terrible things we humans do to each other, from truly horrific violence to all kinds of mundane emotional cruelty. But, she says, this incompletion is the way in which our hearts and minds can be transformed, converted. (“…that awe cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart…”)

There is plenty more evidence for this lack in us, this incompleteness. Not just incorrigible human failure like ethnic violence, family and generational violence, but also the more mundane distress we have all felt in our families of origin, in our own families. Parents see themselves in their children, good and not so desirable, and wonder how the not-so-good happened despite our best efforts! It’s common. 

Utopianism is further evidence, if it is needed. We are currently in the power of all sorts of extreme utopianisms. Utopianism is a kind of denial of our incompleteness. A kind of ‘she doth protest too much’, an over-insistence to cover the fear, to protest against, and to reject of the lack in us.

Our tendency to monument building is another sign of this incompleteness. We don’t last, We are like the grass of the field, as scripture says. So, let’s build a monument to ourselves, our family, our culture. Nothing necessarily wrong with monument building, it’s just that it sometimes can be, once again, a protest, against our evanescence: we age, we fade, we disappear.

Or again, the self-help industry. It’s good, why not try to help yourself? But, again, it is an acknowledgement of our incompleteness, there is more to us than what we are now. So we try all sorts of methods to change and grow, all kinds of methods, philosophies, and irrationalities.

We are told to embrace honestly, or at least, to accept this incompleteness in the myriad ways it shows itself. To change what needs to be changed, to grow, to accept.. Of course.

But there is something missing in that account. The Christian account, while accepting what I have just said, thinks there is something more. It’s not just to accept and or change, as good as these are. It is to acknowledge our poverty, our spiritual poverty. The incompleteness doesn't mean that we just have to learn new methods of self-enquiry or a helpful technique to grow psychologically.  We are poor, but to acknowledge this is to acknowledge God’s loving fullness waiting to be poured into our hearts. Christianity doesn’t say we are poor; it says God is rich and wishes to share God’s richness with us in our poverty. We are made incomplete to be filled by God’s Spirit, to take us to a new depth of loving that we ourselves cannot bring about. And this fullness doesn’t just complete us, it brings healing. The very signs of our incompleteness can be transformed and healed in God’s fullness. Anger, hate, malice, fear, anxiety, violence and revenge, alienation and the fear of death, all can be healed and we can be taken where we were made to go.

This is Christmas. God comes as a human being, the beginning of a new humanity filled by God’s Spirit. The weak, helpless baby a sign of God’s desire to stoop down to us and take us to where God is. Not just the birth, of course. There is to come Jesus’ ministry, rejection, crucifixion, and resurrection. But God has done in Jesus what we are made not to be able to do on our own: to be a complete humanity, in the image of that same Christ. 

The Joseph Story

 The Joseph story is one of my favourites in scripture. It doesn't get much more real (except perhaps the cross!). A husband and his two wives ("And it was Leah!), favoured sons, bitter rivalry and envy, betrayal, forgiveness, conversion, and through and in all this God's presence.

I have posted some material before on Joseph. Check out this post on the conversion that Joseph leads his brothers to, and the way in which God's response to evil is not a moralistic separation of the good and bad, neither is God's response a gnostic ignoring of evil, but joining the story and putting the evil on a broader canvas of God's purposes. ("God intended it for good.") Or this post, a short reflection on how Christ is feels no envy toward us, and that through his Spirit we need not be envious of him, for everything that we can receive has been given to us.

Noah's Ark

I am doing a series with some students on 'the evil of the human heart'. I will digress into such topics as the banality of evil (compared to the 'sexiness' of evil on TV and video games). I will also do a session on the way the spiritual realm and the material world are interlaced so that we see that drug cartels are the real manifestations of the demonic, just as the legions of Rome were in the time of Jesus. I started the series this week by reading the punch-line of the Noah's Ark story. The story begins with God sending the rain to kill all living creatures because of the evil of the human heart. By the end of the story God has learned that to eradicate evil the simplistic procedure of killing all the 'evil people just doesn't work. Evil cuts through every human heart. The solution to human evil narrated in Scripture is for God to become one of us, with us, suffer and die at the hands of sinners, and be raised.

This guy made a replica ark - some people have too much time on their hands

So God learns, but guess who hasn't learned this most simple of lessons? Yes, that's right, us, humankind. Indeed, that we have not learned this is part of the evil of the human heart, perhaps even its root. (Separating the sinner and persecuting him/her). In the Noah story God learns the lesson. Of course, God didn't actually have to learn the lesson. But that we haven't learned points to our intransigence, or perhaps blindness, and arrogance. 

Jesus the Exorcist and Healer

When it comes to the healings and exorcisms of Jesus it is easy to get caught up in discussions about the miraculous on the one hand, and questions about the reality of the demonic on the other. While important, those discussions need to be broadened a little. Brad, my co-minister here at Holy Innocents used to work with children with multiple disabilities. In that work he would use every channel available to communicate with the children. He remarked in a recent sermon that he could see some similarity between his work with these children and the story of the healing of the deaf man with a speech impediment in Mk 7:31-37. Those schooled in the debates about the reality of healings and the question of magic miss the very basic ways that Jesus is communicating with the man in the story. Jesus touches the man's ears and tongue, and looks up to heaven and sighs. The man would recognise what Jesus was indicating and doing. The question of what happened in the healing does not disappear, but we need not see the touching and the saliva as some kind of magic, or even just as a prophetic acting out. Jesus might have also been communicating with the man, telling him what he, Jesus, was about to do.

The same holds true with the exorcisms of Jesus. The Gospel stories explicitly weave social and political realities into the exorcisms. Two examples, both in the Gospel of Mark, come readily to mind. The first is Mk 1:21-28 where the exorcism is clearly linked to the contrast between the teaching and authority of Jesus with the teaching and authority of the scribes. And then there is the story of the Gerasene demoniac. (Mk 5:1-20) I can't remember where I read it, but apparently there is some evidence to suggest that in antiquity demon possession increased during times of foreign occupation. Demon possession, while a spiritual reality in the text, is not divorced from the political realities of the people within the text. And just in case we doubt it, the name of the demon is legion, the basic unit of the Roman army.

Evil is Close

It is commonplace to either understate the reality of evil or froth at the mouth about it. I doubt these two misrepresentations are exclusively Christian, but we do them well. Some Christians are still stuck in the Enlightenment's hope of progress, and think that with greater education, the curtailing of religious mania, and greater justice in the world evil would essentially evaporate. Such Christians are offended or embarrassed by the inclusion of 'evil' in the public life of the church, and edit out mention of it in, for example, the baptismal liturgy.

And then there are those Christians who seem to be obsessed with evil to the extent that human agency within it disappears, or certain people are identified entirely with evil. While I have some sympathy with that identification, those who do this seem to spread the just wide enough to catch those they don't like. (A tendency a bit evil in itself.) And the obsession with evil is then perverted still further by Hollywood which makes evil almost sexy (in a perverted way) or so 'other-worldly' that people are distracted from its actual locale. And I should also mention the teenage attraction to evil/demons which seems to derive from either self-hate or plain old teenager rebellion.

So what are we meant to think of evil? Well, first, it is real. Second, it isn't like Hollywood. It is to be found in the lives of real people, and manifests itself in individual perversion right up to whole societies. Third, it isn't sexy either, more banal than anything (but don't let this fool you, evil kills and destroys. Hannah Arendt attached the label of 'banal' to evil in her reporting of the Eichmann trial and the evil of Nazism.) And yes, I think sometimes people earn the appellation 'evil', although not necessarily for good. I looked into the eyes of a drug-crazed maniac yelling satanic abuse in my face from two inches away while he had a screwdriver poking in my belly. Two lives were lost after that night, and it doesn't feel like I was encountering 'merely' human failure that night. He was in the power of evil.

St Paul is right when he says that we are in conflict with more than flesh and blood (Eph 6:10-17); but we don't meet it apart from flesh and blood. It is close to each one of us in the distortions that make up our psyches, and the compounding historical perversions and distortions embedded in our global human community (and in each one of us; just as the doctrine of Original Sin says, we are sinners even before we 'sin'). Evil is opposed (personally and communally, historically and spiritually) through the traditional spiritual disciplines (including good counselling) and in our opposition to social movements of oppression and terror. And if you are really serious about opposing evil in your own heart and in the world, then truth, justice, peace and faith are essential.

Ultimately, evil is defeated on the cross and in the resurrection. Jesus' self-surrender and desertion by the Father to the power of evil, in utter openness to its power, defeats it. This is the truly disturbing heart of Christianity. Some atonement theories, and some interpretations of them, make the cross and resurrection in some way an overpowering of evil, as though God's power is of the same kind as evil, just of a greater magnitude. God's power in Christ is of an entirely different order, the power of self-sacrificing love given over to the power of evil and death. And in the apparent defeat of the cross, when all seems lost in the 'slabby darkness' of the tomb, there we discover that evil was 'tricked' (as the Fathers said in a variety of ways). The powerlessness of love overcomes evil in its (love's) powerlessness. Luckily God did it for us on the cross and resurrection because I don't have the courage to do it in my own life. If that terrible night with the man with the screwdriver was replayed I wouldn't give myself over to the evil, or watch as someone else fell into its power.