Tag: Mercy

As in the days of Ahaz…

As in the days of Ahaz, so my people have traded the fear of the Lord for the fear of temporal things.  Ahaz constructed places of prayer in every home and every hovel, on every hill and under every tree.  The temple that bore my name was not enough.  He longed for me to be available at a whim.  Like the false gods of Canaan, Ahaz taught the people to treat me as a common thing in Israel.  No more purification, no more pilgrimage festivals, no more Torah.  He wanted only the act of worship to suffice.

So, I abandoned Israel to her enemies.  I gave my people over to the gods they had worshipped.  Their high places and Asherah poles did battle for them, and their enemies swept over them as a flood.

But when my time of wrath was spent, I judged, too, the nation that had judged them.  For a nation without mercy will receive no mercy, and a people without compassion will be shown no compassion.

As in the days of Ahaz, so are the days of my people today.  Fear rules the land, doctrines of demons are preached from my pulpits, and my people are possessed by the spiritual forces of evil in league with the flesh.

And I have brought judgment on my people.  Every hidden thing is being made known.  And more than secrets will be unearthed in the days to come.  Again, my people have built high places and called them centers of worship.  Again my people have fashioned gods of their own choosing and worshipped them in my name.

For these sins, I am releasing the flood on my church.  Not one stone will remain on top of another.  This nation will fall from without and from within.  The people will be feasting on each other when they are interrupted by ravenous lions.  The vultures are gathering!  Feed creatures of the earth, feed!  For the feast is before you.  The spoils of the earth have been brought into houses of prostitution, but none shall eat of their fruits.  What has been gathered will be scattered.  What has been ripened will become rotten.  My people will not rest.  Weariness will be their lot.  For they feared the world and only flattered God.

But woe to the creatures who feed on them, and woe to those who pillage their stores.  For I will not call innocent those who do violence to those under my judgment.  When my wrath is spent, I will call to account every evil deed done against my people.  To those who show mercy, mercy will be shown to them.  And to those who bind the wounds of justice with compassion, with compassion I will bind their wounds.

Reflecting on Justice

A few years ago I had the privilege of reading Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. To say that the book was challenging is to put the matter mildly. I felt as though I had been wrecked theologically, emotionally, and behaviorally in only the first third of the book.

For the purposes of this blog, I wanted to focus on a section from Chapter 3 of The Crucifixion, “The Question of Justice.”

The reign of Sin and Death over the kosmos is inseparable from the question we are asking in this book: Why did God in three persons agree on such a peculiarly gruesome manner of death for the second person? What does the method itself tell us about the meaning of the death? There is no quick and easy answer to that question. The biblical account offers hints and suggestions rather than worked-out solutions.

Pushing this train of thought to its most radical application, however, we arrive at a point that is all too rarely acknowledged. In the final analysis, the crucifixion of Christ for the sin of the world reveals that it is not only the victims of oppression and injustice who are in need of God’s deliverance, but also the victimizers. Each of us is capable, under certain circumstances, of being a victimizer. Václav Havel, president first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic, was imprisoned several times for his dissident activities under the Communist regime, the longest stretch being from 1979 to 1983. He wrote extensively about life in the Stalinist galaxy. Here is one of his reflections: “The line [between good and evil] did not run clearly between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ but through each person. No one was simply a victim; everyone was in some measure co-responsible. . . .Many people were on both sides.”

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

This is a challenging passage, and it is situated in a context in which Rutledge is contending for the idea that the cross is about more than forgiveness. For Rutledge the cross is also about justice, and it is a justice for and against all of us.

Recent events in our culture have reminded me again how easy it is to draw our enemies very flatly. As a Christian, I find the convictions of those who believe that one race or another is superior to any other to be a flat out rejection of the Gospel of Jesus. In the context of the Scriptures, the specially chosen people group were the Hebrew descendants of Abraham, and their election, as Romans 9 makes fairly clear, had nothing to do with them and everything to do with God’s purpose in election—that is, the deliverance of all nations of the earth from the tyranny of Sin and Death. For this reason, it is easy for me to paint those who judge others by superficialities like skin color as an uncomplicated and thoroughly corrupted enemy.

However, what Havel has suggested to the world is that at the root of the gravest of deceptions and at the foundation of the worst horrors of humanity’s cultural history is the conviction that some of us are thoroughly on the side of the angels, while others are entirely demonic. This de-humanizing of our adversaries and even our enemies is a useful tool of hate and of war because it paints those with whom we disagree as somehow non-human, as somehow less deserving of basic human considerations.

This very human tendency toward de-humanization was manipulated to devastating effect by the Nazi leadership in World War II Germany. In that context the Jewish people were cast as sub-human demons, devoid of any human complication. And ironically, in many of the responses to the systemic evils within our own culture we are witnessing, even among our own Christian brothers and sisters who rightly recognize the abominableness of the principalities and powers that permeate the world, the rush to flatten, to demonize, and to dehumanize those with whom we disagree seems at times as pernicious as the propagandizing of World War II Germany.

The line [between good and evil] did not run clearly between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ but through each person. No one was simply a victim; everyone was in some measure co-responsible. . . .Many were on both sides.

Václav Havel

Perhaps these sorts of realizations lie at the heart of Jesus’ instructions to “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.” Of course we must speak and stand against evil, and our outrage against tyranny and poverty and racial superiority and corruption is godly and Christlike, in my view. But, evil is never as simple as the totality of an individual. Evil is a power in which each of us participates and which runs through the heart of each of us. Our moral outrage can become as much a tool of the tyrannical powers of Sin and Death as our hate and self-centeredness. In fact, there may be no more infectious type of evil than the evil done in the name of justice.

However criminals are prosecuted and unholy philosophies and ideas are countered and adjudicated, we must never lose sight of the fact that the knowledge of good and evil runs through every human heart, and our enemies are never any less human or deserving of human dignity than our friends and loved ones. Perhaps this is the hardest of the teachings of Jesus and His Apostles to accept. It is easier to oppose people than to oppose Sin and Death as powers that run through the middle of all of us. Individual people can be tortured, defamed, humiliated, and killed. But Sin and Death survive every human life, and continue to hold even those who oppose them in sway long after human justice is done.

For Rutledge, and increasingly for me, this is part of why Jesus not only died, but was crucified. In His manner of death He exposes what lies within even the righteous justice of humanity. Jesus was condemned by the religious leaders of His culture for blasphemy, and it was in how we executed this one blasphemer that who we really are has been revealed. Jesus on the cross is an indictment not only of human sin, but of the corrupting influence of justice; of the fear that causes us to torture and dehumanize those deemed too evil to be treated as human, as beings made in the image of God. The best of intentions crucified Jesus, and the deepest of zeal for right and rightness played out on His flesh and Person. Truly the line between good and evil does not run between us and them, but through each of us.

Let the people of God beware.

~ J. Thomas

Reflecting on Genesis 21:8-21

By J. Thomas Johnson

There are times in which contemporary sensibilities and the narratives of Christian Scripture run seamlessly together. Contemporary concerns with respect to environmental stewardship, for instance, and the biblical insistence in Genesis that humanity was created to care for creation are deeply compatible. However, at other times contemporary mores and Biblical narratives seem to diverge fundamentally. I suspect that the narrative we find in Genesis 21:8-21 is as good an example as any of this apparent divergence.

Genesis 15 recounts a covenant that God made with Abraham. At the heart of God’s promise was a miracle. God promised Abraham and his wife, Sarah, that after decades of infertility they would have a son. So, perhaps as a way of helping God along, Sarah suggested that Abraham take her maidservant, Hagar, as a concubine and produce a child through her. Abraham agreed, and the result of their union was Ishmael. And almost immediately conflict between Sarah and Hagar began to develop.

However, God’s promise to Abraham was not fulfilled in Ishmael. God had intended to provide a child to Sarah and Abraham together. So, in time, Sarah did become pregnant, and gave birth to a boy in her old age. They named him Isaac. And the conflict between Hagar and Sarah escalated.

This conflict is at the heart of Genesis 21:8-21. As Sarah observed the interaction between Ishmael and her baby, she uttered one of the crasser statements to be found in Genesis: “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac” (NRSV, Gen. 21:10).

So much is bound up in Sarah’s charge to Abraham. A distinction of classes is, of course, explicit. But buried within these harsh words are pain and regret and envy and, perhaps fundamentally, fear.  These are not surprising qualities to be found in Sarah given the narratives of Genesis which have preceded hers. What is surprising, at least to me, is that God instructed Abraham to follow her counsel. “But God said to Abraham, ‘Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring'” (21:12-13).

In the text, we are told that Abraham loved both of his children, and it seems implicit that Abraham could only exile Ishmael and Hagar because of God’s promise to care for them personally. And God was true to His word. Genesis tells us that not only did God send His angel to communicate with Hagar and to rescue them both from thirst, but also, “God was with the boy, and he grew up;…” (21:20).

I’ve often reflected on why it was that God did not require these two rivals, Hagar and Sarah, to find a way forward together, and why it was that Ishmael and Isaac could not have been raised as brothers. And then, again, the risk to both in the culture was certainly great. When Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, married two women and took two additional concubines later in Genesis, the rivalry between the women and the children was painful and, in the case of the children, violent. It resulted in one of the sons being sold into slavery by the others. Was God’s decision to support Sarah’s desires rooted in this sort of cultural complexity?

Even more, when God became flesh in the Person of Jesus several thousand years after these events, Jesus taught us that God’s desire was for His followers to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. He instructed His disciples to accept insults without retaliation and to respond to governmental oppression by going beyond what was being forcibly required. In the teachings of Jesus, certainly Sarah’s concerns would have received a rebuke, wouldn’t they? And yet, at the time, God consented to allow her callousness to persist.

As I reflect on this passage again, I am reminded that God begins with us where we are. The rivalry between heirs was pervasive in the culture of Abraham’s day, and Sarah’s concern for the safety and future of her son was certainly reasonable.  And God, rather than asking Sarah to undergo a miraculous and radical transformation of character and worldview all at once, instead allowed her to remain uncharitable, while He Himself served as a personal example of watchcare and devotion to a child that was born outside of His expressed will. God became Himself the caregiver that Sarah could not find room in her heart to become. And by His example, the descendants of Abraham have learned that those who wish to be like God must follow Him into the wilderness and care for a child born out of an act of faithlessness.

I am convinced that Jesus could instruct His followers to embrace their enemies in part because God Himself had set the example for such practices in instances like that of Hagar and Ishmael’s abandonment. Sarah had never seen or experienced this kind of generosity of spirit, and so, she had no context out of which to obey such a command. It is only after God demonstrated His love to those He had not chosen that He asked humanity to respond in kind. God goes first where He asks humanity to follow, and no example of this reality is more fundamental in the church than that of Jesus journey to the cross.

Much later, the Apostle Paul, in his epistle to the Galatians, would recall this episode in the life of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael, and Paul would suggest that God’s love for Israel herself had more in common with His love for Ishmael than with His devotion to Isaac. The canon of Scripture taken together suggests that we all are children born in a world of rebellion against God’s intentions for humanity. We all have come, in one way or another, into a world that has lost faith in its God, a world that has tried to fulfill God’s intentions by its own wisdom and with its own strength. Each of us has more in common with Ishmael than with Isaac. And yet, God cares for children who would not be had He been trusted, and God has been with us. Perhaps this story, too, is echoed in Paul’s summation of the Gospel of Jesus: “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (NRSV, Rom. 5:8). When we are faithless, God is faithful. Ishmael became a great nation. May the Name of the Lord be praised by our willingness to follow in His footsteps.