Readings
3
Do Not Be Afraid
The old university lecture hall was a little decrepit; paint was peeling off the mildly damp walls, and the harsh fluorescent lights overhead mercilessly exposed every crack and chip in the wooden seats and desks. But the Christian Union had worked hard to brighten the mood, and it showed. Colorful bunting had been hung from one side of the room to the other. A green embroidered cloth hung over the speaker’s podium. The coffee was fresh and the doughnuts warm. We were encouraged to find a seat while three cheerful musicians played and sang brightly. One of the senior students welcomed the speaker who, he said, had a gift for sharing the good news about Christ in a compelling and attractive way. The preacher thanked him, stood and slowly surveyed a room filled with faithful and heathens—members of the Union, and others (like me) invited to come and discover “what life is really all about.” He sized us up carefully before looking down at his notes.
“Sin is a serious business,” he began quietly, his deep gravelly voice taking on the tone of a schoolteacher about to give his class a real dressing down. “I wonder if you realize just how serious it is? How terribly serious a matter it is to be a sinner?” He looked up, his penetrating eyes trying to peer into the soul of each one of us in turn. Picking up his Bible, he began to read from Paul’s letter to the Romans:
There is no one who is righteous, not even one;
there is no one who has understanding,
there is no one who seeks God. . . .
Their throats are opened graves;
they use their tongues to deceive.
The venom of vipers is under their lips. . . .
There is no fear of God before their eyes. (Rom 3:10-11, 13, 18)
He fixed upon us with his steely eyes again, before launching into a blistering denunciation of every sin we could ever have imagined, and a few that appeared to come as surprising news to some of the more innocent students in the room. He excoriated the filth of sin, he condemned the depravity of vice, he lambasted the hubris of every wretched man, woman and child who dared offend the holiness of God with their base wickedness. We sweated with guilt over everything we had ever done, even some things we hadn’t dreamed were sins before that night—but, after all, wasn’t even our righteousness nothing but filthy rags? It seemed we couldn’t do anything right; when we were bad, we were evil; and when we were good, we were so unclean we polluted even our attempts at virtue. For forty-five minutes he held us squirming while hell gaped under our chairs. And then, quite suddenly, he stopped. And, incredibly, he smiled.
“But I have a wonderful message for you, my friends!” he chirped. “There is hope!” We leaned forward onto the edge of our seats. Surely this must be the good news we had been promised at the beginning of the evening? After that excruciating diagnosis of our dreadful spiritual condition, we were anxious not to miss a word of the remedy.
“Christians,” he said, “have developed a marvelous vocabulary to describe this hope, this good news. Words like atonement. Propitiation. Justification. Sanctification. Glorification.” He smiled. “Oh, my friends, these words sum up the wonderful hope of the Christian. These words express the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. These words are balm to the soul!” His gaze, now entirely enraptured, drifted upward toward some seventh heaven. “Oh, my friends,” he sighed, “you really should learn for yourselves what these words mean!”
He was silent for a moment. Then he picked up his notes and sat down.
A little while later I mumbled an excuse to my friend and crawled out of the room. I had no idea what any of those mighty and glorious words meant, and they drifted off into some airy far corner of my mind. But the preacher’s vivid denunciation of the evils of sin stayed with me for days. Whatever else you might want to say about God, this much was clear: God is mightily ticked off. With the world. With humanity. And especially with me.
An Uncertain Love
In this book we’re exploring how Scripture might become for us holy ground on which we can meet God, be drawn into his presence. But, of course, this implies that we want to draw near to God. And the simple truth is that, while we might be very willing to hear God, obey God and worship God, many of us are deeply reluctant actually to draw near to God, to open ourselves to the possibility of his divine embrace, because we are so very uncertain of God. After all, we are such wretched sinners. What would a holy and righteous God want with us? Or make of us? Or do to us?
Of course, we understand that God loves us. We have heard the love of God proclaimed in a hundred sermons. We have memorized the Scripture verses: “For God so loved the world . . .” (Jn 3:16) and “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). We have sung God’s love in hymn and chorus; we have reassured one another over coffee in church that “God loves you!”; we have plastered affirmations of the love of God on our Bible covers, our car bumpers, our pencils and fridge magnets and toothbrushes. We know that God loves us.
And yet . . . and yet many of us cannot quite believe it. Our mind affirms it, but something deep in our heart questions it. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we don’t always like what we see. Even if we have hidden our flaws, our failings and our weaknesses from others, we cannot hide them from ourselves. We are painfully aware of the inner struggle with those secret vices we would never dare to name in public. There is a darkness within, a shadowy alter ego we keep firmly locked away. We may have succeeded in hiding our true nature from those around us, at least to some degree. But we are unable to hide from ourselves. Nor can we hide from God, the “Father who sees in secret” (Mt 6:4). He is the one, as an ancient prayer expresses it, to whom “all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” How could this all-knowing God desire our company, our friendship?
And so we find ourselves understanding and affirming the limitless love of God on the one hand, yet on the other living as though God’s love were actually rather more measured and circumspect—in fact, barely more than grudging indulgence. Our hearts tell us that we are sullied. Spoiled goods. In the presence of a holy and pure God we are filthy and contaminated, an unpleasant irritant, a bad odor. Any grace God extends toward us is, we feel, surely against his better judgment. We tell one another that God loves us, but our hearts tell us that God tolerates us.
Our lives demonstrate this reality. Our relationship with God is driven around a never-ending cycle of remorse: our failings and faults lead to guilt; guilt to alienation, the shattering of our friendship with God; alienation to sorrow and abject confession; confession to glorious restoration, often with extravagant promises to ourselves that now we will break the cycle, that this must never happen again; but in the end, with seeming inevitability, we prove unable to fulfill those heartfelt sacred vows and we plunge back into the morass of our faults and failings once more.
Our ability to experience intimacy with God, to practice his presence, comes to depend entirely on where we find ourselves in that cycle. When we feel morally whole, living in that spiritual sweet spot where prayer comes easily and worship is pure delight, then God draws close and we walk together joyfully. But when we fall, we fall into darkness. God seems to retreat, perhaps in disgust. Prayer turns to ash in our mouths. Guilt wraps its black tendrils around our souls. We are sucked into a cloying mire, a slow and sorrowful drowning of the spirit, until desperation drives us (or grace prompts us) to throw ourselves once more on the mercies of God. Again we come back, again with the same confession, the same failures, the same broken vows. Will he really forgive this time? Can the great rift between us be closed yet once more?
We ride this emotional and spiritual rollercoaster because of the image of God we carry in our hearts: a loving Father when we behave, but a pitiless judge when we stray. As long as we allow such an image to remain festering in our souls, we will always find it difficult to experience the intimate presence of God through Scripture—or, indeed, in any other way. If we believe that God truly has such a jaundiced view of us, we will never be able to accept that he might welcome our company. We will be unable to draw near to him, because in our hearts we are not sure he wants us to draw near; he is holding us at arm’s length, always responding to our attempts to draw closer by pushing us a little further away. Such a heart image of God is the death of intimacy in prayer.
But of this we must be certain: God is not so.
Surprised in San Diego
My own experience of this kind of turbulent relationship with God, alternating between closeness and guilt-laden separation, is direct and personal. For years I struggled to become the kind of person with whom I thought God might desire intimacy: someone devout, holy and pure. But throughout that time (and, of course, right to the present) I wrestled daily with the particular vices that disordered my soul, my thinking and my behavior. We all have such besetting faults, I believe, although in each of us the toxic mix is slightly different.
I have something of an addictive personality, so my worst vices include lust and gluttony, with an unhealthy side serving of wrath from time to time. I have always found it difficult to establish good, appropriate relationships with women. Unable to cope with my wayward desires I tend to resist intimacy of any kind, making it difficult to lay the foundations for friendship. I have learned to recognize in my impatience with others the seeds of the anger I too often allow to boil away under the surface and sometimes fail to restrain. And gluttony pulls me toward overindulgence—with more than just food.
One morning in my early twenties I fumbled around the kitchen making coffee. I was already halfway through the first cup of the day before it dawned on me that I had dosed it with a liberal helping of cheap brandy—just like every morning for some time now. Like someone waking from a bad dream, I went over to my heavy overcoat and pulled the small bottle of whiskey from the inside pocket. In a moment of awful clarity I realized where this road was leading. I wasn’t an alcoholic—not yet, at least. I knew I hadn’t tumbled over that precipice, not quite. But I was so close. Terrified, I tossed out the bottle, poured the coffee down the sink, and set out to learn the art of sobriety. Since then I’ve walked with others as they’ve battled chronic drinking problems and seen the fearsome struggle it entails. I had a lucky escape.
Paul compared himself with other sinners and found himself to be the foremost and worst in that company (1 Tim 1:15). Like many I have often found myself usurping that title in my own estimation. Every time my vices prevail, I vow never to be overcome again. Yet every time I rise up from the dust only to fall once more. The pattern is depressingly predictable. It so often seems that my so-called desire for holiness is no more substantial than the morning mist, burned away by the first heat of temptation. And though I say that I fall, the truth is that often I jump. I indulge my vices, humor them, enjoy them. I am, in my eyes, the chief of sinners.
How could God love such a person? Some time back I found myself squarely confronted by that question as I prayed with Scripture. For seven months I was engaged in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola (which we’ll explore in more depth in chap. 9). During the first few weeks of the Exercises I was encouraged to reflect on passages of Scripture which, in one way or another, speak about the love of God, the joy of embracing that love or the seriousness of refusing it.
During this time I had to travel to San Diego. One morning I found myself on a hotel room balcony, coffee in hand, enjoying the cool, restful air of dawn and reflecting on that day’s passage of Scripture. My spirit was drawn, as it had been many times over the previous few weeks, into these words of John’s first letter: “By this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God” (1 Jn 3:19-21). My heart often condemned me before God; I had been wondering what it might mean for my heart to be reassured. My thoughts circled around the passage for some time without finding any resting place.
After a while, my mind began to wander. Below my balcony an annex of the hotel jutted out abruptly, its rooftop spattered with throbbing air conditioning units. Dirty, oily water pooled in the corners of the flat roof, and a rusty ladder led down the back of the building. It was an ugly sight, in vivid contrast to the scenery beyond—gracefully arching palm trees; warm, burned-orange adobe buildings; and radiantly bright bird of paradise plants. The juxtaposition of such beauty with the stark, functional inelegance of the hotel’s backside was startling. Daydreaming, I began to imagine the people living in the houses I could see around the hotel, people who were also both beautiful and ugly, wonderful and depraved, corrupted and magnificent all at once. Everywhere I looked I could either see, or vividly picture, a world grim and glorious in equal measure. I wondered: when God looks at this world, its filth and its brilliance, what does he make of it? Could God love it, this ruined perfection?
And then I heard the voice of God, or at least a whisper of it. I should mention that for me this was extremely unusual, as I believe it would be for most people. I’ve met a very few folks in my time who seemed to have a genuine mystical gift enabling them to hear God’s voice frequently, and I’ve often wondered what that might be like. But whenever I’ve sought God’s specific guidance about some issue, I’ve had to content myself with the more normal experience of feeling God’s gentle nudging in a particular direction or a vague intuition of something God might be trying to say. And even those moments are few and far between. I do often enjoy a very strong sense of God’s presence, for which I am deeply grateful, and which makes possible a richer enjoyment of contemplative prayer. But actually hearing God’s voice? I could count on the fingers of a single hand the number of times I’m sure I’ve experienced that in over twenty years of Christian discipleship.
This was one of those moments. The voice of God came, clear and compelling. A gentle word spoken from afar and heard deep within: It is what it is, and it is wonderful.
I carefully put down my half-drunk mug of coffee; my hand was shaking. I stood for a moment, breathless, alert. I could hear that voice echoing in my soul: It is what it is, and it is wonderful. For what seemed like the first time I understood—really understood, somewhere in my heart, my bones, my guts—that God loves this world. This wild, disordered, amazing, pain-wracked, elegant, sometimes incomprehensible world is, above all else, loved by God. His heart is woven through it and wrapped around it. He loves not only what it was or what it could be, but above all what it is, right now. “God is greater than our hearts,” John had written, “and he knows everything.” And knowing everything, he still loves.
I am part of that world, a mirror of its confusion and corruption. I could see myself, beautiful as God had made me, and depraved as I had undone myself. And still those words reverberated within: It is what it is, and it is wonderful. My soul began to grasp a magnificent and awe-inspiring truth. God knows me, and yet God loves me! My vice-ridden character is unhealthy, destructive, and dangerous; neither I nor God would seek to make any excuse for that. But I had made the mistake of assuming that my moral failure defined my relationship with God, that my brokenness was the starting point (and too often the ending point) of our friendship. It is not and never will be. The realization burst in that when God looks at me, what he sees is shaped by his intense and passionate love, not by anything I may or may not have done. In my ignorance I had thought that God first and foremost wanted to deal with my sin. In reality, before all else, he wanted me.
Readings
It may be that you are struggling to experience God’s love in your own life; that, like me, your opinion of yourself is sometimes harsh, and you find it hard to believe God’s could be otherwise. Perhaps your friendship with God also rides the spiritual rollercoaster between highs of joyful union and lows of sin-induced alienation.
If so, I have a prescription for you, a medicine for the soul that I recommend with all my heart. I’d like you to begin immersing yourself in the Gospels. Specifically, I suggest you find every passage you can which describes Jesus coming into contact with people whose lives are troubled—the sick, the possessed, the morally corrupted, the sinful—and soak in those narratives. (Seven such passages are listed at the end of this chapter.)
Commit yourself to spending a good period of time dwelling in each narrative. First, before you read each passage, spend some time in prayer. Ask God to reveal himself to you in these words of Scripture. Open your heart and mind to the possibility of his presence becoming real as you read. Then go through the passage slowly, a few times, allowing the details of each scene to shape themselves in your mind. Try to picture the scene as vividly as you can; allow it to become real in your imagination. Be alert to the small details: the words each person speaks (and when they don’t speak), actions and gestures, comments offered by the Gospel writer.
Above all, pay attention to Jesus. How and when does he speak and act? How does he seem to relate to each of these broken people he encounters? How does he treat them? Does he seem to despise or welcome them? Is he judgmental or merciful? Does he seek evidence of change in them before he offers his love, or is change a result of their experiencing his love?
Day 1
Matthew 8:5-13
(a Gentile centurion)
Day 2
Matthew 9:9-13
(Matthew the tax collector and his friends)
Day 3
Mark 1:40-45
(a leper in Galilee)
Day 4
Mark 2:1-12
(a paralyzed man lowered through the roof)
Day 5
Mark 5:21-43
(a woman healed and a girl raised)
Day 6
Luke 5:1-11
(fishing with Peter and his companions)
Day 7
Luke 7:36-50
(a woman in the home of a Pharisee)