Readings
4
The Yearning of God
It might be well to pause at this point. For me, that spiritual experience in San Diego was powerful and enduring. It reshaped my soul at the deepest level and continues to affect my life and prayer right into the present. Hardly a day passes, even now, without my reflecting on that moment. But even our strongest and most significant spiritual experiences—including those which are rooted in our meditation on Scripture—must constantly be held up to the light of the biblical texts. Of every experience we must be ready to ask: Is this consistent with the experience of God witnessed in Scripture? Is it in harmony with the understanding of life before God which the Bible describes? Are there any jarring discrepancies between my experience and biblical teaching?
The answers, in this case, are not immediately obvious. After all, doesn’t the Bible seem to paint two rather conflicting portraits of the character of God? First, there is the God of law, judgment and wrath: the God who thunders from the fire on Sinai, who writes immutable law into tablets of stone, who strikes down sinners with earthquakes or plague, and who is ready to send an entire nation into bitter exile as a punishment for their infidelity. Second, we have the God of love: the God who forgives, who is merciful, kind and gentle, who is willing to endure the suffering of the cross for the sake of his people. And if we reconcile these two images, don’t we end up with the picture of God described earlier—alternately welcoming us in his mercy and condemning us in his anger, torn between the impulse to love and the fiery drive to maintain purity and holiness?
We’ll look again in chapter ten at the way we can approach the Old Testament as a book of grace and love. For now, let’s fix our attention on Jesus, in whom we can most clearly see the character of God made manifest.
Holding the Broken Ones
Never once, in any of the four Gospels, do we find Jesus holding broken, contaminated and soiled people at arm’s length. Quite the opposite: he embraced them. He was known as the “friend of . . . sinners” (Lk 7:34). He often overwhelmed people’s reticence and fear with the sheer intensity of his desire for friendship and intimacy. The Gospels are replete with stories of people drawn into Christ’s presence despite themselves, despite their failings and inadequacies, their foolishness or moral bankruptcy. Take, for example, the story of Zacchaeus.
Zacchaeus was a senior tax collector in Jericho, almost certainly despised by the local community as a treacherous collaborator with the occupying Roman forces. By his own admission in the Gospel narrative, he collected not only the required taxes but also a healthy “bonus” of his own on top. He cheated, defrauded and grew rich on the backs of others. When Jesus came through Jericho, the Gospel tells us (Lk 19:1-10), Zacchaeus found his curiosity piqued: he wanted to see this famous rabbi for himself. But, Luke says, “on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him.” We might justifiably wonder whether the tree also provided a convenient hiding place, a leafy blind from which he could spy out Jesus without being seen himself.
Jesus was not fooled. As he passed under the tree he looked up, catching Zacchaeus’s troubled gaze. And then Jesus said something quite remarkable: “Zacchaeus, hurry up and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” The Greek text of the Gospel is very strong here; the words “I must stay” are forceful, as though Jesus were under some kind of irresistible compulsion. What was that driving impulse? An instinct that this would be a significant moment for Zacchaeus? A command from his heavenly Father? A need to make some important theological point? Any of these are possible. But I believe the compulsion was something rather deeper. Jesus was impelled by his yearning for Zacchaeus. Like the persistent father scanning the horizon for any sign of the prodigal son, Jesus looked into the branches of that tree and saw one for whom his heart longed. The Song of Songs expresses the moment well: “I found him whom my soul loves. I held him, and would not let him go” (Song 3:4).
Why does that seem the most likely explanation of Jesus’ words? Because of the way the rest of the story unfolds. Consider for a moment: what is it that brings about Zacchaeus’s dramatic conversion? What enlightening spiritual teaching does Jesus give? What moral challenge? What call to renewal of life? What is the crucial word which Jesus speaks?
Jesus says nothing. Nothing, that is, beyond the words he has already spoken: “I must stay at your house today.” He walks home with Zacchaeus. They dine together. We have no record of their conversation. They may have discussed the significance of prophecy in salvation history or compared theories of the atonement. Or they may have argued agreeably about sports, lamented the recent poor weather or swapped jokes. It hardly seems to matter. We need to understand this: Zacchaeus did not stand up and announce the transformation of his life because of some striking point Jesus made during the dinner conversation. Luke would scarcely have missed the chance to record one of Jesus’ great sayings. No, Zacchaeus was turned inside out simply by being in the presence of Jesus. He discovered that his brokenness and depravity were no barrier to the love of God. If Jesus had told him, “Zacchaeus, only amend your life and God will take such joy in you!”—well, such a message Zacchaeus might have believed easily, even as it drove him to despair. But Jesus told him something quite different, and not in words but in action. Zacchaeus, God delights in you. God yearns for you and longs to be with you. Right now, messed up as you are, God is impelled by love to draw near. Zacchaeus, I must stay with you today.
As John is so keen to remind us, “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). The image of God we see in Jesus is consistent with the picture presented throughout Scripture. And it is possible to encounter this marvelous, loving God in Scripture. We are capable of drawing near to God, of experiencing God in our lives. Scripture itself assures us that God wants us to draw near, longs for our companionship and friendship. God yearns for us.
Behold the Man
I cradled a cup of hot coffee in my hands as my friend wept over Scripture. Sitting in the back room of a church during a break in a conference, I was listening to Juanita Rasmus talk about the Gerasene demoniac while traffic hummed on the freeway beyond the window. Juanita and her husband, Rudy, pastor St. John’s Downtown, a Methodist church in Houston which includes significant numbers of homeless people, alongside others who for one reason or another have found themselves right out on the edges of the community: folks with AIDS, with mental health issues, with addictions—the list seems endless. Just lately this Gospel story had been playing through her head with a peculiar resonance.
She crossed the room, pulled a Bible from a scuffed bookshelf and found the passage:
Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. As Jesus stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me”—for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven out by the demon into the wilds.)
Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” He said, “Legion”; for many demons had entered him. They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.
Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. (Lk 8:26-35)
“These are the people who come to our church,” Juanita said quietly, tears running down her cheeks. “Driven from one place to another, unwelcome everywhere, ragged and weighed down in chains. They’re just a problem to everyone else. Somewhere along the line they just stop being human beings and start being a nuisance, a problem to be solved, a complication to be dealt with. They’re tormented wherever they go.” She looked up at me, her eyes filled with sorrow. “How many times had this man been crushed?” she whispered. “Even when Jesus arrives, all he can imagine is that he’s about to get hurt again.”
I picked up the Bible and looked again at the familiar words, reading them as though for the first time. I could see the man, fallen to his knees, pulling his filthy rags tight around his body for security. I saw the look of desperation in his eyes. What do you want with me, Jesus? he sobbed. Are you here to torture me—just like everyone else? I thought back to the year I had spent working in a church of the homeless in southern England, remembering the addicts, drunks, prostitutes and broken souls who had stumbled into our doors. Their haunted faces were still vivid in my memory; the feral caution they had shown when they first arrived, a suspicion born on the hard streets.
In all the times I had read this passage I had never felt the man’s pain so immediately and sharply.
Juanita was still talking quietly, her hand resting gently on the page. “And look what he does,” she said, pointing to the line where Jesus asks, What is your name?
For a few years I had helped coordinate meetings of my denomination’s Deliverance Ministry Team, a group of clergy who in a former generation would have been known as exorcists. Now I realized, as I looked at the words under Juanita’s fingers, that I had probably spent a little too long among them. I’d read the books and heard the talks; I’d been told that this story illustrates the way Jesus was careful to identify the precise nature of a spiritual affliction before taking action. Naming the demons gives you power over them—whether the “demons” are rapacious spiritual beings or simply metaphors for deep psychological issues.
But now I was reading afresh, and I saw that Jesus wasn’t speaking to these evil spirits. He wasn’t interested in the demons. Luke is very clear: Jesus spoke to the man. This man, who had been tortured and tormented by all around him, expelled from the community, left wrapped in his own darkness among the tombs—
Jesus wanted to know who he was. When the demons spoke for him, Jesus simply pushed them aside. Jesus was looking intently into this man’s heart and soul, perhaps the first person ever to do so, and he was asking, Who are you?
I was no longer reading. Now I had tears in my eyes too, and I was praying. “Oh Jesus—to be loved so utterly and sought so keenly! This man was corrupted and soiled, damaged beyond repair, battered and broken. His demons had so overrun him there no longer seemed to be anything of the person left. But where
everyone else saw the problem, you saw the man. My Lord! Would that I might see myself as you see me; would that I might see those around me as you see them.”
Encountering Love in Scripture
Understanding that God loves us immeasurably, that he delights in us right now, as conflicted and corrupted as we are—understanding and experiencing this love is essential if we want to learn to encounter God in our reading of Scripture. It is possible, of course, to come to the Bible without this knowledge and experience. But that leads to a very different engagement with the text, an engagement that may be more damaging than helpful to our spiritual life.
We may come to the Bible convinced that God cannot love us. We are so burdened by a sense of guilt and shame that we feel completely alienated from God, certain that he casts his glowering eyes over us like a furious divine judge. Scripture then becomes a text that condemns us—and, all too often, a text that condemns others around us too. We find ourselves in a world of punishments and pain, a place where the threat of darkness and the gnashing of teeth is ever present. God takes joy in pouring out bowls of wrath, inflicting plagues and tightening a noose of arbitrary laws around the necks of willful sinners. The sweeping history of the Bible demonstrates a single, inevitable truth: everybody falls. At some point everyone stumbles, and God is waiting in the wings, more than ready to pounce. Scripture is a warning writ large: God is dangerous.
Of course, to sustain such a reading of the Bible we are going to need to be very selective: carefully highlighting certain passages, skating over others and putting a vicious spin on the whole. For the simple fact is that the whole tenor of Scripture stands squarely against any such understanding of God’s character. The fiery preacher stands aloft in his pulpit, pounding his well-worn black leather Bible as he dooms humanity, spitting his chapters and verses on a world of cowering sinners. He can quote more of the Bible than I have forgotten; his underlinings are abundant, and his marginal notes plentiful, for he has explored Scripture thoroughly in his search for judgment. But he hasn’t been paying attention. From the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation, the Bible jubilantly proclaims grace to this world, an exuberant, life-embracing grace that exceeds anything we could possibly hope or imagine. When we read this book of grace as a prescription of condemnation we have, quite literally, lost the plot. God delights in us. And nothing we do makes him delight in us any less than he does right now.
Alternatively, we may come to the Bible convinced that God is indeed ready to love us. All we need is to straighten out our lives enough that we might be pleasurable and acceptable to God, and he will be glad to embrace us. Scripture then becomes a text that corrects us. The Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles talk about reading “for example of life and instruction of manners.” And indeed we can find the Bible to be a rich resource of commandments, principles, decrees, precepts, statutes and directives. We can read the swathe of historical narratives as successive acts in a great morality play, each tale with its own pointed ethical lesson for us to absorb. As the text increasingly brings our lives into conformity with God’s immutable laws, so we become increasingly acceptable to him, increasingly loved.
The only problem with this approach to Scripture is that it constantly throws us back on our own meager and insufficient spiritual resources to transform ourselves. As long as we hold to the idea that if only I were different I would experience the presence of God more deeply, we find we are cornered into reshaping ourselves before God can even begin to draw near. This is the very dilemma Paul explored—and rejected—in his letter to the Romans. “I delight in the law of God in my inmost self,” he wrote, “but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. . . . So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin” (Rom 7:22-25). But Paul also rejoices in the good news of the gospel: God draws near while we are yet sinners. God already delights in us. Nothing we can do will make God delight in us any more than he does right now.
When we truly understand and experience God’s delight in us, his extraordinary love for us, we find Scripture becomes a text that captivates us. From beginning to end it speaks to us of the deep yearning of God. We find it to be a book of love. It inspires in us a longing to be in the presence of God; it opens us to the transforming grace that heals our sin and makes us more able to experience the presence of God; it reveals the longing of God for us; it becomes holy ground on which we meet with God and consummate our love for him. It is wonderful, mysterious and beautiful—just like its wonderful, mysterious and beautiful Inspirer.
We even begin to read those dry commandments and regulations in a different light. Benedict of Nursia, the sixth-century monastic founder, expresses well the way that even law can be an expression of love. His monastic rule is filled with directives, precepts, instructions and even recommended punishments for transgressions. But the opening lines of the rule (which we’ll have cause to consider again more carefully in chapter eight) set the context for all that follows. Benedict writes: “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice.” We might easily imagine those same words prefacing the precepts of Exodus or the prescriptions of Leviticus.
The Jews have always understood this well, perhaps better than Christians. We are apt to describe the first five Hebrew books of Scripture as the “Law,” a set of burdensome restrictions God imposed on the Israelites, who responded by trying to earn God’s favor and merit their way into glory. It’s almost as though the Old Testament was God’s abortive first attempt at salvation: for centuries it was all about works, until God had a better idea on the first page of Matthew and started toying with grace instead.
But Jews speak of these same books as the Torah: the teaching, wisdom and instruction needed to live well. They see the words of the Sinai covenant not as a dragging weight but as a gift, not the imposition of unwelcome regulations but the grace of clear guidance for shaping a life of abundance and well-being. Christians talk about the “Ten Commandments,” but Jews about the “Ten Words”; in Jewish tradition the first of these “Words” is not even a commandment at all but a statement about the grace-filled foundation of God’s covenant with his people: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex 20:2). This act of liberation was pure gift, pure grace. God called his people, God redeemed them, God set them free, God preserved them at the Red Sea, God sustained them in the wilderness—without any “Law.” Grace, as always, came first. This is the nature of God.
Readings
Live with these passages over the coming days. Review them often, asking God to help you see them afresh. Be focused and persistent. Stay with them until you find yourself immersed in them, until every detail becomes familiar. Memorize one or two if you are able. Turn back to them in your thoughts throughout the day—when you drive or wash dishes or walk the dog or lie in bed at night—always asking God to reveal himself through them.
As you reflect, allow the passages to become autobiographical. This is also your story. You too come to Christ as these people did. Unhealthy. Disordered. Confused. Fallen. Broken. Misused. And Christ treats you as he treated them. His words are addressed also to you. His voice is in your ears, and his touch touches you. Experience this Scripture as deeply as you can. Bathe in it. Drown in it, if you can.
I have no idea how you will experience God reading these Scriptures in this way. There is no method or system for encountering God, and no predictable result. This is not a mechanical procedure, the turning of wheels and dials to crank out predetermined answers. You may be surprised or shocked or find your world turned upside down. Pain may well up from deep within, or joy. You may be broken down or built up. It is not always easy.
But have courage. Of this one thing I am absolutely certain: if you seek God’s love in Scripture, you will find it.
Day 1
Luke 8:26-39
(a possessed man thrown out of his home)
Day 2
Luke
23:32-43
(those surrounding Jesus at his crucifixion)
Day 3
John 4:1-29
(a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well)
Day 4
John 5:1-9
(an invalid lying by the pool of Siloam)
Day 5
John 8:1-11
(a woman caught in the act of adultery)
Day 6
John 9:1-11
(a man born blind)
Day 7
John 21:1-17
(Peter after his denial of Jesus)