"Judge Not"

Chapter 2 of Death on a Friday Afternoon is “Judge Not,” on the words “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” I love a couple of the remarks Neuhaus makes in the second paragraph: the thief on the cross “stole at the end a reward he did not deserve,” and then, considering the judgment image of the sheep and goats, “The good thief is a found sheep. More accurately, he is a goat who was made an honorary sheep just before his time ran out.” Neuhaus often makes me laugh with such witty gems.

Neuhaus discusses the thief’s mustard seed faith, hardly able to crack the earth as he first knows and expressed it even as he is dying beside his Lord, and says, “Christ’s response to our faith is ever so much greater than our faith. Give Him an opening, almost any opening, and He opens life to wonder beyond measure.” How true this proves every day. No matter how I feel, how harried I am, whether depression has emerged from the depths to take over mind and heart yet again, the least overture to Him, made in the weakest possible faith (“I believe, help Thou my unbelief!” or, perhaps, “to whom else should I turn? You alone have the words of life . . .”) – He answers, answers with abundant blessing if I will open my eyes to see. So often I think to be blessed means for things to go well – my mother-in-law’s cancer would have been cured, my daddy will know me again, the computer will work as I want it to and not keep wasting my time . . . But so often He showers me with a very different kind of blessing – showing me how to die well, demonstrating loving service before me, teaching me to be patient . . . perhaps accompanied by a lovely moonrise or an encouraging poem or a word of hope from a dear friend . . . Oh, He blesses every day the feeblest movement of faith.

I’m sure I posted this thought last time I read the book, but I love its wonderful truth: “The farther [Christian thinkers and mystics] travel on the roads of thought and contemplation, the more they know that they do not know. The most rigorous thought and the most exalted spiritual experience brings us, again and again, to exclaim with St. Paul, ‘O the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways!’ Therefore it is rightly said that all theology is finally doxology. That is to say, all analysis and explanation finally dissolves into wonder and praise.” I want to be one who praises Him because I do not know but the smallest thing about Him.

Neuhaus says, “The entire discussion of judgment and grace in the Letter to the Romans is to drive home how total is our dependence upon God’s grace in Christ.” This is a truth that, thank Him, is almost forced on me every day: between depression, fibromyalgia, arthritis, exhaustion, my need for His grace is held before me. This is not to say that I don’t often forget it, still; I am not that mature. I would rather find some solution to my difficulties, complain about them to receive the attention of others, use them as excuses to fail. Rather, it is only to say that I have reminders before me if I choose to see them, and He uses them to teach this slow-to-learn heart, gradually, to think of Him first, instead of only after exhausting all other futile attempts to find relief. And He does not give relief from the difficulties themselves, not often, but meets me in them with the strength – His strength – to do His work.

A last thought for this post: “We are saved [. . .] on behalf of all, to be reconcilers, intercessors, and mediators for all.” We are not saved to be separated from the world, to be against the world, Neuhaus says. We are saved to be about Christ’s business of reconciliation, loving and praying for all to know Him. It is so easy to get caught up in the busy-ness of our days, to be disgusted by the ever-increasing depths of sin surrounding us, to insulate ourselves safely within our holy country clubs . . . but we must see the world as He sees it: God “desires all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” And how shall they see unless we go where they are, hear unless we speak what we know?

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us – and let us be willing conveyors of that mercy to the world around us.

"Terribly Good"

Standing outside the car this morning at home, I looked up at black clouds churning against a charcoal grey background. "Beautiful!" I exclaimed. "Threatening," another voice murmured in my ear, as I thought of lightning strikes and tornado warnings. A few minutes later, as I stepped out of the car on campus, the chill wind whipped tree branches and my fresh-washed hair. "Invigorating!" I cried. "Destructive," that other voice whispered, as I trod on pear blossoms and broken twigs littering the ground.

A "terrible beauty," Yeats called the martrydom of the Irish rebels. A "terrible gift," Byron called melancholia. The world is "terribly good," says Stanhope in Charles Williams' novel Descent into Hell.

Life is made of paradox and mystery. I want to accept it -- no, more than accept -- embrace it, run toward it, or at least not run from it and let it embrace me, as Pauline finally allows her most terrible fear to overtake her, only to find it is precisely what makes her most fully herself, most wonderfully able to serve others, most joyfully confident in a Power greater than any she could conjure or imagine, and which she now understands is indeed "terribly good."

Devotion

For a few days, I stopped reading Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest). Now I am trying to catch up, and being rebuked and encouraged at too rapid a rate. I need to discipline myself to read every day; he helps me to understand the Word and the Lord in a way that I need just now.

The June 18th and 19th entries struck me this morning. On the 18th, Chambers describes Peter walking on the water, and beginning to sink when he looks at his surroundings instead of his Lord. He writes, “If you are recognizing your Lord, you have no business with where He engineers your circumstances. The actual things are, but immediately you look at them you are overwhelmed, you cannot recognize Jesus [. . .]. Let actual circumstances be what they may, keep recognizing Jesus, maintain complete reliance on Him.”

On the 19th, he writes, “Jesus did not say – Make converts to your way of thinking, but look after My sheep, see that they get nourished in the knowledge of Me. We count as service what we do in the way of Christian work; Jesus Christ calls service what we are to Him, not what we do for Him. Discipleship is based on devotion to Jesus Christ, not on adherence to a belief or a creed. [. . .] There is no argument and no compulsion, but simply – If you would be My disciple, you must be devoted to Me. A man touched by the Spirit of God suddenly says – ‘Now I see Who Jesus is,’ and that is the source of devotion.” (emphasis added)

This is a constant tension in the Christian walk, it seems. Clearly, we need to know what Jesus taught if we are to live it, so Chambers cannot be speaking against knowledge of the Word here. He teaches from the Word himself, after all. But there are those of us who put knowledge above devotion. We are so concerned to be “right” about every jot and tittle of our intellectual beliefs that we forget the One who inspired us to hold those beliefs in the first place. Chambers, I think, is reminding us to look to Him, be devoted to Him, and the rest will fall into place. When I read the Word with devotion to Him in mind, He will reveal to me what I need to understand. I may not be ready or able to understand some things that others do; that’s all right. I may have a different understanding of some things; that’s all right, too.

It will all sort out in the end, after all. Faith is a mystery. None of us has it all down pat; none of us knows all the truth about this mystery – else it would not be a mystery.

Some disagreements about knowledge are very important: when someone says that God does not abhor homosexuality or adultery or divorce, for example, it is important to know that such assertions are wrong and to speak out about clear Scriptural truth. But so many of our disagreements are so much less important, and much of what appears clear to me may not appear nearly so clear to others who love the Lord as much as and more than I do. In these disagreements, I must learn to be humble enough to realize that it is possible (however remotely!) that I am the one in the wrong, and even if I am fully convinced that I am right, to allow that those who disagree may love Him just as much.

(And about the vitally important issues, it is also important to distinguish between someone who is teaching clear untruth and needs rebuke and someone who is seeking truth and needs loving instruction to understand it. Love, based on our devotion to Jesus, makes these distinctions and responds appropriately.)

Chambers speaks against our living for causes instead of for Christ, as Lewis does in Screwtape Letters. It is so much easier to live for a cause. If I put all my energy into what Chambers calls “the cause of humanity,” I avoid the ambiguity of love. I avoid the potential for being hurt, the difficulty of accepting those who are different, the humility of serving fallen people without reference to some list of attributes and beliefs which define their acceptability.

May I learn genuine, deep devotion to the One who gave up all for me. He did not demand of me perfection nor have a checklist in hand, He simply gave me Himself. I would learn to do the same, to remember and live in the awe of that day He first revealed Himself to me, and I said, "Now I see Who Jesus is!"

Eyes of Eve

My four-year-old granddaughter stands on the porch, eagerly awaiting my son-in-law and my husband as they return from the store. But the resemblance is so striking, I find myself suspended for a moment in time. Surely it is my daughter bouncing at the edge of the steps, awaiting my husband and my father . . . am I mother or grandmother to the child on the porch?

E.B. White, writing of such a suspension in “Once More to the Lake,” sees it as an intimation of his mortality. For me, it is a confirmation of immortality, of the continuity of life, generation following generation through the centuries . . . Later, we sit at the table counting cupcakes, and as I look into those deep brown eyes – inherited not only from her mother but from her other grandmother and both her great-grandmothers – I realize I am looking into the eyes of Eve, the mother of us all.