“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”
So said the Apostle Paul a long, long time ago to a small band of Christians in Rome. Granted, Paul didn’t think of himself as speaking to Christians any more than did those to whom Paul was speaking think of themselves as being Christians. Paul and his audience were both Jewish. (Paul called them “saints, God’s beloved”.) They thought like Jews, they practiced their religion like Jews, they ate like Jews. Like their ancestors of old who looked for the Almighty and found the Almighty in some of the most eye-splitting places, they were Jews through and through. That this last quality of being Jewish would cause some many centuries later to call them not Jews, but Christians, would perhaps have sparked within them as much surprise as distress. But so it went that this small band of Jews in Rome who had heard of God once appearing to their great-great uncle Moses in a burning bush and to their long-lost cousin Elijah in a whisper of silence, one day saw something else they’d never truly seen before: a man.
What made this man so different was not his miracles–feeding 4,000 people on a couple fish and a few loaves of bread; calming stormy seas; or his views on power–that money can be corrupting and poverty crippling beyond self-repair. Moses had split the Nile River and Amos ranted against social injustice. Rather, what made this man so different was his mercy…
He forgave women that others would have stoned.
He leveled evil by inviting its perpetrators to see both the consequence of their ways AND the possibility for change, in him!
He prayed first, which is to say, he insisted on letting others talk first. He listened to understand, and then he spoke, and this was his compassion.
Yes, on occasion he was known to flip tables mercilessly, but he did it only to those who should have known better than to sit down and lick their plate in the presence of a starved beggar.
And what the small band of Jews saw in this man was something of God, the divine spark igniting a bush again.
True, it would not have been unusual to hear a Jew say that God had met them in a way never seen before. To say that God Almighty had descended to earth in flesh and bone even was not entirely new. The Greeks and Romans had been setting their caesars up in palaces, trotting them around in chariots, giving them dominion over the sky and sea, and calling them God for years. What made the elevation of the mercy-man Jesus to divine status so different, however, was that it depended entirely upon the testimony of rather shaky witnesses to say over and over again, it’s true, we believe this about him.
Where the Greeks and Romans upheld their gods and caesars with proclamations and doctrines, giving them the necessary and unchanging justification to do most anything and to never be questioned (at least not to their face) about it—so if Poseidon chose to churn up the seas and cause a massive typhoon to wipe out an entire village, as terrible as this may be, Poseidon must have his reasons for doing so and those reasons must be good—Jesus never laid claim to being anything close to a god, or even to good. As far as we know he didn’t write anything down that couldn’t be erased and the few proclamations he did make tended to make those who once called him God to rethink their position.
Consider the rich man who once called Jesus, Good Teacher, and asked him what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus threw off the title, saying, “God alone is good,” and as for eternal life, start with the commandments: Don’t murder, don’t steal, honor your mother and father. At the heart of Judaism is a concern for law, for a system that works to nurture justice and to protect the innocent. That the rich man responds to Jesus by telling him, “I’ve done all of that,” makes clear that he is well on his way to eternal life. But then this: “You lack one thing: go, sell whatever you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come follow me.” It’s our reminder from Jesus that social responsibility without compassion will get us no where except further away from eternal life. We can live our lives following all the rules. We can never join a march, never disrupt the public square, never steal from our neighbor or even want what they have. We can sit in a pew every week, drop some money in the poor box, keep to ourselves and never pass a judgment. We can do all of this and still be miles away from the goodness of God, because while all things do work together for good for those who love God, the operative word is not “good.” It’s “love,” which is nothing short of a revolution.
It seems to me that we who call ourselves Christians have come to hear these words differently today. We hear that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose, and we forget that if we are to love God, we must first work together. That the purpose of God is to love and to work together. But instead we stake our claim on working only with those who share our purpose, who love like we do, and most notably, who love us like we want them to. So “liberals” tell “conservatives” who in turn tell gays and lesbians who in turn tell gun owners who in turn tell pacifists that all things will not work together for good for you because you are not living according to the purpose of God. We hone in only on the parts that make us feel good about being us, forgetting that there is no goodness, or even any hope of goodness for us, if we don’t give up some of our goodness to love. Perhaps we need reminding that these words—“all things work together for good”—these words were not spoken so much to Christians, or for the sake of Christians, as to those who, on account of their generous orthodoxy and unassuming ways, would come to be called Christians.
Not too long ago I was sharing with a group of children the story of how Jesus once fed those 4,000 people with just a couple fish and a few loaves of bread and how after everyone was done eating there were 12 baskets of leftovers. One little girl asked if the story was really true. (I thought this was a very brave thing for her to do.)
Another child, equally brave, said, “I don’t think so.”
I asked them then, “Do you not think Jesus could feed that many people?”
“Yes, I think he can,” the two said together.
“But I don’t think he did it on his own.”
Overcome with curiosity, I had to know. “How do you think he did it then?”
“I think the people just kept passing the food around, taking really small bites to make sure everyone got something.”
“In the story, though, it says that everyone was filled and that there were leftovers. How could everyone be stuffed if they only had a little bit?”
“I don’t know how the leftovers got there,” said yet another child, “but I think everyone was filled because it feels really good to share.”
If Paul had been asking a question when he said, “all things work together for good for those who love God?” the answer must have been “yes.” In fact we know it was, and is. That somehow, in a world like ours, someone had the guts to say, “all things work together for good, now go out and make it so,” is indeed a call to love and revolution.
But would our vision fit the call. In the wake of this past week’s shootings at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston I have heard a lot of questions.
Is this a time for politics or healing?
Is this the appropriate time and occasion to raise the platform again to talk about gun control?
Was this a hate crime or a crime against Christians (I understand the difference, but seriously, wouldn’t we do better just to tell ourselves that all crime is hatred?)
None of this surprises me. We’ve heard these same haunting questions before. The same people ranting so singularly about their position. For my part, I just don’t think they are the right questions for today. Maybe we can ask them tomorrow, but as long as we insist upon asking them today, we wait for the next gun to go off. These questions will not lead us to the more urgent answers—the right answers—we need today. Some ask, is this a time for poltiics or healing? But what about, can our politics be a force for healing? And what about our religions and our families? Can they be of that same force? Can we start a revolution with just a few loaves of bread and a couple fish? We already know the answer: all things work together for good for those who love God. Are we humble enough and gutsy enough to prove it?
PleaseGrace 