THREE STEPS FORWARD ...

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In my New Testament class recently one of my students listed some qualities of God. I wonder if the kid felt confused as he wrote his list: Loving, all-powerful, long-suffering, vengeful, angry, and forgiving. These are all straight out of the Bible, but it seems on the face of it that we're faced with a God who has serious personality issues and ought to be seeing a counselor. A psychopathologist would have a name for the condition of someone who keeps switching quickly between infinite kindness and unimaginable cruelty, 

So I started a discussion on ways of dealing with the contradictory descriptions of God found throughout he bible. I focused on a concept that I posted here almost two years ago and which I find more and more helpful as time goes on. The following is pretty much the same post as I wrote back then.

God is by nature unknowable to us humans with our limited intellects. So, the Lord has to reveal himself to us. One of the central beliefs of Jews and Christians is that God does this through Sacred Scripture, “revelation.” So it’s obviously important to get scripture right; but unfortunately, we often don’t do so! Here are a couple of basic ideas that might help us to read the bible so as to get the message that the Lord intended.

REVELATION POINTS IN ONLY ONE FINAL DIRECTION

First, although the bible is a collection of 72 different books with various authors, written over a period of a thousand years, it needs to be read as a unity: From the first verse of Genesis to the final verse of the Book of Revelation, The bible is always heading in one single direction, toward love, inclusivity and unity.

But, and here’s the second point, the bible is written by human beings and is rooted in time and space, bounded by the writer’s specific culture. One scholar said that the bible is “a document in travail.”  We shouldn’t think of it as a book that is finished, and  that we can just read it the way we read a cookbook or a newspaper. This is important: like any human endeavor, biblical revelation doesn’t proceed in a nice, smooth straight line It has a definite  direction, a goal, of course,leading toward the final fulfillment of God’s love, a New Heavens and a New Earth. But it proceeds toward that goal in typical human fashion by taking three steps forward and two steps back.

We can easily recognize the “three steps forward passages:” E.g. When God delivers his people through the Red Sea, or brings them into the promised land and they enjoy the first crops in the new country -- this is God being faithful. We see three steps forward toward the goal. When the Word becomes flesh in Bethlehem, or when Jesus gives himself up out of love, to take conquers death itself to save us. Clearly these are events that bring us three steps forward.

AN UNDERSTANDABLE GOD?

But what about the two steps back? The steps that lead in the opposite direction from the goal of love and unity? They’re easy to spot, too: They’re the ones in which God acts like a human! The God of vengeance, who keeps score so he can get back at people. The God of justice, who watches our every move and keeps score sop that at the end of our fife He can exact just punishment for every misstep. be done. We can relate to this God: he act a lot like us!

Recently I read about the rioting in South Africa between rival tribes after apartheid was ended.

Imagine a person inside -- It's hell.

Both sides practiced this horrible form of execution called “necklacing,” in which people would hold somebody down and slip a tire over his torso, pinning his arms at his sides, and then set the tire on fire. When I read that I said to myself, “Oh yeah! I recognize that from the Bible! That’s what God does to sinners! That's hell!" Although the passages in the bible that talk about this kind of a God are clearly in the “two steps back” column, some of us good Christians are very reluctant to let go of this very understandable God. We want God to mete out strict justice to everyone: “You break, you pay!”

Some of us get nervous with the "three-steps-forward" God like the Father we meet in the parable of the Prodigal Son. We say to ourselves,  “I know what I would have done if I were that father.” But Jesus came to tell us “Well, you are not that Father, his ways are far above your ways. His love overpowers every other consideration.”  All a sinner needs to do is turn around (repent) and show up at the father's doorstep. No necklacing, no getting out the account ledger to add up your sins.

LETTING GO OF OUR "UNDERSTANDABLE" GOD

Three steps forward

And when someone objects, “Hey, necklacing is in the bible, and so is the fact that white people are superior to the sons of Ham, and that we should destroy people who don’t believe in our God!” Jesus gently urges that person to let go of the easily-understandable two-steps-back pages of the bible, and embrace the more difficult mysterious passages, the ones that reveal to us a God who is so loving, so beautiful that He's incomprehensible to us,

Let's all pray for one another, that the "three-steps-forward" passages in the bible may lead all of us together toward the final goal of infinite, everlasting all-inclusive Love, the Kingdom of God, where we hope to live together with Him as one loving family forever and ever.


PILGRIM ROAD: THE LENTEN JOURNEY

Wednesday, Feb. 26, is Ash Wednesday. I would like to invite you to join the spiritual pilgrim group that walks the road to Easter together each year by reading the daily reflection for the day in my book Pilgrim Road: A Benedictine Journey Through Lent. I guarantee that you won't be walking with a grumpy, angry God, but rather one who invites and comforts, strengthens and consoles all of us on our journey. So, get yourself a copy of the book and join the crowd!