Several days ago I wrote a post on ignorance in Eden. You can read it here. I recommend it, if only for the sake of your understanding where I'm going with the following paragraphs. It's short.
This is how the post ends:
"The leaves of the Tree of Life, from which we were once banished, are now for the healing of the nations. The first exile was from Eden, from that place of no dichotomy [between good and evil], to a place of dichotomy. If 'place' is confusing, think of it as a state of being. We are exiled out of the intended state of being -- that of no moral distinction between any word or deed -- and into a place running rampant with gross manifestations of evil, full of dichotomies.
One who walks in the power and knowledge of Jesus the Messiah is brought out of that exile. There's a new Exodus, and it's happening right now. I suggest you get your staff and satchel and join us, we're learning to bear the light of love and justice on this strange and dangerous planet."
This place of no moral distinction, now and still to come, is the gift of all Christians. Let me explain...
In 1 Corinthians 6:12 Paul writes, "'All things are lawful for me,' but not all things are helpful. ‘All things are lawful for me,' but I will not be dominated by anything." He's referring to food and sex in a letter written to the people of Corinth (a largely Greek population).
"All things are lawful for me" has been set in quotation marks by later editors to draw attention to the fact that this was a common idiom in Corinth. In the Greek text the phrase looks like this: πάντα ἒξεστιν (panta eksestin), which, when read within the flow of the text by a trained eye, is clearly idiomatic (local lingo). This must have been astonishing to the early listeners, especially those of Jewish stock. He's putting a Jesus spin on a pleasure-driven cultural norm.
I'd imagine Paul took a great deal of slander. "No, Paul, not everything is permissible, how could you possibly just throw out the entire Levitical law code? What are people going to do if you tell them that they can do anything? Look what this mindset has done to those hedonistic heathens, those pagan Greeks!"
Later in the same letter, in 10:23-24, Paul writes, "'All things are lawful,' but not all things are helpful. 'All things are lawful,' but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor." In case once wasn't enough, he says it again. Here he's referring strictly to food, especially offered to idols. He tells his listeners that they can eat anything, but he also tells them that their actions--now that their bodies belong to the Messiah--are, first and foremost, meant for the benefit of others.
So, all things are allowable but not all things are helpful. A few verses later in 1 Corinthians 10, Paul tells the believer to eat whatever is set on the table, "But if someone says to you, 'This has been offered in sacrifice,' then do not eat it."
And we, as American Christians, generally stop here and start to make rules about what to avoid, for the sake of our own holiness.
But Paul doesn't. He says not to eat it "for the sake of the one who informed you, and for the sake of conscience—I do not mean your conscience, but his. For why should my liberty be determined by someone else's conscience?"
Taking the place of rules and regulations (and dichotomies) is the concern for the well-being of others. This is an application of the heart of Jesus' command, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
It really isn't about your moral goodness. Rather, it's about loving God (eternal life is knowing God--John 17) and being a benefit to other people, regardless of whether or not they are a benefit to you.
Here's the thing: Being a Christian isn't about finding out what's good and what's bad in order to do the good and avoid the bad. It's about much, much more than that. It's about finding out what it means to walk in the cool of the day with the Lord, showing his characteristics to the world in love and grace and justice and mercy. And, curiously, at the end of his or her life the Christian will actually end up being the most moral person around, not because of any striving to be moral or avoiding “bad people,” but because of striving to know and commune with the Lord. Out of that communion comes the divine power to love and forgive and honor and heal. David deSilva, a prominent New Testament scholar and historian, says this in a discussion concerning the letter to the Ephesians:
"The Church ... is the place where God's determination to reconcile and unify heavenly realities with earthy realities makes itself effective (Eph 1:10) as believers on earth are also brought into the heavenly sphere by their incorporation into Christ (e.g., Eph 2:6) ... The 'praise of God's glorious grace' and the 'praise of his glory' emerge as the natural consequences of God's mighty acts on behalf of humanity."
And just a few sentences later:
"Just as Christ provides believers with a point of entry into heaven, so the believers provide God, as it were, with an ongoing point of entry into creation, making God's generosity and will for humanity known as they live out the consummation of God's mystery" (Introduction to the New Testament; 726).
So what does all this mean for me and you in the everyday humdrum of our busy lives? I would love to go the route of the status quo and tell you that it means being more serious about your life and taking time for what really matters. But, let’s be honest, we've all heard that a zillion times. At least a zillion.
So what does it mean to walk with the Lord in the cool of the day? (I'm not sure why I keep repeating that phrase, it just sounds really nice to me. If you would rather walk with the Lord in the heat of the day, or the cool of the evening, or whatever, then imagine that instead.)
We’re free to stop focusing on the bad. Instead, as the Christian matures, we learn to let it be, to contemplate the unending love we’ve been shown, to invite the spirit of the living God to move our hearts to loving action. Anything else is empty selfishness.
Because of Emmanuel. God with us.
Because Jesus loved us and died for us and rose again for us, we can love just like Jesus.
Here's what happened. We, through our own fault (read the comments here), turned away from God in selfishness. We wanted to be like God. We thought it would be really fun to know all about evil. So do most 12 year-olds today. Evil sounds like fun, until after the act when that feeling of creeping death drips over your soul. We've all felt it.
After we lie or cheat or sleep around. But if we do enough evil that creeping death just becomes normal. We shrug it off and laugh, and our eyes get dark and we make strange, loveless choices with what to do with our lives, now and later. Often we settle into shaky relationships because we don't think we're worth somebody amazing, or, at best, we convince ourselves that we're actually good and then proceed to hurt nearly everyone we’ve known for more than a few days, especially when it comes to romantic relationships.
Because of evil. Because we know evil.
That’s why sex outside of absolute commitment can be so destructive, especially for women. Because when they’re left after a loud yelling match, already having given all of their beauty, they come to realize that they aren’t beautiful enough. Sex is only destructive because of evil. Because of selfishness, we have, on our own accord, destroyed what is perhaps the most pleasurable and intimate experience a human being can have.
So, we know, we knew evil. Then Abraham. His line was called to bless all, to be a light for the nations. They would be the witness to the nations of the character of YHWH.
They didn't do very well.
At one point God commissioned his prophet, Hosea, to marry a prostitute, Gomer, who would have his children and then repeatedly cheat on him. God told Hosea to keep retrieving his cheating wife from her strange men and to continue treating her kindly, rejoicing over her as his beloved bride. It was a picture of the relationship of God and his beloved. "The more they were called, the more they went away; they kept sacrificing to the Baals and burning offerings to idols" (Hosea 11:2). This God just wanted to love his creation.
But they knew evil, just like us.
Each individual Israelite knew evil. They were heartbroken with evil; they didn't think they were worthy of love, and if they did, they just became proud heartbreakers. Even King David had a married man killed so he could ease his conscience when he slept with the man’s wife.
The following is a thought experiment, you need to actually stop reading and do the imagination. Get your emotions involved, like God's are.
You have a child whom you deeply love (as a healthy parent indeed does). Imagine that your young child decides that he doesn't care for you and wants to live in somebody else's house and call them mom and dad. You discipline him but he keeps leaving. Then he just stops coming home, and night after night the dinner gets cold. Your love falls unseen. You can do nothing. You taught him to walk. You fed him his first meal with that tiny rubber spoon. You bandaged his cuts and sang him to sleep, holding his little fingers. And now he despises you.
"It was I who taught Ephraim to walk;
I took them up by their arms,
But they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with chords of kindness,
with the bands of love, ...
and I bent down to them and fed them" (Hosea 11:3-4)
"How can I give you up, O Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, O Israel?
How can I make you like the destroyed cities?
My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender." (11:8)
All those years God called Israel back; he restored his beloved. Often it was with harsh judgment and discipline. They were exiled as slaves in Babylon. Much of the book of Hosea is prophesy of horrible judgment, but when we read it with knowledge of this just God's loving plan for humanity, we see that these scenes are meant to call Israel back. He chose only to love them well, not to compromise his character and thus his plan for their lives and ours, as well as his afterlife. If God had not acted according to His covenant with his people, he would have been compromising his own justice.
God's just and loving character went uncompromised through the whole story of Israel.
Here's a little pop culture button-art. Did you know--MLK had a PhD in Theology from Boston University?
mlk
After the Exodus from Egypt, led by Moses and his brother Aaron, God called Moses to a mountain top (mount Sinai) where he gave him a list of commands. The "Ten Commandments" or "Decalogue" made up only a small portion of these commands. The books "Exodus," "Leviticus" and "Deuteronomy" contain hundreds of them.
In Deuteronomy 28 the final language of God’s covenant is laid out. Paraphrased, it looks like this: "If you don't worship any other gods and if you obey all these commands then I'll prosper you in the land. Your crops will grow richly, you'll have many healthy children and you'll conquer your enemies (these all represent peace and prosperity in the language of the Hebrew Bible). If you don't follow these commands then your crops will die, your children will die, and you'll be conquered. You'll fail as a people and be exiled (those all represent backward mobility in the language of the Hebrew Bible).
Remember, God’s people were a special people. Through them God was to bless the world. The trouble was, more often than not, the Israelites failed to keep these commands, thus they failed to represent God (sound familiar?). They were sick with that creeping death.
They didn't know how to receive love and grace.
They were spiritually dead--they had severed their relationships with God--each of them as individuals, just like you and me--through selfishness, which produced shame and fear in them, with no method of removal. It was all that they could do to offer animal sacrifices for their mistakes and to follow the many laws. They were supposed to be the love light of God in the wicked world. But, like us, these people couldn't do it.
If God is all knowing, why the law? Why the failed people? Did he just have a wicked sense of humor, setting us up for certain failure?
At this point we must return from where we deviated, back to Paul's first century letters to the churches in Rome and Galatia. Here's what he wrote about the law and evil: "Why the law then? It was added for the sake of defining evil deeds" (Gal. 3:19), "by the works of the law no human will be invited into his sight; for through the law comes the knowledge of evil" (Rom. 3:20-21), "I would not have come to know wicked deeds except through the law; for I would not have known about coveting if the law had not said 'Thou shall not covet.' But evil, taking the opportunity through that commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind" (Rom. 7:7-8); "the law came in to increase the wicked acts" (Rom. 5:20).
Wow. What?
So here we have these Israelites trying to keep an externally enforced law that only inflames their rebellion. Each time they fall and are wiped out they swirl into the depths of regret. They just can't seem to stop doing the very thing they want to avoid. We want to stop the bad habits, but they just seem to come back, and often the harder we try to get rid of them the more menacing their return. "The law came in to increase the wicked acts."
For hundreds of years this went on. And it's still going on in most of our kind.
But there was a promise. From the oldest days, there was a promise.
"I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your chest and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. And I will deliver you from all your uncleanness. And I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you."
(Ezekiel 36:25-29)
"When, Lord?" Cried his people. "When will you make us clean from this creeping death, all these dichotomies of good and evil?” This life is painful. Help us.
All these years they'd been doing blood sacrifices, cutting the throats of young bleating lambs, just to clean themselves temporarily.
The night before the Israelites left Egypt (on the "Exodus"), the story goes that YHWH told Moses to have the dad in each family kill a young, white lamb, and, having taken its blood, to wipe the doorframes of the primary entry of the house. There would be a death during the night--all the firstborn sons in any house without blood on its doorposts would die (the firstborn sons represented dignity and identity)--but the death would not strike those whose thresholds were marked by the blood of a young lamb. This was so that the Egyptians who had kept the Israelites in slavery for 430 years would let God’s promised people go. It was done so that the people Israel would remember who their rescuer was. An unforgettable, redemptive event.
That was the first day and is “year one” on the Jewish Calendar (like our 1 CE). Still. A lengthy feast is still celebrated in memory of the night before the Exodus by both Jews and Christians. They call it “The Feast of the Passover,” and the Israelites were told to keep it alive as a tradition, to remember what the Lord had done that night in a sweeping and final rescue of his beloved from the hands of their oppressors in Egypt, where they existed as a downtrodden community of slaves for 430 years; it was a rescue of a people who were to be the light of goodness to the whole world. "Do this feast in remembrance of me," that was the reason God gave.
Remember.
But they didn’t. They remembered the trappings of the feast, indeed, the “rituals” if you will. But these blessed people forgot their rescuing king. They went away and worshipped the gods of other people, because they cared more for power and money connections with those other people in their world than they did for their lover and redeemer and wise, healing God. The other gods weren't continually taking them out of oppression, but their worship came with common political ties to the cultures of humans who worshipped those other gods; a valuable resource in the economy of the present world system. And the image of the feast began to peel away from their memories.
And they sank back into that pool of creeping death. Blaming and shaming and being blamed and feeling ashamed. Feeling powerless, hungry for some sort of love and hanging onto hopes that disappointed.
To cap the problem, they were eternally selfish.
That's the human condition.
We, as both the collective human race and as individuals, can't stop being selfish; we all want "me" to win--even if for the most part subconsciously.
But these Israelites knew of a promise; one day the cleanliness would last forever. The shame would go away. They would be free to love and be loved fully and well. They would be really, really good at loving people and God. The prophets rejoiced over this day to come. Many of the most poetically beautiful verses in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) are found in the prophetic hymns to the messiah (the promised bringer of final freedom from suffering--the victory of God) in ancient books like Isaiah.
Over. And over. And over again, these people cried out.
The people Israel, like us, longed to be good people; ones who knew and believed their own lost dignity, as individuals and as a nation; people who could be counted on and trusted, free from the crushing arm of shame. It was said that one day there would be one who would come; he would be a servant of God and would do the perfect will--in absolute love and justice--of the Lord of love who sent him. God would be evidently in him and he in God. But the servant would be crushed and destroyed, his blood spilt like all those bleating sheep, sacrificed to honor the covenant of justice and love.
He would be the last lamb.
--written sometime during the 6th century BCE (five or six hundred years before--him).
****
He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we did not honor him.
Surely he has lifted our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on his servant
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he opened not his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
and as for his generation, who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people?
And they made his grave with the wicked
and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him;
he has put him to grief;
when his soul makes an offering for guilt,
he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.
Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.
(Isaiah 53:3-10 ESV)
There was a servant to come.
The Israelites cried out, "Who is this man, Isaiah, O Prophet of the most high? Where is this "man of sorrows," the one that's coming to allow his people freedom into full love and from shame and fear, freedom which we've lost for ourselves in a time gone past and still today? This last lamb to be cut off from the land of the living, who will he be?"
More centuries went by. Many good young men and women died too soon, mothers without husbands died in childbirth, there were wars and devastations, famines and siege.
And then, some 500 years (that's a half a millennia!) after Isaiah died (the prophet who wrote the passage above), there was a man in a desert somewhere on the west coast of the Mediterranean Sea. He was dressed like an ascetic, ate grasshoppers and raw honey, and kept shouting in a rather loud and exuberant voice, "Prepare the way of YHWH, make his paths straight!" People all over the region were hearing the rumors. But he wasn't the only one who caused them. There were and had been dozens of these "messiahs" in the ancient Near East (all over the world in fact, but especially here and now in the place where this man appeared in the desert). All the messiah movements stumbled to a halt at the death of their self-proclaimed king. Who's to say that this one would be any different?
I imagine these people as a skeptical bunch. Jaded dreamers, a lot like us. There were thinkers then, too.
***
The grasshopper-eating vagrant is down by the river again. People are gathered around; some are watching from a distance with folded arms, others are pressing in, water to the ankles, straining to get a closer look. Some are well dressed, others look as if they've just awoken from a drunken slumber somewhere on the bank nearby. It happens today that a certain young man has joined the interested crowd. Perhaps he's standing next to you and the warmth of his arm on your skin is lessening the shiver. Then, suddenly, he steps forward to be put into the water, joining the ranks of those who've gone before. He's placed himself as one of them.
***
Let's call the baptizer John, and the guy who just left your side to be baptized--let's call that one Jesus--just to make things easier for the sake of the story.
John caught sight of Jesus and stuttered. He knew this was the one Isaiah wrote about, the one who the people--sick of war and destruction and hate and evil and ignorance and selfishness and craving--cried out for in desperate hope.
"Look!" John screamed out at the top of his lungs, pointing, wide eyed, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29)
And for a just little more than three years this Jesus walked around the western Mediterranean healing sick people, forgiving sins, and leading a little group of a dozen or so men and women into what it meant to live as truly human.
He made people angry. Especially the religious people. Much like today's religious elite, many of those in first century Israel-Palestine were judgmental, hypocritical and closed-minded. They would have none of this radical Jew, largely because this Jesus hung out with the "sinners" and the betrayers and ignored many of the trappings of popular Judaism.
That's an important point. Jesus was a Jew, through and through. He was circumcised on the eighth day, had a Bar-Mitzvah, learned from Rabbis, let his followers call him a Rabbi, taught about the coming kingdom of Israel's YHWH, and said that he was to fulfil the whole of the law and the prophets.
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."
Matthew 5:17
And yet the popular Jewish religious elite accused him of breaking the Sabbath rest because he healed the sick on the seventh day. He was their מָשִׁיחַ (messiah--a really, really charged word for the Jews) the one they'd longed for all these years. And now they rejected him.
“He went on [...] and entered their synagogue. And a man was there with a withered hand. And they asked him, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?"—so that they might accuse him. He said to them, “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other. But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him.”
(The Gospel According to Matthew, 12:9-14 ESV)
This "Pharisaism" accounts for the rap that many Christians get today, in part because those who appear in the popular media, as representatives of the "faith," are no less religiously arrogant than the Pharisees of ancient Judaism. We get judged as being a collection of proud, loveless Nazis (ironic that we use that word). This judgment is often warranted. Indeed, "of all the bad men, religious bad men are the worst" (CS Lewis). Jesus warned of it. Don't let yourself become like the Pharisees, he said. Don't let even a little bit in or it will ruin all of you.
But Jesus just kept on. The oppressors couldn't stop him from loving the outcasts.
Not even when they took him and whipped him and kicked him in the face and spit on him.
Not even when they drove spikes through his wrists and ankles and asphyxiated him on a tall piece of wood.
The last lamb was dead.
His last words on the cross were τετέλεσται, which, when translated, means "it has been completed."
The sacrifices were all through. And they still are.
Because Jesus didn’t stay dead.
He and God were one. And God has power over death. And when Jesus exercised that power, as a human being, he showed that, with God, humans don’t have to stay dead.
Not the ones with God.
Not the ones who look to Jesus as their king.
Really. Christians live in a theocracy.
As a Christian, the life that I live is actually not, at the most basic level, my own life. God lives through me, and when God looks at me, he sees the work of the person of Jesus. He sees a son. He sees royal blood.
That’s why Paul could say that he could eat anything. Before then the people of God wouldn’t dare say that. Because they would be breaking part of the covenant.
But Jesus brought a new covenant. He fulfilled the law. All the failures of the Israelites fell upon him, crushed him and killed him. He submitted to death so that we wouldn’t have to.
God. Submitted. To Death.
Because he loves his creation. In order to gain victory over the death and wickedness which had consumed it, he had to be destroyed by it, let it pour itself completely into him. And then he rose again. Evil poured out completely, but wasn’t enough. In Jesus’ death, God wins. In his resurrection, God now reigns. God is king. God became king of the world in Jesus. And he still is.
As Christians, we are the royal family of God in the world. We are here to bring his kingdom of meekness and kindness and gentleness and love.
That’s why Paul said that we don’t avoid food for our own sake, but for the sake of those whom we’re serving. Our lives are now intended to bring God to earth. God’s continued victory over evil is played out by those who trust his act of inauguration into kingship with the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus, in his death, showed what love was like. He submitted to the power of evil so that those he loved wouldn’t have to.
“No one has greater love than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13
Now, we live. Now. We don’t wait and pray to be rescued out of this world. We pray that God’s kingdom should come, on earth as it is in heaven. And then we live it out, in community with other people who are doing the same. We are the good God’s tool for meekness and love and justice in this broken world.
Now go, find a friend and read the Gospels, enter into God’s story of love and justice.
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