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“[Jesus] fulfills none of my dreams…” so is Easter really for me?

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I read a quote from an article on the Mockingbird website recently that has been percolating from heart to brain and back again ever since.

If a man who is in love is asked what gives his beloved such unique value for him over all other persons, he can only answer: “She is the fulfillment of all my dreams.” If the questioner has undergone any similar experience, the subjectivity of this answer causes no offense because the lover makes no claim that others should feel the same. He not only admits that “she is beautiful for me but not necessarily for you” but glories in this admission.

If a man who professes himself a Christian is asked why he believes Jesus to be the Christ, his position is much more difficult, since he cannot believe this without meaning that all who believe otherwise are in error, yet at the same time he can give a no more objective answer than the lover: “I believe because he fulfills none of my dreams, because He is in every respect the opposite of what He would be if I could have made Him in my own image.”

Thus, if a Christian is asked: “Why Jesus and not Socrates or Buddha or Confucious or Mohomet?” perhaps all he can say is: “None of the others arouse all sides of my being to cry ‘Crucify Him.'”

– W.H. Auden, from an article by David zahl on the Mockingbird website

Reflecting on these words, I asked myself today, “In what ways do I cry ‘Crucify Him!” to Jesus? Certainly, the ways I do are merely modest sins that anyone could understand. It was in my humble pride that a thought came breaking through.

There is a family that began coming to the church I have recently begun to call home. After all the destruction, pain, anger, and hurt from the past year, I had actually begun to settle down and be thankful not just for the Lord’s faithfulness, but for giving me a place of healing. When this family showed up from the very church that had helped inflict me, my wounds were prodded, poked, and aggravated afresh.

My internal dialogue this week might have sounded something like this: “God, we found a place that we thought you were calling us to, and now someone from the enemy’s camp has come into our safe-place. What… the… hell? You led us through the Valley of the Shadow of Death just to re-injure us? Is there no place where we can be free from our inflictors?”

Ah, the hidden God. The God who sought to put Moses to death right after giving him potent promises of deliverance. The God who led his chosen people out of slavery and bondage, to wilderness wondering, suffering, and death. The God who delivered a Gentile from his leprosy by one of his prophets, while there were those of his own who were inflicted, yet unhealed. The God who delivered his people over to her enemies, and their destruction was so great that they resorted to cannibalizing their own children.

“Crucify him!”

The God who became incarnate to take the sin of the world onto himself. Like a thief he came and stole my sins and bore them on himself, and sent them to hell with his very own death on the cross.

Who hell does this God think he is? I can take care of myself! I can make things right. I suffered a lot the past year! If you won’t give me a place of healing, I’ll just go find my own! Why do you keep inflicting! “Crucify him!”

His body, laid into a tomb. Thank God! Now I can get back to… judging a family who is desperate for the same grace I was starved for this past year.

Christ have mercy, I crucified you.

Easter…is it for me? Life, resurrection, hope… dare I even peek in that direction?

I peek.

What is that I hear? “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”

Wandering

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“I went walking, through streets paved with gold.

Lifted some stones, saw the skin and bones

of a city without a soul…

I went drifting, through the capitals of tin.

Where men can’t walk or freely talk

And son’s turn their fathers in…

I stopped outside a church house, where the citizens like to sit.

They say they “want the kingdom,”

but they don’t want God in it…

I went out walking down that winding road,

where no one’s trusting no one

and conscience a too heavy load…

Yeah, I left with nothing,

but the thought you’d be there too

Looking for you.

Yeah, I left with nothing,

Nothing but the thought of you,

I went wandering.”

The gravelly voice of Johnny Cash adds a weathered, tired, tone to these exhausted words as U2 plays a deceitfully simple loop to undergird them. I can’t help but hear in this song the spectral sigh of the Preacher from Ecclesiastes. I find myself searching, wandering, and the wanderlust, it’s incurable. With the Preacher, it would seem all that seeking is indeed a striving after the wind.

Perhaps I sound bleak. As an ENFP in Myers-Briggs Typology, and a 7 on the Enneagram, I assure you that I am not. Well, at least if I am for a moment, it is impossible for me to sit there too long. I love the soberness and the reality check this song, and the Preacher’s sermon in Ecclesiastes, ushers me into. The Advent Season, with its longing and nature of waiting expectantly, has been a good season for me to wander a bit.

We have been looking for a church over the past few months. Like everything else in our culture here in the United States, there is a flavor and color and size available for each of your tastes and desires. There are many options available for my consumption, and, quite frankly, it has become exhausting.

I really resonate with the idea of walking streets of gold and finding a city without a soul, or walking through capitals of tin, or a church people that keep preaching that we are the kingdom, or bringing the kingdom, or some variant version of this, yet without God in it. He has become the power of making our kingdom come (or if we are “orthodox,” His kingdom), but we are the engines doing the work. It’s up to you and me to make it happen. Meanwhile, God is somewhere out there waiting on us to bring it about. Perhaps, if we are lucky, after a guilt trip on how I need to be doing better as a Christian, because I am the only example of upstanding goodness a person might see, we might be offered a better choice we can make that might make God happy with us for at least trying hard, while still missing the mark.

What I am saying is overly simplistic, lacking the nuance that pastors and well-meaning Christians put on it. I speak from a place of tiredness and exhaustion, so please forgive me. I have no desire to discourage brothers and sisters.

I just yearn to hear afresh, “The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.” Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs, and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jew and Greek, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

Not what I need to be doing. Not what I need to know. Not what I have been or am growing to be. As Luther wrote, “The law of God [read: what God requires us to be doing], the most salutary doctrine of life, cannot advance humans on their way to righteousness, but rather hinders them. Much less can human works, which are done over and over again with the aid of natural precepts, so to speak, lead to that end.” (Thesis 1 and 2 of the Heidelberg Disputation, 1518).

What I need is the foolishness of God as seen in the cross. The strange and yet life giving truth that in the death of Jesus, I see the death of my sin. In his words from the cross, “Father forgive them they know not what they do,” Jesus is giving himself to me so that I can hear the words, “You are forgiven.” In his resurrection from the dead, I can trust that I too will be risen from the dead. It has been here that the wind is settled and I realize I am not grasping after wind, yet, have been grasped by someone who is quite tangible.

Yeah, I left with nothing,

but the thought that you’d be there too

Looking for you.

Yeah, I left with nothing,

Nothing but the thought of you,

I went wandering.”

It is in the quiet voice given with the bread: the body of Christ, broken for you, and in the quiet voice given with the cup: the blood of Christ, shed for you, that I find my fear’s and strivings cease. When offered these, my eyes are opened to that I have left with everything.

“Very nearly the most difficult of all sins to deal with is judging our neighbor!”

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“Very nearly the most difficult of all sins to deal with is judging our neighbor!”

“Very nearly the most difficult of all sins to deal with is judging our neighbor!”


— Read on afkimel.wordpress.com/2022/08/09/very-nearly-the-most-difficult-of-all-sins-to-deal-with-is-judging-our-neighbor/

This is Where We Start Again

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Grace. What is grace? I remember a youth leader who used the acronym, God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense to try to get us to understand the idea of grace. What do you think about that one?

I have also heard it explained by being juxtaposed with the concept of mercy, Grace is getting what you don’t deserve while mercy is a withholding of something you do deserve. How do you feel about this concept of grace?

Paul Zahl in his book, Grace in Practice, defines grace as “one-way love,” specifically illustrated in God’s one-way love towards sinners. One-way meaning God’s love for you, the sinner, that generates from his own heart and is aimed at you without any expectation of reciprocation: not receiving, not earned, not a potential in you that may respond back, but sheer, God loves you because he does and delights to do so. How does this one resonate with you?

There’s a song from the Goo Goo Dolls called Come to Me. It’s one of many songs they sing that harmonizes with Zahl’s idea of grace. There’s a line in the song that sings, “You and me, we both got sins, and I don’t care about where you’ve been. Don’t be sad and don’t explain, this is where we start again.” I can’t help but hear the voice of Jesus sing these words to you and to me. From the cross, the sin of the world, your sin and my sin, he received to himself.

You see, Jesus meets sinners, the broken, the lost, right where they are. I had a pastor once who used to say that while Jesus meets us where we are, he never leaves us there. He expects us to follow and he will change us and expects us to grow. I have diverged from this sort of thinking and have to agree with Dr. Paulson, when he says that this is the first rung in a Christian ladder theology. I understand this idea of Jesus meeting us and not leaving us there as a semi-Pelagian theology.

This sort of theology, a ladder or semi-Pelagian theology, would have you believe that God did his part, now you must do yours. Or, God saved you, now act like it. Or, God saved you by grace, now you need to be obedient and make your calling and election sure. In the words of the world renowned wrestler Nacho Libre, “whatever.” This kind of thinking always leads the sufferer to despair of his God. For those who still grip tightly to their freedom to obey and manage to convince themselves that they are obeying, it may not at the moment lead to despair, but to those who suffer and are broken, it always does. It leaves God as a passive sovereign whom you hope you’ve done enough for, or proven that you have indeed had the Holy Spirit do something in your life that you can lift up to him as validation of your salvation. Again, like Sisyphus, this thinking and doing is exhausting, and eventually the hamster gets off the wheel, fatigued.

Jesus doesn’t want better people. Shocking, I know. It doesn’t resonate with the law of checks and balances that permeates the world and is pervasive in our own wills and minds in bondage to sin, the Devil, and the flesh. Jesus doesn’t want obedient people. Jesus doesn’t want people to “choose him.” Jesus doesn’t want people to exercise some intellectual power or will within themselves to pick him over and against something else. We have the whole history of Israel in our book to illustrate the futility and fatigue this thinking produced in the Israelites. Neither do we see Jesus going around demanding these things from the broken and the sinful: in teaching, in his parables, nor in praxis. When he does seem to bring this edge, it’s to cut the ‘good’ self-righteous and the ‘good’ religious people away from what they are clinging to…their goodness.

What this kind of thinking does is lead to the mammothly exhausting effort to grasp wind, find the fountain of youth, win the lottery, or find the elusive unicorn. It is wishful thinking that leads to futile doing. Saint Paul expresses the same, wrapped up in Romans 7.

So, if Jesus doesn’t want better people, what DOES Jesus want? It’s not at all intuitive, given that you and I are in bondage to sin apart from Christ. He wants your life. Not, a life dedicated to him. He wants your literal life. He wants to take it from you. Which sounds horrific at first blanch. Let that sink in a moment. Jesus wants your death. We spend our whole lives fleeing, ignoring, and insuring ourselves against death. When feeling bold, some even stare death in the face, daring it to try to take them, defiantly. “Death does not discriminate, between the sinners and the saints, and it takes and it takes and it takes.”

Jesus wants your life, and he shall have it. You can’t run. And its okay. Your baptism tells you what has happened to him and what he is doing to you. You will die. You will die in him. As the water was poured over you and covers you, so you will be covered in death. It will swallow you. And that is how sin, the devil, and the flesh lose their grip on you.

Then, the third day will come. Just as you were buried into Christ, so you will be raised to life also. Jesus wants your death because he is going to resurrect you. While you may manage to become somewhat ‘better’ in this life, what Jesus is most interested in is resurrecting you. Death and resurrection are the only way you will truly be better. And this is scary as hell to the world, to the Devil, and to your flesh.

Alas, he promises he will never leave you and never forsake you. In your darkness, he is there. In your brokenness, he is near. In your oppression, he is at hand. When you’re not good, growing, and obedient, when you are still wallowing in your sin, he has marked you and will not leave you. In your obedience, in your righteousness, in your goodness, though you may forget and look to yourself, he is there.

You were buried with him. He will resurrect you. As surely as you receive the bread, he has given his body to you and for you. As surely as you drink the cup, his blood was exchanged for your blood.

There is freedom for this life. Freedom to do. Freedom to not do. Freedom to obey. Freedom to not obey. Grace. It produces all that the law demanded. It can’t help itself. Faith, hope, and love, against such there is no law.

You and me, we both got sins, but I don’t care about where you’ve been. Don’t be sad and don’t explain… take eat, this is my body. Take drink, this is my blood. Given to you for the forgiveness of sins. This is where we start again.

Smile, You Just Got Away with It!

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It was hot. Not just hot, but it was unbearably stuffy hot. You know what I mean. The dim lights of the room made it extremely hard to see. There was only so long I could hold my breath. We weren’t finding what we were looking for and if I didn’t get out soon, I was most certainly going to pass out on the floor. Beaded sweat from my hair line began to pour down my back and chest. I had to get out and get out soon. I was beginning to get tunnel vision. So many people to get through. None of them looked as concerned. It was now or never.

It was my second week on the job as a pest control technician and I was along for my first bed bug job. The house we arrived at made my heart hurt that someone actually lived in it. It was a cobbled together single wide that had been abused thoroughly, then coaxed into generating more life than she ever had to give. There were gaps in the walls and ceiling, the carpet was an unidentifiable color and worn bare where the main trails had been galvanized in the fashion of a game trail. Clutter blocked much of the view. The other techs were spread out to the bedrooms and the main living room. I was assigned to go look for bed bugs in the back right room and was warned there was black mold all over one wall.

So, here I was, in my white hooded coverall plastic suit, straining to see any of the tiny blood feeders in the crevices of the mouldering furniture in this room, holding my breath, and rapidly heading toward a heat stroke. With my stored oxygen spent, lungs on fire, stars appearing in my vision, I bolted from the chamber and made a beeline for the front door. Gasping, I sucked in the clean air as I emerged from the house like a penguin popping out of the sea, just missing the great white shark’s jagged jaws. Sucking in as much air as possible, I bent over and breathed deeply. My vision returned slowly and my muscles started to relax. My eyes roved over my white suit to make sure that there were no tiny red dots. We were all terrified of carrying bed bugs away from here. Except the one grizzled veteran of 40 years, who confidently oversaw the operation like a master sergeant pressing his troops into no man’s land from from trenches in the Somme, who donned literally just his regular uniform.

Ah life. Sweet life. The hot early summer sun was not even close to as stifling as that room had been and the air was sweet to my burning lungs. No black mold. No bed bugs. No dankness. The colors of the late spring flowers, the mostly sunny sky above, and the sounds of life in birds and dogs and human activity replaced the darkness, heat, and certain death.

I have had some people say that they feel like I am “getting away with my sin.” I think what they mean is that they don’t see enough remorse, on one hand, or, perhaps, they don’t perceive the consequences as being stiff enough for what my fall should have been like, on the other. Perhaps, something else entirely. Who knows?

Unfortunately, my first thought when I ponder this is, who doesn’t? Get away with their sin, that is. Whatever ‘tier’ your sin falls into, from tier one gossip, too much time thinking about that attractive person, one sip too many of that amazing Napa Cabernet, I did stop, mostly, at that stop sign, I earned some time to do what I want to do instead of putting up dishes with or for my wife, to tier five, seven deadly sins stuff, we must see that our arbitrary lists of what sins are worse than others all fall under the same doom: the wages of sin is death. Saint Paul writes, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” And elsewhere, “The law came to increase sin…”

Saint James says that the word of God is like a mirror. It shows us who we really are. God gave us his law to expose to our proud hearts that you and I are the Sinner. There are no ‘tier’ lists. There is no escape.

I imagine the law like the Eye of Sauron in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series. The piercing light sees everywhere and exposes everything. It roves everywhere, catches all, and exposes them as guilty. And this picture helps me think about what happened on Good Friday. When Jesus cried out, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?“, “My God, My God, why have your forsaken me?” Jesus was literally damned by the law. The roving eye of the Law locked in place, fixed toward the cross, not finding anything else to expose, accuse, and condemn, other than the Lamb of God who took the sins of the entire world upon himself at that moment, like the Eye of Sauron fixated on Aragorn at his gates. The sin of the world was literally transferred onto the Lamb. It’s why Jesus was forsaken. He tasted, not just a little dab of it to get a little flavor, but was immersed and drank the cup of condemnation do its dregs.

He tasted the ripened fruits of the sins of the world, and included in that are the sins of James, me, personally. He knew me by name on the cross as one of the sinners whose sins were placed on him. From tier one to tier five. “Behold the Man upon a cross, my sin upon his shoulders. Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice, call out among the scoffers. It was my sin that left him there, until it was accomplished. His dying breath has brought me life. I know that it is finished.”

Like Peter, when I hear the tomb is empty, I run. Oh shit. If he’s alive, he’s got to be upset with me. He knows what I did, because it was laid on him. Perhaps I can explain. Perhaps I can make amends. Perhaps I can apologize to him. Ease the sufferings a little by just… Or I can tell him, he really didn’t have to that, but thanks?

Like Peter, I arrive at the tomb and it’s empty. Damn. He knows. And he’s somewhere. He’s alive. And I’m screwed. But also, like Peter, Jesus comes to me. I see his scars. I see what he did. I see his body, broken and torn. And his blood shed, for what I have done. Done for me and to me. He doesn’t go through my list of crap demanding an account. He says, “It is finished. Do this in remembrance of me. This is for you until I return. And when I do, have hope. James, it is finished. The Comforter will remind you. I promise. The tomb is empty, you have no need to fear death, the devil, and those who would preach his accusatory sermons to you. Listen to my voice. I am the first born of the living. You are mine. I bought you at the price of my own life. For freedom I have set you free. You are forgiven.”

Here we come full circle. There are only two sermon’s preached. Satan’s, “I know what you did and how you look. Everyone else see its also. It’s obvious you’re guilty, whether you feel it, whether you see it, or not. And this is what you need to do to make things better. And if you don’t, then you’re not really sorry or repentant. The law says so.” (The law that came to increase and bind everything under sin, curiously enough.) Jesus’ sermon, “This is my body, given for you. This is my blood poured out for you. Take this in remembrance of me. It is finished. You are forgiven. I remember your sins no more.”

If you don’t think you’re getting away with your sin, then may the Law you seek life in be a kinder task master to you than it has ever been to anyone else, including the Lamb of God, who it slayed on the cross. Satan’s sermon is louder and the constant pulse of a world enslaved. If you know you have gotten away with it, then you’ve already arrived at home. It is exactly in the knowledge that you have, the law loses its power and resurrection happens. It’s only in death that life can come. New life does not come through reformation or rehabilitation. That is supplementing what was already there.

And this…This is what it’s like coming out of a bedbug, black mold infested, single-wide. The Gospel, the good news of Jesus, breathes fresh life back into me as I gasp for clean, life giving air. As my dimmed eyes get dazzled by the vividness of the created world. As my ears begin to hear the life that is being sustained by the God who created all things, yet has come to me to make me his own. Satan’s sermon would keep me in the mouldering room, all the while, the Holy Spirit would lead me out to life and fullness.

I love this song from Goo Goo Dolls. It’s called Boxes. I close with its lyrics, I imagine it as a song between Jesus and myself. He is gentle, and lowly, and in patience walks with us.

I need a family to drive me crazy
Call me out when I’m low and lazy
It won’t be perfect, but we’ll be fine
‘Cause I’ve got your back, and you’ve got mine
You got mine

We’ll have tiny boxes for memories
Open them up and we’ll set them free
There’ll be bad days and some hard times
But I’ll keep your secrets, if you keep mine

You are the memory that won’t ever lapse
When twenty-five years have suddenly passed
Wherever you take me, it’s clear I will go
Your love’s the one love that I need to know
Your love’s the one love that I need to know

Take my picture and then you laugh
But I hate the way I look in photographs
Keep your memories, but don’t live the past
I’m looking forward to the best days we will have

You are the memory that won’t ever lapse
When twenty-five years have suddenly passed
Wherever you take me, it’s clear I will go
Your love’s the one love that I need to know
You are the sun in the desolate sky
And your life’s in these words and it can’t be denied
Wherever you take me, it’s clear I will go
Your love’s the one love that I need to know
Your love’s the one love that I need to know

You can cry away all your complicated memories
That keep you up so many nights
But darling, save your apologies
‘Cause I know that you’re scared
But I swear you’ll be alright
I swear you’re alright
You’re alright

When the answers escape us when we start to fade
Remember who loved you and the ones who have stayed
‘Cause my body will fail, but my soul will go on
So don’t you get lonely
I’m right where you are

As the sign in front of Calvary St. George’s in New York says, “Enjoy Your Forgiveness.” This is for you.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

“A Plain Sermon”

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I read this recently and wanted to share.

A Plain Sermon on The Pharisee and the Publican

Luke 18:9-14: Jesus spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Consider the characters in this parable. Forget the prejudice that Jesus’ frequently stinging remarks about Pharisees have formed in your mind. Give this particular Pharisee all the credit you can. He is, after all, a good man. To begin with, he’s not a crook, not a time-server, not a womanizer. He takes nothing he hasn’t honestly earned; he gives everyone he knows fair and full measure; and he is faithful to his wife, patient with his children, and steadfast to his friends. He’s not at all like this publican, this tax-farmer, who’s the worst kind of crook: a legal one, a big operator, a mofia-style enforcer working for the Roman government to a nifty franchise that lets him collect — from his fellow Jews, mind you, from people whom the Romans might have trouble finding, but whose whereabouts he knows and whose language he speaks — all the money he can bleed out of them, provided only that he pays the authorities an agreed upon flat fee. He’s been living for years on the cream he has skimmed off their milk money. He’s a fat cat who drives a stretch limo, drinks nothing but Chivas Regal, and never shows up at a party without at least two five-hundred-dollar-a-night call girls in tow.

Now, then. The first thing to get off the table is the notion that this parable is simply a lesson in the virtue of humility. It’s not. It’s an instruction in the futility of religion — in the idleness of the proposition that there is anything at all you can do to put yourself right with God. It’s about the folly of even trying. The parable occurs after a series of illustrations of what Jesus means by faith, and it comes shortly before he announces, for the third time, that he will die and rise again. It is therefore not a recommendation to adopt a humble religious stance rather than a proud one; rather, it is a warning to drop all religious stances — and moral and ethical ones, too — when you try to grasp you justification before God. It is, in short, an exhortation to move on to the central point of the Gospel: faith in a God who raises the dead.

The Pharisee, however, is not only good: he is religious. And not hypocritically religious, either. His outward uprightness is matched by an inward discipline. He fasts twice a week, and he puts his money where his mouth is: ten percent off the top for God. If you know where to find a dozen or two such upstanding citizens, I know several parishes that will accept delivery of them, not questions asked and all Jesus’ parables to the contrary notwithstanding.

But best of all, this Pharisee thanks God for his happy state. Saint Luke says that Jesus spoke this parable to those who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. But Jesus shows us the Pharisee in the very act of giving God the glory. Maybe the reason he went up to the temple to pray was that, earlier in the week, he slipped a little and thought of his righteousness as his own doing. Maybe he said to himself, “That’s terrible; I must make a special visit to the temple and set my values straight by thanking God.”

But what does Jesus tell you about this good man — about this entirely acceptable candidate for the vestry of your parish? He tells you not only that he’s in bad shape but that he’s in worse shape than a tax-farmer who is as rotten as they come and who just waltzes into the temple and does nothing more than say as much. In short, he tells you an unacceptable parable.

For you would (I know I would) gladly accept the Pharisee’s pledge card and welcome him to our midst. But would you accept me for long if I had my hand in the church till to the tune of a Cadillac and a couple of high-priced whores? Would you (would the diocesan authorities) think it was quite enough for me to come into church on a Sunday, stare at the tips of my shoes, and say, “God be merciful to me a sinner”? Would the bishop write me a letter commending my imitation of the parable and praising me for preaching not only in word but in deed? Jesus, to be sure, says that God would; I myself, however, have some doubts about you and the bishop. You might find it a bit too… vivid. There just seems to be no way of dramatizing this parable from our point of view. That being the case, turn it around and look at if from God’s.

God is sitting there in the temple, busy holding creation in being — thinking it all into existence, concentrating on making the hairs on your head jump out of nothing, preserving the seat of my pants, reconciling the streetwalkers in Times Square, the losers on the Bowery, the general in the Pentagon, and all the worms under flat rocks in Brazil. And in comes these two characters. The Pharisee walks strait over, pulls up a chair to God’s table, and whips out a pack of cards. He fans them, bridges them, does a couple of one-handed cuts and in an accordion shuffle, slides the pack over to God, and says, “Cut. I’m in the middle of a winning streak.” And God looks at him with a sad smile, gently pushes the deck away, and says, “Maybe you’re not. Maybe it just ran out.”

So the Pharisee picks up the deck again and starts the game himself. “Twenty-one, okay?” And he deals God and ace of fasting and a king of no adultery. And God says, “Look, I told you. Maybe this isn’t your game. I don’t want to take your money.”

“Oh, come on,” says the Pharisee. “How about seven card stud, tens wild? I’ve been real lucky with tens wild lately.” And God looks a little annoyed and says, “Look, I meant it. Don’t play me. The odds here are always on my side. Besides, you haven’t even got a full deck. You’d be smarter to be like the guy over there who came in with you. He lost his cards before he got here. Why don’t you both just have a drink on the house and go home?”

Do you see now what Jesus is saying in this parable? He’s saying that as far as the Pharisee’s ability to win a game of justification with God is concerned, he’s not better off than the publican. As a matter of fact, the Pharisee is worse off because, while they’re both losers, the publican at least has the sense to recognize the fact and trust God’s offer of a free drink. The point of the parable is that they’re both dead, and their only hope is someone who can raise the dead.

“Ah, but,” you say, “isn’t there a distinction to be made? Isn’t the Pharisee somehow less further along in death than the publican? Isn’t there some sense in which we can give him credit for the real goodness he has?”

To which I answer: You’re making the same miscalculation as the Pharisee. Death is death. Given enough room to maneuver, it eventually produces total deadness. In the case of the publican, for example. his life so far has been quite long enough to force upon him the recognition that, as far as his being able to deal with God is concerned, he is finished. The Pharisee, on the other hand, looking at his clutch of good deeds, has figured that he has more than enough to keep him in the game for the rest of his life.

But there is his error. For the rest of his life here, maybe. But what about for the length and breadth of eternity? Take your own case. Let’s suppose that you are an even better person than the Pharisee. Let’s assume that you’re untempted to any sin any sin except the sin of envy, and that even there, your resolve is such that for the remainder of your days you never do in fact fall prey to that vice. Are you so sure, however, that the robustness of your virtue is the only root of your unjealous disposition? Might not a very large source of it be nothing more than lack of opportunity? Have you never thought yourself immune to some vice only to find that you fell into it when the temptation became sufficient? The woman who resists a five-dollar proposition sometimes gives in to a five-million-dollar one. Men who would never betray friends have been known to betray friends they thought were about to betray them. The reformer immune to the corruption of power finds corruption easier as he gains power.

Take your dormant envy, then. From not till the hour of your death, you may very well not meet that one person who will galvanize it into action. But in eternity — in that state where there are no limits to opportunity, in which you have literally forever to meet, literally, everybody — is your selflessness so profound that you can confidently predict you will never be jealous of anyone? Is the armor of your humility so utterly without a chink?

There, you see, is the problem as God sees it. For him, the eternal order is a perpetual motion machine: it can tolerate no friction at all. Given long enough, even one grain of sand, one lurking vice in one of the redeemed, will find somewhere to lodge and something to rub on. And that damaged something, given another of the endless eternities within eternity itself, will go off center and shake the next part loose. And that the next — and so straight on into what can only be the beginning of the end. The very limitlessness of the opportunity for mischief will eventually bring the whole works to a grinding halt.

What Jesus is saying in this parable is that no human goodness is good enough to pass a test like that — and that therefore God is not a bout to risk it. He will not take our cluttered lives as we hold them into eternity. He will take only the clean emptiness of our death as he holds it in the power of Jesus’ resurrection. He condemns the Pharisee because he takes his stand on a life that God cannot use; he commends the publican because he rests his case on a death that God can. The fact, of course, is that they’re both equally dead and therefore both alike receivers of the gift of resurrection. But for as long as the Pharisee refuses to confess the first fact, he’ll simply be unable to believe the second. He’ll be justified in his death; but he’ll be so busy doing the bookkeeping of a life he cannot hold that he’ll never be able to enjoy himself. It’s just misery to try to keep count of what God’s no longer counting. Your entries keep disappearing.

If you now see my point, you not doubt conclude that the Pharisee is a fool. You’re right. But at this point you’re about to run into another danger. You probably conclude that he’s also a rare breed of fool — that the number of people who would so blindly refuse to recognize such a happy issue out of their afflictions has got to be small. There you’re wrong. We all refuse to see it. Or, better said, while we sometimes catch a glimpse of it, our love of justification by works is so profound that, at the first opportunity, we run from the strange light of grace straight back to the familiar darkness of the law.

You don’t believe me? I’ll prove it to you: The publican goes “down to his house justified rather than the other.” Well and good, you say. Yes indeed. But let me follow him now in your mind’s eye as he goes through the ensuing week and comes once again to the temple to pray. What is it you want to see him doing in those intervening days? What does your moral sense tell you he ought at least try to accomplish? Aren’t you itching, as his spiritual advisor, to urge him into another line of work — something maybe a little more upright than putting the arm on his fellow countrymen for fun and profit? In short, don’t you feel compelled to insist upon at least a little reform?

To help you be as clear as you can about your feelings, let me set you two exercises. For the first, take him back to the temple one week later. And have him go back there with nothing in his life reformed: walk him in this week as he walked in last — after seven full days of skimming, wenching, and high-priced Scotch. Put him through the same routine: eyes drown, breast smitten, God be merciful, and all that. Now, then. I trust you see that on the basis of this parable as told, God will not mend his divine ways any more than the publican did his wicked ones. God will do this week exactly what he did last because the publican is the same this week as he was last: he’s still dead, and he simply admits it. God, in short, will send him down to his house justified. The question in this first exercise is, Do you like that? And the answer, of course, is that you don’t. You gag on the unfairness of it. The rat is getting off free.

For the second exercise, therefore, take him back to the temple with at least some reform under his belt: no wenching this week, perhaps, or drinking cheaper Scotch and giving the difference to the Heart Fund. What do you think now? What is it that you want God to do with him? Question him about the extent to which he has mended his ways? Why? If God didn’t count the Pharisee’s impressive list, why should he bother with this two-bit one? Or do you want God to look on his heart, not on his list, and commend him for good intentions at least? Why? The point of the parable was that the publican confessed that he was dead, not that his heart was in the right place. Why are you so bent on destroying the story by sending the publican back with the Pharisee’s speech in his pocket?

The honest answer is that while you understand the thrust of the parable with your mind, your heart has a desperate need to believe its exact opposite. And so does mine. We all long to establish our identity by seeing ourselves as approved in other people’s eyes. We spend our days preening ourselves before the mirror of their opinion so we will not have to think about the nightmare of appearing before them naked and uncombed. And we hate this parable because it says plainly that is’t the nightmare which is the truth of our condition. We fear the publican’s acceptance because we know precisely what it means. It means we’ll never be free until we are dead to the whole business of justifying ourselves. But since that business is our life, that means not until we are dead.

Because Jesus came to raise the dead. Not to reform the reformable, not to improve the improvable… but then, I’ve said all that. Let us make an end: As long as you’re struggling like the Pharisee to be alive in your own eyes — and to the precise degree that your struggles are for what is holy, just, and good — you will resent the apparent indifference to your pains that God shows making the effortlessness of death the touchstone of your justification. Only when you’re finally able, with the publican, to admit that you’re dead will you be able to stop balking at grace.

It is, admittedly, a terrifying step. You will cry and kick and scream before you take it, because it means putting yourself out of the only game you know. For your comfort though, I can tell you three things. First, it’s only a single step. Second, it’s not a step our of reality into nothing but a step from fiction into fact. And third, it will make you laugh out loud at how short the trip home was. It wasn’t a trip at all: you were already there.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Between Noon and Three, Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace, Robert Farrar Capan, Wm. B. eerdmans Publishing Co, 1997. pgs 155-163.