John Koessler's Blog, page 18

The Seven Deadly Virtues-Ambition

[image error]When I was growing up, my parents used to buy our shoes from a little shop at the end of our block.  There was something about the store’s big chairs and the smell of leather that made the place seem luxurious to me. This was before the days of big box stores and discount shoe chains. Getting a new pair of shoes was always a big deal, an event that warranted a family expedition. It was also a minor drama whenever the new shoes were for my brother or sister instead of me. “But honey you don’t need a new pair of shoes,” my mother explained, in a vain effort to stem the flood of tears I unleashed. Her reasoned argument brought me no comfort. Not as long as the shiny gleam of a sibling’s new shoes was in plain sight. My anguish was not about need. It was about possession. As long as they possessed what I did not, I was certain that I could not be happy. I might never be happy again.

There is more to envy than desire. In the end, envy is about displacement. The Bible commands, “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” (Rom. 12:15). But envy compels us to do the opposite so that we mourn when others rejoice and rejoice when they suffer misfortune. Envy unites itself with our ordinary desires in a way that blinds us both to its own deadly nature and to the true nature of those who possess what we want. The fifth-century monastic leader John Cassian made this observation about those who envy: “Tormented not by the faults of the people they envy, but by their prosperity, they cannot admit the truth about others and are always on the watch for trivial and silly causes of offense. These imaginary causes of offense cannot be overcome so long as the deadly virus is in them and they will not bring it to the surface.”

Like all “capital” sins, envy is a gateway to a myriad of other sins. In order to find fault with those we envy, we must elevate ourselves over them. In order to justify the anger we feel about their success or their prosperity, we must accuse and judge. Envy is more about the way we see ourselves in relation to others than it is about the things we desire. This makes envy especially the gateway to pride, the one sin that the ancients considered to be the fountainhead of all other sins. It was out of envy of God’s glory that Satan aspired to usurp His throne (Isa. 14:13-14). Envy drove the religious leaders to hand Jesus over to Pilate (Matt. 27:18).

Envy is untreatable as long as we remain in this blinded state. “The disease is so incurable, that it is made worse by treatment; the sore is inflamed by ointments” John Cassian observes. Consequently, recovery must begin with recognition. God has to open our eyes so that we come to understand that what we have been calling ambition is actually jealousy. It is a kind of ambition to be sure, but it is “selfish ambition” (James 3:14). What we thought of as our considered judgment is really only malice. We do not see others as they truly are, because we do not know ourselves as we truly are.

Despite this, I do not think that we can simply talk ourselves out of envy. We must be delivered from it. The answer to envy is happiness and ultimate happiness (what the philosophers used to call Felicity) is obtained as a gift, not by effort. “No one can obtain felicity by pursuit,” theologian Josef Pieper observes. “This explains why one of the elements of being happy is the feeling that a debt of gratitude is owed, a debt impossible to pay.” The path to happiness does not begin with a vision of what we can achieve but with a sense of what has been given to us. Likewise, envy cannot be tamed, it can only be thrown down. The longing for what others have, along with its corresponding desire to dispossess them of those things, can only be eliminated by suffering a kind of death. We must accept the loss in order to discover the gain. This is the message of the beatitudes (Matt. 5:1-12). It is key to understanding Christ’s warning in Mark 8:36: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” This is how ambition works in the strange economy of the Kingdom. Only the losers win.

 

The Seven Deadly Virtues-Justice

[image error]A popular saying goes, “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.” These words are commonly attributed to St. Augustine but no one seems to know where or even whether he actually expressed such a thought. To be honest, it sounds more like something a modern would say. The view of the ancients was much less approving of anger. Their attitude was more like the one expressed by the fourth-century desert father Abba Macarius: “If when you want to reprove someone you are stirred to anger, you are pandering to your own passion. Lose not yourself to save another.”

The old monk’s restraint seems peculiar to us. Everybody gets angry. Some people deserve our anger. Anger is just an emotion, an expression of our righteous indignation. When it is rightly employed, anger can be the fuel that energizes change. At least, that’s how we think about anger. Perhaps we are right in thinking this. As the words attributed to St. Augustine suggest, maybe anger really is the offspring of hope. Is it possible that this anger that I feel within me is actually a fire kindled in my soul by a vision of a different world? Maybe the moderns have it right after all. That’s why they have removed anger from the list of deadly sins and declared it a cardinal virtue.

But if I am truly honest with myself, I will have to admit that there is often more indignation than righteousness in my anger. Anger itself may have its origin in the fires of God’s justice. But once it is in my hands it turns into something else. Upon closer inspection, my anger proves to be exactly what Macarius warned that it would be. Instead of a passion for justice, it is simply pandering to my own passion. Our anger often bears little resemblance to justice as God’s defines it. We would do better to call it sentimentalized outrage.

Jeremy Begbie observes that the pathology of sentimentality has three primary features. According to Begbie, the sentimentalist misrepresents reality by trivializing evil, is emotionally self-indulgent and avoids taking costly action. It is my contention that all three of these marks are prominent in much of the anger that is directed at injustice today. It misrepresents evil, not by denying its existence, but by oversimplifying its nature. Difficult complexities are ignored in favor of a superficial diagnosis which can be easily turned into a stereotype. The emotional self-indulgence of our anger is evident in our rhetoric, which usually gives off more heat than light. We are quick to speak, slow to listen, and too intellectually impatient to do the hard work of analysis that is really needed to understand the nature of the problem or divine a solution. We are willing to shout, carry a sign, or post to social media. But that’s about as far as our plan of action goes. Anger is our only real contribution to the cause.

The level of comfort we feel with our own anger is matched only by the degree of discomfort we feel when it comes to God’s anger. The notion of a wrathful God has largely fallen out of favor. This is true even among those who believe that such wrath exists. We treat God’s wrath the way we would the awkward personality trait of some family member. We hardly ever talk about it. We would rather not think about it. Instead, we attempt to put the best face on a bad situation. Sure He flies off the handle once in a while but that’s not really who He is. He is a good guy, once you get to know Him.

Yet we cannot really grasp the Bible’s view of justice without taking the wrath of God into account. God’s wrath is not a divine personality flaw but a measure of the distance that sin has introduced into our relationship with Him. It is this same sin which interjects the fatal flaw into our anger. It is not wrath in itself that is the problem according to James 1:20 but the fact that it is the wrath of man which “does not bring about the righteous life that God desires.” Sin is also the reason we cannot grasp the biblical idea of justice without taking into account divine wrath’s complementary attributes of grace and mercy. Grace reflects God’s disposition toward us in Jesus Christ. Mercy describes His action. Together they are able to quiet the accusing voice of divine justice. In the person of Christ, God took the punishment that justice demanded upon Himself and offers us forgiveness in exchange. 

The Seven Deadly Virtues–Leisure

[image error]My first job was short-term employment. I suppose you could say I was a day laborer. A neighbor hired me to weed her lawn. She provided me with a two-pronged weeding fork and promised to pay me five dollars when I was done. At the time it sounded like a fortune. I said yes eagerly, carried away by visions of all the comic books I intended to purchase with the money I earned. Plus this was work that I could do in a more or less recumbent position.

On my hands and knees in the hot sun, my enthusiasm soon diminished. The lawn looked much larger from that angle than I had first imagined. There were more weeds than I had thought. As the sweat trickled down the back of my neck, I poked them half-heartedly with the weeding fork, pausing every few minutes to scan the yard and see what kind of progress I was making. The view was not encouraging. The number of weeds appeared to be growing not shrinking.

After a while, I persuaded myself that I had worked long enough. There was still a weed or two left but surely my employer didn’t expect me to pull every single weed? She did. “You’re done already?” she asked skeptically when I went to the door to collect my money. Then she walked the lawn with me, pointing out the weeds that remained and grumbling about my work ethic. There were more than I thought. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed them. Probably because they were the same color as the grass, I reasoned. With a sigh, I knelt down again and went back to work, this time with even less enthusiasm than before. Eventually, my employer paid me off and sent me on my way. By now more eager to be rid of me than of the weeds.

“A sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he is too lazy to bring it back to his mouth” Proverbs 26:15 warns. I suppose my unhappy employer would have said that a sluggard buries his hand in the lawn, too lazy to pluck out the weeds. The sin that the ancients called sloth or acedia certainly includes laziness but it also involves more. Sloth has many features and manifests itself in many forms. At times it looks like what we call ennui, an immobilizing lethargy that leeches away our interest in those things that ought to concern us. Other forms of sloth are more active and profligate. We squander our time and energy on meaningless trifles at the expense of other obligations.

In our day sloth is often reflected in what is falsely called leisure. Sometimes this involves empty activity that does not provide either rest or pleasure. It is marked by a kind of frenetic busyness whose aim is to distract us from whatever is making us uncomfortable. Theologian Joseph Pieper observes that true leisure has a different character. Leisure is a kind of silence. It is an attitude of contemplation: “Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as activity, leisure implies (in the first place) an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy,’ but letting things happen.”

True leisure is marked by an attitude of confidence and peace. It is grounded in trust and particularly in trust in God. The essence of leisure is expressed in Psalm 138:8: “The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your love, O LORD, endures forever—do not abandon the works of your hands.” By this definition, true leisure is as important to our work as it is to our play. Leisure as most people describe it is merely time off. Leisure as God defines it is a state of grace. It is the ability to rest in God, confident that He will bring to completion all that concerns me according to His plan. 

 

The Seven Deadly Virtues–Prosperity

[image error]A couple of years ago I noticed a menu option on my retirement account’s website labeled “net worth.” When I clicked on it, the site asked me to type in information about my assets and liabilities. The result was a brightly colored graph which represented the sum total of all my worldly goods. I have looked at it many times since then and its effect is always the same. Instead of making me feel secure about my future, it leaves me anxious. No matter how much I have, it seems that I would like to have just a little more. There is a word for this condition. It is what the Bible calls greed.

Greed, like lust and gluttony, is a sin of appetite. While lust is usually associated with sex and gluttony is linked with food, greed is typically looked upon as a similar inordinate desire for money. Most of us are pretty sure that we don’t suffer from greed because we don’t have an inordinate amount of money. The rich are greedy perhaps but not us. The flaw in this reasoning is that desiring is not necessarily synonymous with having. It is certainly possible that a rich person might be a greedy person but so might one who is poor. It is not the having but the wanting that is the problem. The adjective that best expresses the impulse of greed is not “most” but “more.” Whatever I possess will not be enough if I succumb to the influence of greed. I must always have more.

According to Dorothy Sayers, the character of this sin has changed with the times. “It was an unromantic, unspectacular sin” she observes. “Unkind people sometimes called it by rude names, such as parsimony and niggardliness. It was a narrow, creeping, pinched kind of sin; and it was not a good mixer.” But in the modern era, this view of greed changed. “It was left for the present age to endow covetousness with glamor on a big scale and to give it a title that it could carry like a flag” Sayers explains. “It occurred to somebody to call it enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, covetousness has gone forward and never looked back. It has become a swaggering, swashbuckling, piratical sin, going about with its hat cocked over its eye, and with pistols tucked into the tops of its jack-boots.”

In our day greed still possesses some of the cultural dignity that Sayers describes. But the way we tend to legitimize this sin is by viewing it through a more personal lens. None of us is really greedy. We are merely seeking prosperity. Since greed is bad and prosperity is good, we have convinced ourselves that there is nothing wrong with our desire for more. The Bible does indeed speak well of prosperity. In the Old Testament, the prosperity of the patriarchs was attributed to God’s blessing (Gen. 32:9, 12; 39:2). Similarly, prosperity is seen as a something which God provides in the New Testament (3 John 1:2). Our giving springs from His generosity to us (1 Cor. 16:2). But we all know that what is good can be turned against us. Indeed, one way to understand the nature of any sin is to see it as a distortion of the good that God has provided.

In the case of greed, it is not prosperity itself that is warped but my desire. When my desire for more overtakes my gratefulness for what has been provided it undermines my trust in the Provider. The focus of my devotion has shifted from the Giver to what is given. This is why Colossians 3:5 calls greed idolatry. This same verse says that the only way to deal with greed is by putting to death “whatever belongs to your earthly nature.” This should be a clue to us that we are all prone to greed. It doesn’t really matter what your net worth is.

How much is enough? The answer is always the same: just a little more. Greed shifts my focus away from God to that which God provides. If greed is a form of idolatry then faith is its only true remedy. The fool in Jesus’ parable thought that if he accumulated enough, his soul would be able to rest in those things (Luke 12:19). But rest is Christ’s generous gift to all who trust in Him no matter how much we possess (Matt. 11:28-30). As Thomas Aquinas observed, “The whole good cannot be found anywhere in the realm of created things; it is encountered in God alone.” 

 

The Seven Deadly Virtues–Satisfaction

[image error]I have been bothered by my weight most of my life. I was heavy as a child, a condition which my mother euphemistically described as being “big boned.” I was so obsessed with the fear of being fat that even when I thinned out in my adolescence, I did not think of myself as thin. I am no longer thin and I am still bothered. I am not alone. According to some estimates, 45 million Americans go on a diet each year. In our weight-conscious culture, you would think that we would be highly sensitized to the sin the Bible calls gluttony. The truth is, most of us wouldn’t recognize a glutton if he swallowed us whole. We certainly wouldn’t be able to tell whether we are gluttons and the mirror will not help us. That’s because gluttony isn’t really about one’s weight at all.

Traditionally gluttony is linked with food and drink. The Bible associates gluttony with drunkenness (Deut. 21:20; Prov. 23:21). Gluttony is essentially a sin of inordinate appetite. But why would the Bible deem any hunger to be inordinate? Hunger, after all, is a part of our nature. If we don’t eat, we die. Jesus Himself came “eating and drinking” (Matt. 11:19). Food, drink, indeed, all our bodily appetites are part of God’s design. But what exactly is that design?

It is tempting to think that the function of our appetite is to point us in the direction of fulfillment and satisfaction. In truth, it is the opposite. Our appetites by their very nature can never be entirely satisfied. Satisfy your hunger with a meal now and a few hours later it will return. There is nothing to be done about it. Functionally, appetite is a means to an end. It motivates me to take in the sustenance I require for life. When appetite becomes an end in itself, it turns into a kind of slavery (1 Cor. 6:12-13). Spiritually, our appetites are signposts which point to a hunger that cannot be filled by any human means. They are a sign of our emptiness and our need for God. When we look to earthly means to fully and finally satisfy ourselves, we become those whose “god is their stomach” (Phil. 3:19).

Gluttony may seem like an outmoded relic of medieval culture to us. Yet those who live in a consumer society are especially vulnerable to it. That is because consumerism plays upon our emptiness by promising to completely satisfy our appetite. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the culture of marketing. “The consumer culture encourages us not only to buy more but to seek our identity and fulfillment through what we buy, to express our individuality through our ‘choice’ of products” author and activist Jean Kilbourne observes. “Advertising corrupts relationships and then offers products, both as solace and as substitutes for the intimate human connection we all long for and need.” It isn’t the buying and selling that is the problem here, so much as it is the false promise of satisfaction.

Consumerism has profoundly shaped the way the church functions today. Not only because churches are competing with one another to attract more attendees but because consumerism plays upon our spiritual hunger, causing it to promise more than it can deliver and offering cheap substitutes for those things that the Bible calls “worship” and “fellowship.” Instead of providing a context for encountering the reality of God’s presence, we try to create a worship “experience” that will attract more spiritual customers. In the place of “koinonia,” we offer atmosphere. In this model, both God and the church’s members are pushed to the margins.

The Bible’s warnings about gluttony are not a form of Gnosticism or asceticism. Eating is associated with fellowship with God in both Testaments. This theme was reflected in the many meals that Jesus shared with His disciples and was ultimately captured in the Lord’s Supper. It will find its culmination at the end of the age in the marriage feast of the Lamb. Only then will we find what we hunger for most. It is only then that our true desire will be satisfied.

 

The Seven Deadly Virtues–Love

[image error]We use “love” to refer to a multitude of desires and affections, some high and some low. An unmarried couple on a date might declare undying love for one another during dinner and then in the next breath say that they “love” the food that is on their plates. Neither of them thinks this is strange.  Afterward, they might decide to “make love,” using the same term in a third sense that is really more in line with what the Bible calls lust. Not every affection we feel necessarily qualifies as love. Sometimes it is just a passing fancy. At others, it is something even more basic, merely a bodily response to stimuli. 

Most people associate lust with sexual sin. The Bible does speak this way but the Scriptures also employ the term more broadly. In the New Testament, the Greek term that is sometimes translated lust refers to desire. It can speak of both legitimate and illegitimate desires. In its sinful form, our desire can be fixed on many things. It is just as likely to be focused on someone else’s possessions or on their success as it is to be an illicit desire for sex. John hints at the full scope of this cardinal sin in 1 John 2:16: “For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.” As far as John is concerned, when it comes to lust everything in the world is a potential target.

I do not mean to minimize our problems with sexual lust. Lust is so much a feature of our culture that it is hard to find a dimension of our experience which is not somehow shaped by it. Sexual lust is the point of appeal for most of the products that are marketed to us. If lust is not the direct focus of most of the entertainment we consume, it is at least the garnish that its creators use to hold our attention. But this biblical sin has become so commonplace in our culture that it is almost a cliché. Lust’s commonplace status does not make it less dangerous to us. If anything, overfamiliarity increases our vulnerability. We have become desensitized and are therefore too tolerant of it, both in our environment and in our own experience. But the biblical sin of lust has many faces and sometimes its sexual form is only a symptom of something else. In the middle of the last century Dorothy Sayers observed, “The mournful and medical aspect of twentieth-century pornography and promiscuity strongly suggests that we have reached one of these periods of spiritual depression where people go to bed because they have nothing better to do.” According to her diagnosis, in some cases, sexual lust may actually be a symptom of another of the cardinal sins. It is the one that the ancients used to call acedia or sloth, a condition which sophisticates of another generation once called ennui. 

You might think that sin and love would be incompatible. After all, if the heart of righteousness is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself, then the essence of sin must be the opposite (Matt. 22:37, 39). But sin has its own version of love. To sin is to love yourself at the expense of your neighbor. More than that, it is to love yourself at the expense of God. Sin shaped love expresses itself primarily in the form of narcissism. It is self-absorbed love. This affection is actually a distortion of love which, once it has achieved its full effect, actually proves to be an exercise in self-loathing. It is hate masquerading as love, compelling us to engage in self-destructive behavior. Sin promises freedom and delivers slavery. It speaks the language of friendship while treating us like enemies. Sin is a cruel master who promises good wages only to reward our loyalty with hard service, disappointment, and death. Yet for some reason, we return repeatedly to this false lover and expect a different result.

The antidote to lust is love–God’s love. This is a love which comes to us from the outside, like the righteousness of Christ. Adopting the language that Martin Luther coined to speak of Christ’s righteousness, we might call it “alien love” because it does not originate with us. It is a love that begins with God and can only come to us as a gift. For the Christian, this greater love is the organizing force for all our other desires. In this regard, it is not so much an emotion as it is disposition. As C. S. Lewis observed, “It is a state not of feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.” It is the Love which orders all our other loves. It is also the only love powerful enough to wean us away from our infatuation with ourselves.

The Seven Deadly Virtues

[image error]In the latter part of the Fourth Century, a monk named Evagrius of Pontus compiled a list of eight sins that people commonly commit. He didn’t consider this to be an exhaustive catalog of sinful behavior. The eight actions Evagrius singled out were meant to represent the main categories under which all other sins might fall. They came to be known as “capital” sins. His list included gluttony, fornication, greed, sadness, anger, weariness, vainglory and pride. Later church leaders reduced the list to seven, reasoning that vainglory and pride were essentially the same.

No doubt some of the items in the old monk’s list seem odd to us. Hardly anybody I know would call sadness a sin, let alone a capital sin. When someone’s sadness is debilitating, we usually treat it as a disease. Likewise, gluttony seems to moderns to be a throwback to an age when food was scarce. We might think that it is unhealthy or perhaps rude. But we generally don’t consider it to be a sin. Indeed, we usually don’t think about it at all. I’ve only heard one sermon on gluttony in my life and that was from a guest speaker during a chapel service while I was a student in seminary. The athletically fit speaker told the audience that those of us who were overweight preached the gospel with our mouths but contradicted it with our lives (or more specifically, with our bodies). In the class that followed chapel several of us were eager to know what our professor, a man of some girth, thought of the message. “Give me a moment,” he said. “I am enjoying a Snickers bar.” He chewed for a while and then in a wry tone declared: “All I have to say is that Proverbs 11:25 says, ‘The liberal soul shall be made fat.’”

Weariness also seems out of place to most of us. After all, isn’t weariness just a consequence of hard work? The industrious person is more likely to consider it a badge of honor. We don’t even know what vainglory is, though we tend to recognize it in others. In those instances, we call it boasting. While we may be reluctant to categorize boasting as a sin, we do agree that it is bad form. Unless, of course, it appears on a resume. Fornication is still generally considered to be a sin. But hardly anybody commits it anymore. Instead, people “make love.” Love is widely regarded to be a good thing and for many people making love is simply part of the dating ritual. Those who stumble upon the Bible’s denunciation of this sin wonder what all the fuss is about.

Contrary to the famous line uttered by Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street, most do not think that greed is good. But neither do they really view it as a sin. At worst, I suppose, they consider it to be impolite, at least when it is displayed publicly. As long as greed is not put on display, people look at it as either thriftiness or success.

If you read Facebook or drive the expressway, you already know that nobody believes that anger is a sin these days. We view it as an emotion. Actually, we now consider it to be a virtue, especially if it is exercised in the cultural or political sphere and is characterized as a “passion for justice.” Indeed, most of the sins in this list have been turned upside down, so that what the ancients once regarded as sin modern people have relabeled to be less than sin. In an age which has learned to call evil good and good evil, the seven deadly sins are now the seven deadly virtues. 

 

What’s in a Name? Maybe Too Much!

[image error]The other day I saw a billboard for an area university which promised that its program would turn the school’s graduates into “conquerors.” This was not the word I expected. It seems to me that a different description might have been more appropriate. Competent comes to mind. Or perhaps capable. Or maybe even hirable, as long as it is combined with the additional qualifying phrase: “in certain fields and economic environments.”

The trouble with a school advertising that its graduates will be conquerors is that it is promising too much. I suppose it might be appropriate if the school specialized in military strategy and its students were preparing to be despots or generals. But even then I think I would be suspicious.

This billboard is an example of the kind of hyperbole we often hear in our culture. It isn’t limited to marketing. Sometimes it creeps into the names we give our children. In the old days, bread and butter names like Jack or Suzie were perfectly acceptable. Now the names we hear sound more like titles. Instead of Phil, it’s Royal. Instead of Judy, it’s Precious. These aren’t names. They are adjectives. Some sound suspiciously like the names we used to give to our pets. “Come here, King! Good dog!” 

I do understand what is really going on here. Such names are meant to send a message to the child. They are intended to build a child’s self-image. Parents want their children to feel that they stand out from the crowd. Why merely be Mark when you can be Magnificent instead? Still, sometimes I think we do children a disservice by promising so much. Parents who want to be more honest in their naming might do better to call their child Average or possibly Irritating.

Some will say that the Bible sanctions this practice of aspirational naming. After all, didn’t Jesus change Simon’s name to Peter, which means “a rock?” This is true. But I will point out that the term doesn’t seem to refer to a boulder but to something smaller. It is more like a stone. Do you know how annoying it is when you get a stone in your shoe? Jesus called James and John the Sons of Thunder. These were the two brothers who offered to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritan village that refused to welcome Jesus (Luke 9:52-56). One wonders if there wasn’t just a touch of affectionate ridicule in the nickname Jesus bestowed upon them. 

Then, of course, there was the prophet’s daughter-in-law who named her son Ichabod after the ark of the covenant was captured by the Philistines (1 Sam. 4:21). According to Old Testament scholar Robert Alter, the name meant something like “inglorious,” or “Where is the glory?” But this was more of an observation about current events than it was a value judgment about the child’s character. If our culture decides to follow her example, in a few years I will probably start meeting students in my classes named “Government Shut-Down Due to Lack of Agreement on the Budget.” Though I suppose that it is unlikely, even if there is a biblical precedent. 

 I am afraid that the church is too much given to meaningless hyperbole in its rhetoric. It often does this in an attempt to market itself to outsiders. The trouble with marketing hyperbole is that it is empty. By saying too much, it says nothing at all. When the church slips into marketing speech, it exaggerates its experiences and misrepresents the nature of the Christian life. It relies on sentimental tropes, pat answers, and superficial analysis of life’s problems. Such talk blunts the force of the Bible’s true hyperbole when we come upon it. 

Interestingly, the Bible does not call us conquerors. It actually says that we are more than conquerors, “through him who loved us” (Rom. 8:37). In the same context, it also mentions trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger and the sword (vs. 35). This is no marketing hype but real life. A life that has been intersected by the grace of God. And that’s no exaggeration. 

On Good Friday

[image error]We didn’t attend church much when I was growing up. If we did go, it was usually because there was a funeral or a wedding. I once asked my parents whether we were Protestants, and they just laughed. “I suppose we are Protestant” my dad said. “That is, if what you mean by that is a protest-ant.” When I asked for clarification he said, “It just means we’re not Catholic.” The answer wasn’t much help to me.

My father was a lapsed Roman Catholic. He had grown up in the church and attended a parochial school. He boasted that the nuns had expelled him from kindergarten for bad behavior. He had once snapped another boy’s bow tie, an apparently unpardonable sin in those days. My grandfather was a medical doctor who treated the priests and nuns of the parish and my father had seen its darker side. When my father talked about his religious upbringing, he talked mostly of guilt, hypocrisy, and spite. 

My mother, on the other hand, did not have much to say about her religious background, though I gathered she had occasionally attended church as a child. On one occasion she disparaged the Hallelujah chorus. “I hate that song” she complained. “When I was a child we had to stand through the whole thing, while they sang the same words over and over again.” My mother had a kind of spiritual sensibility but I do not think she would have called herself a Christian. Neither of my parents identified themselves this way. If Jesus’ name was mentioned at all in our home, it was usually as an expletive.

Yet for some reason, when Good Friday came, my mother insisted that my brother and sister and I stay indoors during the hours between 12 and 3 pm. When we demanded an explanation, she told us it was because those were the hours when Jesus hung on the cross. In the 1960’s it wasn’t unusual for people to observe Good Friday as a matter of course. Shops closed for those three hours and many churches held services. What was unusual was for my family to take note of this Christian observance. We did celebrate Christmas and Easter of course, but not in any especially religious way. Christmas was mostly about the presents. Easter was mainly about candy and a new set of clothes.

I was disturbed by this sudden burst of devotion. The thought of Jesus suffering for three hours seemed vaguely depressing to me. Why did He need to suffer? Moreover, why did the rest of us need to suffer with Him? Surely He wouldn’t care if I went out to play. Or was it that He resented my freedom, fixed as He was to His place of suffering during those three hours each year?

When I was older and my mother gave up on this forced observance, I realized that it had only been a concession to culture.  My mother did not want us to seem disrespectful. She did not want us to stand out. It would be several more years before I grasped the real significance of the cross. That understanding did not come from Good Friday but from the Scriptures. As I read the Gospels, I came upon the cross again and saw it in a different light.

This was not the morbid Christ of my youthful reflection. This Christ did not resent my freedom, He pitied my bondage to sin. His gaze was not one of reproach nor did He view me with spite. This was a Christ who gave Himself on my behalf. This was the Christ who prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Truer words were never spoken. On Good Friday, we did not know what we were doing.

Mob Action

[image error]It wasn’t a parade, it was a procession. It was also a coronation of sorts. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem the multitude walked with Him, some going before and others following after. They cast their cloaks down upon the road before Him and cut branches from the trees to lay them down as well. They shouted for joy: “Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” Their words were both an acclamation and a cry for deliverance. If we had been among the disciples, we too would have thought that Jesus had finally come into His own. God’s people had recognized their king.

Yet in less than a week a different cry would go up. The crowd that gathered to watch Jesus’ trial, now more of a mob than a multitude, howled for Jesus’ blood. For a short time, Pilate became a strange ally and aligned Himself with Jesus in an attempt to set Him free. “Here is your king!” he declared to the crowd that spread out on the pavement before his judge’s seat. This was more or less what the multitude had meant when they had cried Hosanna. But now they changed their tune, incited by the jealousy of the religious establishment. “Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!” they shouted. Pilate turned out to be no friend after all and acquiesced. He turned Jesus over to the soldiers to be crucified.

Watching all of this from a comfortable distance of more than two millennia, I am shocked by the speed with which the celebrating crowd turns into an angry mob. How is it that they can move so quickly from apparent devotion to denunciation? But then I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at all. That is the nature of the mob. They are quickly moved and easily incited. We see it all the time on the Internet in our day. I should not be surprised by their inconstancy, I should be shocked by my own. For I find that I am more like Pilate than the screaming mob. Like him, I too can move from acknowledgment to acquiescence in seconds.

Sometimes it’s the crowd that compels me. I am more attuned to their sensibility than I am to the motions of the Spirit. I don’t want to stand out. I’d rather fit in. Or maybe I am falsely persuaded by the force of their enthusiasm and make the rabble choice. But more often it is my own heart that turns traitor. In the blink of an eye and in the quietness of my own soul I make the choice. I still know that Jesus is my king. But with a look or a word or an act, I surreptitiously take up the mob’s rebel’s cry, “We will not have this man to reign over us.”