"Until" is an Amazing Word

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We will be discussing chapters 7 and 8 of Fleming Rutledge’s book Epiphany: The Season of Glory tonight at 7:00 EST.

You can register to join us HERE.

In case you missed it, here is last week’s session with Fleming herself:

During the course of our discussions, my friend and fellow Fleming fan, Josh Retterer has been writing reflections on the reading.

Here’s his latest:

The agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry's response to “Love everybody,” was perfect in its honesty. “A man only has so much love to give!”

That’s certainly what it feels like when we hear that command in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. This is also where the oft invoked law/gospel distinction is thrust into the light. Christ’s word stands there, boldly, and won't be ignored; it definitely won’t ignore you. Gerhard Forde, in On Being a Theologian of the Cross, takes on probably the most impossible of all these impossible commands. I mean, have you met people, let alone enemies! 

“The law says, ‘Thou shalt love!’ It is right; it is ‘holy, true, good.’ Yet it can’t bring about what it demands. It might impel toward the works of the law, the motions of love, but in the end they will become irksome and will all too often lead to hate. If we go up to someone on the street, grab them by the lapels and say, ‘Look here, you’re supposed to love me!’ the person may grudgingly admit that we are right, but it won’t work. The results will likely be just the opposite from what our ‘law’ demands. Law is indeed right, but it simply cannot realize what it points to. So it works wrath. It can curse, but it can’t bless. In commanding love law can only point helplessly to that which it cannot produce.”

This leaves us in a bit of a pickle. But, here is a wonderful thing, it all ends up working out amazingly well for us. In chapter 8 of Epiphany Rev. Rutledge tells us how to navigate this, with a particular emphasis on the preachers who will (dare) to preach it. 

“It may be doubted, however, how seriously the ordinary Christian takes the Sermon on the Mount, or how well the average churchgoer even knows it. How many preachers have expounded the whole of it, or sought to illustrate what it might look like in practice? As soon as we ask this question, we must acknowledge that there has always been a tension in the way the sermon has been interpreted, sometimes rising to the level of serious divisions in Christian theology. Are we to understand the Sermon on the Mount as law, or as gospel? 

Like the Ten Commandments, the sermon can be read as prescriptive instead of descriptive. When that occurs, the liberating gospel of unconditional grace is obscured under a heavy weight of impossible expectation. The result will often be that the sermon is not taken seriously. Preachers and teachers will always need to be alert to the challenge of getting this balance right. It is always tempting to read the Epistle of James prescriptively (“Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead,” James 2:17) without reference to Paul (“No human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law,” Romans 3:20).3 Paul’s fundamental emphasis on justifying faith is not contradicted by the works that arise organically out of that faith, for the true vine produces branches (John 15:1-9; see also Romans 11:17-24). James seems to be saying that over a long lifetime, such as that of Abraham (James 2:21-23), God’s free gift of justifying faith will plainly show itself in God’s own works of righteousness. God’s mercy is fathomless, but it will never cancel out his justice; this seeming contradiction must continue to be at the heart of any serious attempt to proclaim the gospel. The symbiotic relationship of righteousness and mercy lies at the heart of the Beatitudes and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, and they serve to authenticate faith. This understanding of faith and works should not be understood as a threat to the radicality of Paul’s preaching about the justification of the ungodly (Romans 4:5; 5:6). There are certain qualities that will emerge in the person who knows herself to be justified by grace and faith alone (sola gratia, sola fidei). Those qualities will be a result, not a cause of justification. Such qualities will look like the Beatitudes appearing in that person, even though the great adversary will be pulling in the other direction until the Lord comes again.”

That “until” is an amazing word. The fight is already won. That produces a palpable effect on us. It is a reality, like sap in a vine. Or that God’s mercy is fathomless. Even better, when the Lord returns, the great adversary’s work ends; death and darkness end. God’s mercy does not. 

Amen! 

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