Forgiveness has to be personal

Corrie Ten Boom was 52 years old when the Nazis came for her and her family.

For two years, the Ten Booms had been helping to hide Jewish families and other refugees during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. When she was arrested, Ten Boom and her sister Betsie were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany, where Betsie died. Ten Boom survived, and when the war ended, she returned home and established a safehouse for refugees.

Two years later Ten Boom was back in Germany, sharing with the internationally reviled German people a message that God forgives. One night, at a church in Munich, she recognized a member of the audience. He had been one of the guards at Ravensbrück.

At Ravensbrück, Ten Boom had known hunger and want. She had been stripped of all her possessions and forced to walk naked past the guards. She had been forced to sleep in beds infested with fleas. Her sister Betsie had died, one of an estimated 50,000 women to perish at Ravensbrück. Prisoners there had been starved, overworked and even experimented on. Ten Boom had endured and witnessed unimaginable suffering, and this man had been a part of it.

And he didn't want just a divine pardon. He wanted hers as well.

If you've heard the story, you know how it ends: She forgave him. (If you don't know the story, go read it.)

Corrie Ten Boom's story is one widely shared in Christian circles, in no small part because it is so amazing. It's hard to imagine a more difficult request than the one the former Ravensbrück guard made of her, and it defies belief that she actually forgave him. It's not just amazing; it's supernatural.

That's one of the reasons we often lionize Ten Boom and portray her as a larger-than-life hero of the faith, but when we do that we miss out on so much. We can draw inspiration from saintly heroes, but following in their footsteps is too daunting if they wear seven-league boots and we're left to chase after them in sandals. There is hope if we remember that seven-league boots only go one step at a time.

We'll start with the first step. Let's suppose we could approach Ten Boom the afternoon before she arrived in Munich. Maybe she's having a cup of coffee, or maybe she's writing her thoughts down on a piece of paper. She sees us coming, and smiles that encouraging smile of hers, so we ask her the big question. Has she forgiven the people responsible for the death of her sister, for all that she had suffered and seen during the Holocaust?

The words wouldn't even be out of our mouths before we realized what a stupid question this was, not to mention rude and presumptuous. Of course she has forgiven these people. She's in Germany, isn't she? While other survivors of the camps were weighted down with horror and grief, or quietly rebuilding their lives and starting new families, Ten Boom had come back to the land where she had suffered, to share God's forgiveness with the nation that had visited such evil on the world.

And then there was Ten Boom's work in the Netherlands. She hadn't just been caring for Jewish refugees and other victims of Nazi savagery; she also was providing shelter for jobless Dutch citizens who had collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation.

How could anyone think to ask if she had forgiven? Of course she had.

Her encounter with the former Nazi brings out the one thing missing from this forgiveness narrative: the human element. It took his self-awareness and his desire for forgiveness to set this amazing story in motion. It's easier to forgive in the abstract, but it's much more meaningful to do it person-to-person. If the former guard hadn't been in that Munich church that night, he never would have asked Ten Boom to forgive him; and neither of them would have experienced that soul-shaping moment.

It's not just enough to offer forgiveness carte blanche. For real, deep and meaningful forgiveness to happen, someone needs to ask for it, and someone else needs to give it.

So where does that leave us when people are unaware how badly they have hurt us, or in even worse situations, know what they have done but don't care, because they don't see it as a big deal? Is it possible to forgive someone if they don't ask for it? Even the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the grandfather of teachings about forgiveness, says that God's forgiveness is free but we are required to acknowledge our sins and to repent of them, rather than merely feeling sorry about them.

Think about the story of the rich young ruler. He wanted to follow Jesus, who told him that mere belief wasn't enough. The ruler also needed to part with his wealth and give it to the poor around him. Unfortunately, the money meant too much to him, and the young ruler walked away, prompting Jesus to lament that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Compare that to the story of Zacchaeus. As a tax collector, Zacchaeus used his position with the Roman government to extort money from his countrymen. Jesus didn't even need to prompt him. During dinner, Zacchaeus pledged to give half his possessions to the poor and to repay fourfold anyone he had defrauded, after which Jesus declared that salvation had come to Zacchaeus' house.

Jesus seems like a forgiving guy. You're left with the impression from these two stories that he's going to have a good relationship with Zacchaeus going forward. The other guy? Not so much.

So where does that leave us? I've heard for years the merits of letting go of things, and there have been many times I've given that same advice to other people. And letting go seems like excellent advice when someone is overreacting, like being angry because their favorite seat was taken, or because someone else ate more cookies than was fair.

The trouble is, it's easy to let it go and forgive when someone is five minutes late picking you up, but not so much when they completely forget about you, left you stranded in the middle of nowhere and potentially put your life in danger. It's easy to let go of an inconvenience. It's much harder to forgive when someone has really hurt you.

At best, letting go may be the first stage of forgiveness, one where no one learns anything, except for how inexcusably awful other human beings can be. But maybe that's the highest we can aspire to in some circumstances.

Author Madeleine L'Engle once described herself in a situation where she realized she needed to forgive someone but couldn't find the strength to do it. So she prayed this: “God, forgive the son of a bitch,” and found that in the end, it was enough. It was a start.

And so, for those who have wronged us and who make no attempt to set things aright, we pray to the Lord: "Lord, forgive the sons of bitches." Amen.

So say we all.


Copyright 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Forgiveness is a Struggle

I've been having a hard time with forgiveness lately. I'm sorry, did I say lately? It's been a problem for years. More than a decade, even.

Fourteen-and-a-half years ago, my wife and I opened our home to a foster child. At the age when our own daughter could climb stairs, feed herself, draw pictures with crayons or pencils, and communicate her thoughts with laughter, tears and words; Isaac could barely stand, much less walk. His vocabulary consisted of wordless but excited moaning, and he had no idea how to play. (He could sit still for TV, though. His parents taught him to do that extremely well.)

We didn't do this alone, though. I was from Pittsburgh and my wife was from Tuscon, Ariz., but we did have the support of our church, a community of believers we had been a part of since we came to the area. As one they stood before God and swore an oath to support us as we took this child into our hearts, and to support not just us, but also another couple who were offering their home his sister.

Isaac's problems were worse than we initially realized, but for those first few months things went gloriously. One of the women in our church was a licensed social worker, and at the beginning she and her husband handled arrangements for supervised visits. They gave us support in other ways too, as she gave us perspective, explained state regulations and even offered advice on how to engage a 2-year-old who was used to being ignored.

Isaac's mother had started coming to our church several weeks before the state removed the children from her custody, and Carla had difficulty understanding boundaries; so other friends ran interference for us. And everyone expressed great enthusiasm for what we were doing. If shouldering the burden of caring for someone else's abused child is Paradise, then that winter was Eden.

The serpent had arrived in Eden by springtime. The pastor our church had hired a year previously was showing his colors, as he used his pulpit to manipulate, to bully and to control. As quickly as he had drawn new congregants in his first several months, he was now driving people away, and as they went, our support network unraveled.

The social worker and her husband disappeared from the scene first. Then other people began to realize that they were overextended, and they began to pull back as well. We couldn't. There was a child depending on us.

My wife bore the worst of it. In addition to the extra attention Isaac needed, we had to care for our own daughter and there was a second child on the way. Harder still, I had started a job that spring that demanded more than 50 hours a week, including almost all day Monday and Tuesday. I could get relief by going off and working in the garden, but for my wife, Eden became a cage with iron bars.

She tried to get help. She called people from the church and asked them to watch our daughter for an hour or two just so she could attend a medical appointment. They told her no.

Time went on, and soon it became evident that Isaac was returning to his birth parents. We watched as the progress he had made in our home was torn up by the roots and thrown out. If our church was grieving with us, we couldn't tell. By midsummer, the church had all but fallen apart, and the people who had sworn to be with us were nowhere to be seen.

Isaac had come into our lives with a great deal of fanfare, but when it came time for him to depart we were almost completely alone. When I came home from work at two in the morning and found my daughter sitting at the stop of the stairs crying because her brother wasn't around, I was there to comfort her.

When the quiet and the grief overwhelmed with a depth too profound for words, the community I had believed would be with me, was gone.

So I say this to my old church: You screwed up, big time.

These people had sworn before God that they would be there for us throughout the entire time we fostered. They sang our praises, and told us how our faith inspired theirs. When we lost Isaac, they were nowhere to be found. We didn't even get a lousy sympathy card. One person when I saw her barely a month later actually told me to get over it.

Those last two really hurt. Fifteen years later, and forgiveness is still a struggle.


Copyright 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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An empty 'maranatha' waiting for Godot

It's Sunday evening. My family is gathered around the dinner table as we have every Easter for the past fourteen years. There, in the center of the table, a wine glass stands on a saucer next to a bottle of wine.

“How much joy have we had this year?” I ask, and fill the wine a quarter of the way. “This much?”

My girls know the drill. “More than that!” they answer, and I fill it halfway to the top. “This much?” I ask.

“More than that!” I pour again. Three-quarters. “This much?”

“More than that!” Wine flows, and a moment later wine fills the cup past the rim and splashes joyously to the saucer below. We have friends. We have a home. We have one another. Middle Daughter has found a passion for the stage that will carry her well into adulthood. Oldest Daughter is in the home stretch of her junior year and thinking about college. For Youngest Daughter, every day is a new adventure, every moment a treasure to unpack. Life overflows with joy, and with love.

After we have measured our joy but before we eat the meal, comes what I am finding is the hardest part of Easter. My own wine glass in hand, I turn to Youngest.

“Before Jesus ascended into heaven, he told us he would return one day,” I tell her. “Open the door and invite him in.” I quickly add: “Don't let the dog out.”

Youngest knows the routine by now. She opens to the kitchen door and peers out into the back yard. “Maranatha,” she calls. “Come, Lord Jesus.”

There is a pause. Jesus doesn't come. “Maybe next year,” I say. Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won't come this evening, but surely tomorrow. 

It's been about two thousand years. How long are these Last Days supposed to last, anyway?

I had my religious awakening in 1988, about six weeks after high school graduation. While I was away at college I soon found myself drawn to an Assemblies of God church off campus. Services there were lively and boisterous, a marked departure from the staid Presbyterianism I had grown up in. There was an immediacy about worship there that I had never felt before, a sense that we were in the very presence of God and not just admiring him from a distance.

With that immediacy also came an urgency. Christ could return any day. The modern nation of Israel had formed in 1948, an event that to many evangelicals fulfilled key biblical prophecy in heralding the Second Coming. Adding to that urgency were the dramatic shifts in the popular zeitgeist and in geopolitical power over the course of that one decade.

For much of the 1980s the entire nation had lived under the cloud of nuclear war. Made-for-TV movies like “The Day After” in 1983 and “Countdown to Looking Glass” in 1984 carried the fear right into our living rooms. Conflicts like the military downing of a Korean Air Lines flight in September 1983 set the nation's teeth on edge. Even the pop culture reflected this fear, with songs like "99 Red Balloons" and "It's a Mistake" imagining nuclear war breaking out over a simple misunderstanding. (As it nearly did.)

Then in the late 1980s, reforms like glasnost and perestroika led to the breakup the Soviet Union. One by one the Baltic republics declared their independence and established democratic governments. The Berlin wall came down, and suddenly there were talks of reunifying the two Germanys for the first time since World War II.

With that much change afoot, it couldn't help but feel that Judgment Day was coming. And when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, armchair interest in biblical prophecy shot up in a way it hadn't since Hal Lindsey had published “The Late Great Planet Earth” in 1970 and Christian moviemakers started producing B-movies like “A Thief in the Night.” Jesus was coming! No one knows the day or the hour, but still it had to be soon. It had to be.

Except Jesus didn't return. In fact it's been 68 years since the founding of Israel, so significant that Edgar Whisenant once wrote a popular book, “88 Reasons Why the Rapture will be in 1988,” prompted by that event. (Spoiler: It didn't happen.) Whisenant later predicted the return of Christ in 1989, 1993 and 1994 as well. Jesus didn't return then either.

'And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come.' — Matthew 24:14

This has been going on for a while. The church fathers were so convinced that the Parousia was coming within their lifetimes that the Bible contains apostolic letters reassuring people not to panic that they were dying of old age before Christ's return. He's coming, Peter says. Just be patient. It's been about 1,980 years. How patient do we have to be?

I don't have a good answer for that. I'd love it if I could find a neat and tidy conclusion that makes the interminable wait seem worthwhile. The gospels tell us that Jesus is going to return, and it's the creeds that we recite; but year after year keeps going by. We keep waiting, and he keeps not returning.

Why do we do this? Is it because the Second Coming is supposed to be such a major event? At the Parousia, that wondrous appearing of Jesus, we're told that all will be made right. Fish will team in rivers and streams whose waters will be restored, and herds of buffalo will stampede across the plains again. The wicked will no longer feed off the anger in the land and turn us against one another, and the arrogant will no longer sit in places of power.

When Christ comes, we'll recognize the dignity of one another without pause or exception. We'll recognize the wrongs we've done one another over the centuries, and we'll ask forgiveness for not setting it right sooner. We'll apologize for separate drinking fountains and for glass ceilings, for stolen land and for stolen labor. We'll dismantle empire and repair the damage it has caused, and as we get to know our neighbors, we'll wonder why we ever avoided them before.

Is that why we wait, to remind ourselves what the Kingdom of God is supposed to look like? Do we have the promise of a Second Coming so that we can take seriously what he said the first time he came, and start working on that in the meantime?

“Maranatha,” my daughter dutifully says. There is a pause. Jesus doesn't appear, just like he didn't appear last year, or the year before that.

“Maybe next year,” I say, and I think: “I doubt it.”

The doubt is all I have, Lord. I give it to you, and pray that it's enough.


Copyright 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Ten percent is all I have left

I reached the conclusion about four to six weeks ago that Christianity is about 90 percent bullshit.

By this I do not mean just how it is practiced today, by prosperity charlatans and Prayer of Jabez nonsense, but the very thing itself. Our doctrines, our mythology, our concepts of God and sin, our attitudes toward the Bible, and so on, by and large would make an excellent fertilizer if someone could figure out how to bag it.

That 10 percent, though, is impossible to let go of. I find that it won't let go of me.

What's in that 10 percent is Christ, and his resurrection. It's been said with some truth that if God didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. I don't believe anyone could invent Jesus.

I've seen some attempts, and they're always pathetic. They make no sense, or they represent perfectly one philosophy, one viewpoint, one nation, or one ideology. The Jesus depicted in the gospels is impossible to pigeonhole on politics, economics, taxes, education, environmental policy, or anything. He is so freaking subversive, so determined to embrace all people yet still managing to offend everyone he shouldn't, that he defies the ability of humanity to imagine.

As for his Resurrection, Occam's Razor suggests that the simpler explanation is probably the true one. And so we ask ourselves, which is more likely: that this group of incessantly bickering and fighting disciples willfully perpetrated a fraud of unprecedented scale on the world, gave their lives in some of the most horrible ways imaginable, and no one brought out a body to confound the fraud -- or that Jesus actually rose from the dead?

My money's on the Resurrection because, quite frankly, it's simpler.

But none of that is entirely germane to the discussion of church. I know the standard explanations given for the expectation of church attendance, and I'm really not interested in rehashing them. I'm trying to take a step back and ask what it is that I really want, whether that counts as a reasonable expectation, and how I can go about realizing those goals in church. I'm trying to find my way to offering what I have to offer in a way that works with this church and its structure.

Does that make sense? Ten percent is all I have to work with, and it will have to be enough.

Viewing Jonah as divine fiction

One of the common objections among evangelicals to viewing the book of Jonah is ahistorical, is that such a view is the first step down a long and treacherous slippery slope.

Ken Hamm, a major name in creationist circles, asks "If the Creation and the Deluge stories aren't actual events, as described, then at what point does God start meaning what he says?" If you can't believe in Jonah, how can you believe in Jesus coming back from the dead? Especially when he referred to "the sign of Jonah" as the only evidence his generation would receive that he was messiah!

How can I believe in the Resurrection but not in Jonah's misadventure with a marine animal? It's actually pretty easy. I believe the story of Jonah being swallowed by a great fish is a parable about God's love for all nations. I believe that the Resurrection is an actual historical event. (See? It's not hard at all.)

The Bible is a collection of multiple genres. It contains mythology, from Genesis 1-12; it contains folk stories and legends, from Genesis 13-50, the books of Judges and Ruth, and parts of Exodus; and it contains history, from Samuel through Kings and Chronicles, plus Ezra, Nehemiah, and Acts. It includes poetry in the Psalms and the Song of Songs; and wisdom literature, in Proverbs, Koheleth, and Job.

There is mysticism in the gospel of John; theology in most of the Pauline and lesser epistles; personal correspondence such as Philemon; lessons on Christian living, such as the book of James; apocalyptic writing in Daniel and Revelation; and so on. The synoptic gospels actually combine several of these types of writing.

The Bible isn't a history text, though it contains history. It isn't a math text, though it contains some math; and it isn't a science text, though it contains some science. (And some of it appallingly bad, like the way Jacob breeds Laban's flocks so that he can get all the best ones and leave Laban with the weak ones.)

We do the Scriptures needless violence when we insist that there is only one way to understand it, and that its every word has to be treated as definitive in terms of science, history. Its only claim about itself is that it's God-breathed and meant for instruction, encouragement, reproof, and revelation.

Given the polyphany of voices in Scripture, it's reasonable to regard Jonah as divinely inspired fiction. In what way does that diminish its meaning or message? Either way, its inclusion in the canon shows that God's love abounds even to our enemies, and that his desire is for a broken heart and contrite spirit, rather than to leave a smoldering ruin where a great city once stood.


Copyright © 2007 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Resurrection lies at the heart of faith

You know, it's the Resurrection more than anything else that keeps me from walking away.

It's not apologetics. A lot of apologetics involves either violence to the text, such as the rather involved, complicated, and beside-the-point efforts to justify scientifically the Deluge and a six-day creation, instead of just letting the stories be what they are; or they involve trying to convince ourselves that square pegs are round.

It's not experience, because experience can go be interpreted at least two ways. Do we sense God's presence during worship, or does something about music stimulate a part of our brains that we mistake for God's presence? Those who have gone to both have remarked that attending a Grateful Dead concert is like attending a Pentecostal worship service.

Those who attend churches with loud worship, heavy on guitars and drums, feel excited in the presence of God -- just as they would at a secular rock concert, because the volume triggers an adrenaline rush and makes those who listen feel excited.

And those who attend somber, serious-minded services with organ worship probably feel the same sort of sober response as concert-goers listening to Bach or Mendelsohn.

It's not the transformation, because I don't see much evidence of that. I've known absolutely saintly people of just about every religion, and even with no religion, and I've known some real jerks who claim to have been born again. Frederick Douglass in his autobiography noted that the cruelest slave owners were also the most devout.

Keep in mind that many Christians see nothing wrong with imposing Christian morality or views as the law of the land if we can build a large enough lobby for it. If that doesn't seem so bad, just ask a gay friend how much compassion they get from the church crowd for happening to be gay.

Think about the way Christians so lovingly rip to shreds spouses who file for divorce.

Consider the paranoid thinking that often comes from our evangelical leaders about the various agendas supposedly at work to destroy all that is decent in America, and the cavalier arrogance that marks the ways we discount as foolish those whom we disagree with.

Recall the ways we so carelessly classify one another as "real Christians," "cultural Christians," "counterfeit Christians" and "Christians who don't get it as well as I do" based on petty stuff like baptism, eschatology, doctrines of Scriptural inspiration, ethics and sexual morals, abortion, capital punishment, and so on.

And that doesn't even touch the Christians who  shoot abortionists, bomb clinics, or tacitly support those who do.

When you get down to it, I see very little difference between Christians and the rest of the world as far as spiritual renewal goes. As someone once observed, I'd find it easier to believe in the Savior if I knew more people who had been saved by him.

But the person of Christ is someone I can't let go of, and the Resurrection is something I just can't shake.

Understanding and cultivating the unconditional love of God

I love to get a new trade paperback comic to read.

I'll sit for hours at night, reading the story over and over again. Each time I read it, I see new details that eluded me on the first reading — clues that foreshadowed the twist ending, intimations about relationships between characters, and clever little tidbits in the background art. I love the way creators weave the strands of a story together, and when the story is told well, I can enjoy the structure and telling of the story as much as I enjoy the story itself.

That's what I'm doing now with the notion of God's love. What God's love is about and what it means to be loved by him are questions I have puzzled over for years.

Part of the problem is that we often have a fatally flawed understanding of grace. We see divine grace as something that kicks in after we've made our best efforts and tried our hardest, but hat's not it at all. That would mean we have to earn grace, and grace that can be earned isn't really grace.

You could call it "the law of consequences." I'm sure you know how this goes. "If I do X, then by God's grace, Y will happen." The only problem is, that's not grace. It's law, and law never heals, it only kills.

Ask a divorcee. Chances are, they'll be able to tell you about the times they fell into this trap.

"If I had only been a better wife, he wouldn't have left me"; or "If I had been a more attentive husband, she wouldn't have felt neglected and wanted to start over with someone else." If I hadn't spent so many hours at work, if I hadn't been home so much, if I hadn't forgotten to fix the roof.

Parents'll do the same thing. "If I had been a better parent, my child wouldn't be gay." "If I hadn't been so strict, he would love me more."

If, if, if.

You'll also see the flip side. "Oh, it's all by the grace of God it worked out this way. We just followed the scriptural principles on how to raise our children, on how to keep our marriage vibrant, and on how to balance work and home life. Without the Lord, it would have been a disaster." (Notice the statement of pride? Although they're claiming to give God credit, they're also stressing how much they did to earn God's favor.)

The truth is, you can do your best job and still fail, or do a rotten job and have everything work out just fine. Influence still exists, but Christ died to free us from the law of consequence. The law of consequence, if we were under it, would result in utter failure for all of us, since none of us is capable of following the law and to break the least part is to be guilty of breaking it all.

But by living under the law of consequence, we subject ourselves to an immense, unbearable burden that steals our joy, keeps us from experiencing Christ's love, and leaves us miserable and alone.

Experiencing the joy of Christ's love often means letting go of our self-imposed performance expectations and allowing ourselves to act out of love rather than obligation. When James tells us that faith without works is dead, he means not that we do things because God still expects us to perform good deeds, but that our faith will express itself in tangible ways as we love those around us.

Being involved in a soup kitchen because "Christians care about the poor" is the first kind of act; it's law. Being involved in a soup kitchen because I want to help the people there springs from a different source, and is an act of love. Same action, different heart.

Another part of the question has to do with what God's love is and how he expresses it. It's only been in the last few years, as I've mourned the loss of my foster son, that I've really started to gain a mature understanding of God's love.

I can't speak for anyone else, but for the longest time, I don't think I loved God as much as I was just in love with him. An example from my own marriage: When my wife and I first started dating, and when we first married, we had periods marked by a giddy, heady feeling of euphoria. She was sensitive, charming, well-mannered, considerate; she enjoyed my jokes, shared my interests, and held the same deep convictions as me. All I could think about was how much I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. That's being in love.

Since we married six years ago, although my prior assessment of her remains good, there have been times I've wanted to scream. She's nagged me, criticized the way I fold the laundry, delivered withering critiques of projects I was proud of, and blown up at me for not being able to read her mind. Once, when I had got up early and done a number of things just for her, she left me in tears within an hour by complaining about how I had done each of those things without once stopping to thank me for doing them in the first place.

The sun and the moon still set on her, and the stars above still circle her, and I'm still amazed that she wants to spend the rest of her life with me, but our relationship has matured. There have been times for each of us when it would have been easier to walk out, but we stayed. That's not being "in love" -- that is love, and it's much more satisfying.

God's love is the same way, but infinitely moreso. It's so wild and difficult to explain, I think it's easy to understand why people might complain that he's either indifferent to our suffering, or just downright cruel.

Why do I say that? Let's take it from an example Paul provides us in Scripture. In his letter to the Roman church, Paul says that God demonstrates his mercy and compassion in sending rain to both the just and the unjust. Men as evil as Hitler knew what it was like to be in love; men as full of hatred as Osama bin Laden know the joy of holding their own newborn babies; and even a serial killer like Ted Bundy knew a thousand little delights every day, even after he denied those same delights to his victims. It's easy to see that God's mercy and compassion abound to even the most wicked.

That's a great sentiment, but it's hardly the best example Paul could use, in some senses. It's one thing if God shows great kindness to undeserving people, but he also allows really nice people to suffer hideously, such as the victims of men like Hitler, bin Laden and Bundy.

Elie Wiesel suffered horribly at Auschwitz and saw the desecration of everything he had believed about God and the struggle between good and evil.

In California in 2002, there was a 5-year-old girl who was abducted, kicking and screaming, from her front yard where she had been playing, and was raped and brutally murdered. In New Jersey, we had the horrifying case of Faheem and Raheem Williams, who were under state care yet still were locked inside a basement by their caretaker to starve. (Their DYFS caseworker had closed the case when she was unable to find the boys, rather than keep the case open and have to deal with the thorny problem of losing two abused children.)

Bruce Jackson, 18, weighed about 60 pounds when police found him rummaging for food through garbage cans. His foster parents, a churchgoing couple, were in the process of formally adopting him and other foster children. As far as their case records indicated, they were in a great home -- never mind the starvation, severe medical neglect, and what else.

Kick it this way, kick it that. God showers the wicked with great compassion while he sometimes seems to piss on the righteous and the innocent. Is he cruel, or merely capricious? Paul asserts he's good.

Paul's basis for that claim is the Cross, the lynchpin of human existence. This is where Christ became all the sin of the world, and took on himself all the suffering and torment that goes hand in hand with being human. Everything before the Cross pointed to its coming; everything after it points back to it.

If we rejoice and draw near to God, it is because Christ made it possible. If we suffer, whether for sin, for righteousness or just because, we find solidarity with Christ, who also suffered for each of those three reasons. If we have any righteousness before God, it is because he looks at us and sees his son instead, all because of the Cross.

So if the Cross is the fullest expression of God's love, and if it suffuses all human history with meaning, what does that mean?

It means that the whole of human history, from the day God breathed life into Adam down to the advent of the New Jerusalem (and far, far beyond that) is also an expression of God's love. It's not like any other form of love we've ever known as humans.

It's wild, and uncontainable, and it moves with the irresistible force of a river coursing down the rapids toward a waterfall, where it will dash us against the rocks if we let it carry us. We'll be buffeted and bruised, cold and unable to grip anything but water, and it'll toss us about and leave us gasping, but it'll never kill us -- at least, not in an important way. Instead, it makes us alive in indescribable ways.

I shared this with someone once, and her question was, but how do I experience it? First, we let ourselves live free of the demands of law. There's a joy in knowing that it doesn't all depend on your effort, and that your only obligation is to love. Secondly -- and this is the hardest thing -- we need to learn to love. Loving as Christ does means living in relationship with other people, no matter who they are, seeing people as people and not as projects or as beneficiaries of our attention.

Forget this hectic pace we whip ourselves into, and take the time to enjoy the people around you, and as you become aware of their needs, find ways that you can fill those needs. Cultivate relationships, and more than that -- cultivate relationships with other people as you work to help the world around you.

It's like the men's ministries that involve hanging out and watching football together. Some ministry.

There may be male bonding, but the way to experience God's love is to embody it and carry his love to the people around you, particularly the needy. Be involved in something like Habitat for Humanity, or foster care, and make connections with the people around you.

Do that, and you'll discover God in new and amazing ways.

Postmodernism and Christianity, perfect together

Ten years ago at least it was a popular teaching in churches that postmodernism is contrary to the Christian faith.

This is nonsense. Postmodernism is simply a generational outlook that reminds us that a lot of what we hold to be self-evident is based on cultural and personal presuppositions. It involves deconstructing things to get past the accretions of past years and get down to the essentials.

Postmodernism also stresses the importance of relationships. Love expressed in action is fundamental to Christianity, and it certainly leaves people more receptive to a philosophical and religious discussion than simply telling everyone why society is going to hell in a handbag.

As someone who grew up in the postmodern generation -- Gen X, and proud of it -- I can't say I really have a problem with this.

My younger brother became a lot more interested in what I had to say about Christ when I became a missionary. Other people have shown more interest ever since we took in a foster child.

"Let your light shine before men so that men may see your good deeds and praise your Father, who is in heaven" (Matthew 5:16).

It's our job to reach the lost by presenting the gospel in a way that people will understand without altering the Truth of it. If other Christians can't handle that, they'll have to deal.

Choosing Barabbas over Christ

I first came across this essay way back in my college days, in 1990 or so. It's a nice piece to trot out as Easter approaches, to stop and reflect on what happened on Good Friday.


"Not this man, but Barabbas!"

It is often said that Christianity is at its roots anti-Jewish, that it encourages hatred for Jews by teaching that they are responsible for the death of Jesus. Moreover, it is said, this is not just a distortion of the Christian faith by a few misguided fanatics -- it is the teaching of the New Testament itself. In this essay, I should like to examine in what sense, if any, this is so.

Before examining the question of how the Christian scriptures interpret the events, where they lay the blame for the events connected with the death of Jesus, let us consider how they report the events themselves, their account of what happened, and the role of the Jews in it.

It seems to me that some aspects of the trial of Jesus are often misunderstood, and that it is important to clear up the misunderstandings, both because they cause ill will between Jews and Christians, and because they keep us as Christians from understanding clearly what the Scriptures have to teach us.

In the gospels, we read that Pilate was willing to release Jesus, but that the crowd shouted, "Crucify him!" and that Pilate gave in rather than risk a riot. From this, many readers infer that the overwhelming majority of Jews hated Jesus because he rebuked them for their sins, and were determined to see him dead.

Occasionally, the moral is drawn that the crowd was not so much consistently malicious as hopelessly fickle, so that the same tongues that shouted, "Hosannah, Son of David! Welcome in the name of the Lord!" on Palm Sunday were ready to shout "Crucify him!" only five days later.

Now the first thing to be noted is that the gospels plainly declare that Caiaphas and his associates were determined to kill Jesus, not because he was unpopular, but precisely because he was popular. They were afraid that the people would hail him as the messiah, and start an uprising against Rome, which the Romans would crush without mercy, as they had similar uprisings in the past (John 11:47-50).

And so they decided to have him arrested, but not when there were people about, because of the danger of a riot in his favor (Matthew 26:5); hence the usefulness of Judas, who could lead them to him at a time and place where he was alone and could be seized quietly.

It is highly probable that they made arrangements with Pilate ahead of time, explaining the situation to him and receiving his assurance that when they brought him the prisoner at the crack of dawn, he would ratify the judgment of the Jewish tribunal immediately and automatically, without re-examining the case, so that the prisoner could be sentenced at daybreak and nailed up within the hour, before the people knew what was happening. The following points favor this theory:

1. If Pilate had received an advance visit, he might well have told his wife what it was about, and so it would have been natural for her to dream of Jesus and her husband on Thursday night, and to wake in the morning knowing that he had gone to sign an execution order.
2. The accusers could not enter the courtroom, lest they become ceremonially unclean and unable to celebrate the Passover. This required Pilate to be continually going outside to hear what they had to say, and back in again to confront the prisoner. This is a ridiculous way to conduct court, and presumably court would not ordinarily have met that day at all. That Pilate consented to hear the case under the circumstances suggests prearrangement.
3. Pilate, having got a note from his wife, changed his mind and decided to re-examine the case after all, instead of simply glancing at the warrant and signing it. When he says to the chief priests, "What is the charge against this man?" They answer, "If he were not a criminal, we would not have brought him here." In other words, "Never mind the details, just sign."

This is an incredible piece of insolence, explicable only if they were relying on an explicit promise that this case would go through without a snag. Caiaphas presumably had explained that Jesus was a dangerous man, and unless he were dealt with swiftly and without giving his followers a chance to react, there was danger of a major uprising.

So here they were, delivering the prisoner at the crack of dawn as arranged, to be sentenced and nailed up before most of the city was stirring. And now Pilate was, for no apparent reason, having second thoughts. No wonder that his accusers feel double-crossed, and that their response betrays their indignation.

Pilate delays, sending the prisoner to Herod in the hope of not having to make a decision himself. And by the time that Herod sends him back, there is a crowd. They have come to demand the release of the Passover prisoner.

Now few if any have come to demand the release of Jesus. Except for the disciples, who have fled in disarray, and the arresting party, almost no one in Jerusalem knows that Jesus has been arrested. Nor is someone likely to show up who has no particular prisoner in mind that he wants released, but who plans to vote for someone or other when he gets there. In fact, most of the crowd consists of partisans of Barabbas, and have come for the express purpose of getting him released.

Years ago I heard a sermon in which the preacher spoke of how the crowd chose Barabbas over Jesus, and reminded us that Barabbas was a murderer, and that it was as if the crowd had a choice between Jesus and George Sidney Sitts (a then-famous multiple murderer -- today he would have said Ted Bundy).

But surely this misses the point. Barabbas was condemned for murder and insurrection. In the eyes of those who favored armed resistance to Rome, he was a freedom fighter -- less a Ted Bundy than a Nelson Mandela, or, if you like, a Joe Hill.

The English writer Dorothy L. Sayers, in her radio play The Man Born to be King, suggests an Irish parallel. Suppose that in the days before Irish home rule, during "the troubles," you are an Irishman in Dublin, and it is St. Patrick's Day. Suppose for the sake of illustration that it is the custom that every year on that day, the English governor general must release a prisoner selected by the Dublin crowd.

This year, good old Paddy Murphy is in jail, sentenced to be hanged because he blew up a bridge that a British troop train was crossing. So we are all going down to Government House this morning to shout, "Free Paddy Murphy! Free Paddy Murphy!"

Here we are now, at the back of the crowd, almost a block away from the balcony on which the governor general (may his bones rot!) has just made his appearance. A great roar has gone up from the crowd. "Free Paddy Murphy!" On the balcony, the governor general (may his bones rot!) is waving his arms and trying to get the crowd to quiet down so that he can speak. People are quieting down a little, expecting him to announce the freeing of Paddy Murphy. But no, he is saying something to the effect that he has another prisoner in mind that he would rather free instead.

Now the crowd is really roaring, and we are shouting along with everyone else. The nerve of the fellow! The rule is that he has to free the man that we pick, and does he think that he can take the choice away from us and set someone else free instead? If he can get away with that, we might as well not have the St. Patrick's Day Amnesty at all. But in fact he is not going to get away with it. If he tries, we'll see to it that he has a riot on his hands. Altogether now, boys. "Free Paddy Murphy! Free Paddy Murphy!"

Fine. The governor general has backed down. I knew he would. He doesn't want a riot on his record. So Paddy Murphy is free and the other fellow is to be hanged. Who was the other fellow? I didn't quite catch his name, and it really doesn't matter. I suppose it is a shame that he's got to hang, but it was him or Paddy, and what counts is that Paddy got off, and that we showed the governor general (may his bones rot!) that we know our rights and that he can't bluff us out of them.

All this, of course, takes Pilate completely off-balance. He has managed the whole thing badly. When the case first came to him, he could have ordered the prisoner released on the spot. Instead, he has the brain-wave about passing the buck to Herod. When Herod simply sends the prisoner back, the crowd has assembled by this time. Knowing (if he was in Jerusalem the previous Sunday he could not help knowing) that Jesus was extremely popular with the people, he assumes that he can talk the crowd into choosing Jesus for the Passover Amnesty.

When this blows up in his face, he has effectively tied his own hands. By offering the crowd a choice between Jesus and Barabbas, he has said, "We have here two prisoners, both condemned to death." Having said that, he cannot turn around and say, "I was just kidding about Jesus of Nazareth. Of course he is innocent and I never intended to sentence him to anything."

To do that would be to acknowledge to the crowd that he had tried to cheat them, had tried to get them to waste their vote on a man who did not need it. Pilate has already convicted the prisoner and passed sentence without noticing it, and there is no way out.

***

What is the practical application of these considerations? What do they do for our practice, as opposed to our historical curiosity?

First, they guide us in making statements about the Crucifixion and the role of the Jews therein that meet the tests of truthfulness, fairness, and goodwill. Christian statements on the subject have not always done so, and it is important that they should.

Second, they guide us in our own thinking about the Passion of Our Lord. It is easy to think of history and conflict in terms of good guys and bad guys. Why did Nero persecute the Christians? Because he was one of the bad guys. Period. Why did Caiaphas want Jesus dead? Because Caiaphas was a wicked man. And of course this means that we would never behave like Nero, or Caiaphas, or Pilate, or Herod (either Herod Antipas or his father Herod the Great at Bethlehem a generation earlier). We may cut a few corners every now and then, but sheer wickedness for its own sake is not our style.

In fact it is not as simple as that. Let us look at the record:

So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said, "What are we to do? For his man performs many signs. If we let him go on thus, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation." But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, "You know nothing at all; you do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation should not perish." (John 11:47-50)

There you have Caiaphas' motives plainly set forth, and they are defensible and in some respects praiseworthy. Many times in Caiaphas' lifetime men had risen up and incited the Jewish people to strike a blow for national independence. Some of them had claimed to be the messiah. Some had performed, or were believed by many to have performed, miracles. All had ended in disaster, with severe repressions from the Romans.

Caiaphas had every reason to fear that with the next uprising all traces of Jewish liberty would be stamped out. Certainly he had grounds for arguing that it was better to kill one potential leader of a rebellion than let him survive to lead thousands to their deaths. A general who will not sacrifice one man to save a battalion has no business in uniform.

Do we ever reason like this, concentrating so on the big picture that we neglect the immediate issues of right and wrong that are before us? Perhaps not. Most of us are not in a position to be faced with policy decisions on a large scale.

Very well then, let us look at the crowd. If they had assembled that morning out of sheer malice and wickedness, because they had heard that a completely innocent man was on trial and they wanted to make sure that he was convicted, then their actions would have no lesson for us. But in fact they were there for the perfectly legitimate purpose of getting a freedom fighter out of the clutches of the occupation troops.

Intent on their purpose, they did not stop to think when Pilate put forward an alternative. They simply thrust it aside and demanded what they had come to demand, seeing in Pilate's suggestion only a distraction from the business at hand.

Are we ever like that? Do we ever pursue a goal with a single-mindedness that keeps us from stopping to consider who might get hurt in the process? If so, then let us remember Our Lord's words: "What you have done to the least of these, you have done to me."

***

We have seen how the Holy Scriptures narrate the events leading up to the Crucifixion. Now, what do they say about blame for the events?

On two occasions, Peter, addressing Jewish audiences, speaks of them as involved in the killing of Jesus:

"Men of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works which God did through him in your midst, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men." (Acts 2:22-23)

"Men of Israel, the God of our fathers glorified his child Jesus, whom you delivered up and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release him."

(Acts 3:12-13)

However, when Paul is addressing a synagogue audience in Pisidian Antioch, he says:

"Brethren, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you that fear God, to us has been sent the message of this salvation. For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize him or understand the utterances of the prophets which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled these by condemning him. Though they could charge him with nothing deserving death, yet they asked Pilate to have him killed." (Acts 13:26-28)

The distinction is clear. Peter is addressing crowds in Jerusalem, the first address less than two months after the Crucifixion, and the second shortly thereafter. It is probable that both audiences included persons who had been present when Jesus was condemned. But Paul, addressing Jews outside Jerusalem, says, not "You killed him," but "They of Jerusalem killed him."

There is no suggestion in the New Testament that "the Jews" as a body were responsible for the Crucifixion. The most that can be argued is that the writers think that "they of Jerusalem" were responsible.

Now Christians have been accustomed to view the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the second temple in A.D. 70 as a punishment for the Crucifixion. And in support of this, we have Christ's own words as he wept over the city (Luke 19:41-44 and Matthew 23:37-39). What are we to make of this?

I reply that a historian who refused to put any religious interpretation at all on his data nevertheless would have good grounds for connecting the crowd's choice of Barabbas over Jesus with the fall of the city a generation later.

The people were offered a choice between two leaders, one offering spiritual renewal and the other political and military action aiming at national independence. They chose the latter. Given the strength of Rome, and Rome's willingness to use that strength, the choice was suicidal. A purely secular historian might have listened to the crowd that day and said, "Now I know that the sack of this city by the Romans is inevitable."

A Jewish friend to whom I made this point asked, "But why do you blame the Jews of that day for aspiring to political freedom and national independence? In what other people would such a goal be considered anything but admirable?"

I said: "One answer would be that the Jews had a calling not to be like the other nations, and that therefore what is allowed to other peoples might not be allowed to them" (1 Samuel 8:7,19-20).

It is not that political aspirations are wrong in themselves, but that they cannot take first place with those called to serve God. But in fact, I remind you that our hypothetical historian is carefully steering clear of religious and moral judgments. He is not saying that it is wrong for the Jews to fight Rome for their independence. He is only saying that if they do, they are bound to lose -- which they did.

***

So, when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but that a riot was about to begin, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, "I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves." And all the people answered, "His blood be on us and on our children." (Matthew 27:24-25)

Here we have the people solemnly cursing themselves. But one thing is missing -- a voice thundering from heaven, "So be it!" It is written: "How can I curse whom God has not cursed?" (Numbers 23:8). A curse, even on oneself, is powerless if God does not ratify it. Jesus, as He was being crucified, said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Does anyone suppose that his words carried less weight with the Father than theirs did?

I regret to say that I have heard one person argue that this prayer was spoken only on behalf of the Roman soldiers, not on behalf of the Jewish rulers, since they knew what they were doing. This contradicts the words of Peter: "Brethren, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers" (Acts 3:17).

On the other hand, the fact remains that Matthew has preserved for us the words of the crowd. Since he clearly did not preserve every word spoken that day, it appears that he thought these words significant. What then is their meaning?

There are no grounds for applying them to the Jewish people as such. The application must be narrower, to the then inhabitants of Jerusalem and their immediate offspring, the next generation; or broader, to all the peoples of the earth.

As we have already noted, they are applicable to the sack of Jerusalem, and it is largely the crowd front of Pilate's hall, and their children, who would bear the brunt of that sack when it came a generation later.

On the other hand, they are applicable to the whole human race. In the Law of Moses, we find that blood is taken as a symbol of guilt. To say that A's blood is on B is to say that B bears the responsibility and the guilt for the death of A. But blood is also taken as a sign of purification. When a leper is declared to be well again, and clean of his former disease, he is smeared and sprinkled with blood (Leviticus 14:6,7,17). When the covenant is ratified at Sinai between God and the people of Israel, they are sprinkled with blood (Exodus 24:8). When a priest is consecrated to the service of the Lord, he is smeared and sprinkled with blood (Exodus 29:20; Leviticus 8:23,30) In like manner the blood of Christ is on every member of the human race, either for guilt and condemnation, or for cleansing, incorporation into the covenant, and consecration.

May God grant it to each of us to receive it for the latter.