[“Abou Ben Adhem,” by Leigh Hunt]
I first encountered that poem when I was younger than Iain is now, I think, and it’s stayed with me ever since—not because it’s poetically great, but because it’s a fascinating scene. I could easily start analyzing it as I would an Old Testament narrative—if the angel was there, God must have sent the angel, and obviously God knew what would happen, so . . . —and I’d be off to the races. That would be piling far too much weight on it, of course, but the poem is making a theological point: we can only love other people because of the love of God, and so to the extent that we do love others, it’s a sign of the love of God at work in our hearts.
Which is true, and one of those truths which sounds very noble and high-minded, especially if one wants—as it seems Leigh Hunt, who wrote “Abou Ben Adhem,” did—to argue the position that all religions are fundamentally the same, all lead to God, etc. At first blush, it seems freeing; you don’t have to worry about anything specific the Bible teaches, or any other religion, because as long as you love other people, you’re good. But here’s the kicker: that’s a move away from a divinely-revealed faith toward human religion, and as I’ve noted recently, that means legalism. What does it mean to love other people, and how do we know if we’re doing it right, or if we’re doing it enough? All well and good if you have an angel show up in your bedroom to tell you, but what about the rest of us?
I get teased a little for my insistence that we have to define our terms—which makes me smile, because it makes me feel seen—but no word ever actually goes undefined; it’s just that if we don’t get the definitions out into the open at the beginning, we don’t know what definitions everyone is using or who’s determining them, and so we’re playing by someone else’s rules without knowing it. That’s especially true when we’re using a big, loaded word like “love.” “All you need is love” sounds great when you have John, Paul, and George on guitar with Ringo on the drums, but what happens when you get down to brass tacks?
Well, what happens is what always happens: the law of love yields to the love of law, and the people who get to decide what it means to be loving make all the rules and judge you for breaking them. Which is why, within the church, our passage from 1 John this morning—the whole book, really—so easily and so often becomes a burden piled on the backs of the people of God. What does it mean to love? It means to obey all God’s commandments—and more than that, to find it easy to obey God’s commandments. It means we have to love one another—which in practice means we’re graded on whether those around us feel loved or not, and the one who uses the most red ink usually determines the grade—and we have to defeat the evil in our world. If you don’t do all these things, it proves you don’t really have faith, you don’t really believe Jesus is the Son of God, and thus you aren’t really a Christian. It’s right there in the Bible.
Is that really what John is on about? No; but it’s so easy to tell it like that—legalism is our native language, morally speaking, and translating our understanding into the language of grace is hard. When we hear commands and talk about obedience, we naturally go to law, and we tend to stick there. Given that, rather than trying to lay out John’s argument step by step from start to finish, let’s jump to the end and work backwards: this is not law, it is grace.
That might not sound like a radical statement to you; if it doesn’t, count yourself richly blessed. The church over the centuries has proven itself gifted and efficient at turning gospel into law. I first realized the extent to which that’s true in 2012 when I began my project on the Sermon on the Mount and discovered two things. One, not only are the Beatitudes commonly taught as law—which, when I really thought about it, seemed outrageously silly—I had been taught them as law, and needed to dismantle my own understanding of them before I could come at them right-way-round. Two, almost everyone has taught the Sermon as a whole as law—even Luther and Calvin, two of the greatest preachers of grace in the history of the church. If we can take “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” as a command to be followed, what odds we do any better with 1 John?
You know the answer—not very good. New Testament scholar Gary Burge tells this story:
Last spring I was explaining to an introductory New Testament class Paul’s view of grace as it appears in Galatians. Paul shares John’s opinion that it was God’s love expressed in Christ that inspires the Christian life . . . law by itself simply triggers rebellion. Then I tried an experiment. I asked all forty students to write a one-page essay analyzing whether their lives had been shaped by the threat of law or the wonder of God’s grace. I was devastated by the results. Over 90 percent of the class [said] the possibility of God’s disfavor and wrath had shaped their Christian outlook since childhood. God’s unending love was not foremost in their minds, but his possible displeasure was. Christianity, they reported, was really about following the rules. When I told them it was not, you could hear a pin drop. . . .
I do not believe . . . my student sampling was unusual. These were mature young men and women who came from strong evangelical churches and families. And their reflex was to please God so that he would continue to favor them. They had not learned to please God because he already favored them. . . . The following was written by a 21-year-old student who is a strong, knowledgeable evangelical . . . in a term paper describing the justice of God.
“I feel like God punishes me for sins all of the time. I feel that there is always something I am being punished for. I know that is impossible because there are not enough minutes in the day for God to punish us. I probably should not call it punishment, but that is the way I feel about God’s justice. I know of God’s love and blessings for me and for that I am eternally grateful and thankful. But I live with this fear that one mess-up and I will be punished again.”
Consider that, and look back up the page to 4:18: “Perfect love casts out fear”—why? Because “fear has to do with punishment.” Burge observes,
An immediate reaction among students—and even some colleagues—is the fear that without some disciplinary threat, without law, such generous love could be exploited. No doubt that is true. I am quite sure that Paul’s opponents in Galatia were saying the same thing. But it is striking that both John and Paul are willing to endure that risk. . . . Fear is not a primary pastoral tool.
The truth is, the gospel puts obedience to God—for believers—on a completely different foundation than punishment; the problem is that the temptation to legalism is constantly pulling us back toward paganism, which is vending-machine religion. The upside to that, and one of the reasons for its appeal, is that if you put the right spiritual coin in the god machine and push the right button, you are promised to get exactly what you want—none of this “God giving you what you need instead” stuff. The downside is, if you do it wrong, or if you refuse to comply, the vending machine topples over on you. To quote that unnamed student, “one mess-up and [you] will be punished.”
The problem with pagan deities is they only care about themselves, not about you; their “love” for you is entirely conditional, predicated on your giving them what they want. The one true God relates to each of us on a completely different basis. It’s common to say his love for us is unconditional, but that’s not actually right; that might sound like I’m pushing back on that idea, but I think I’m actually pushing it further. I’m indebted on this point to David Powlison, a Christian counselor and writer—for longtime VSF folks, Powlison is one of the few figures in the realm of Christian counseling of similar stature and influence to Larry Crabb. In his seminal article “Idols of the Heart and ‘Vanity Fair,’” Powlison writes,
The gospel is better than unconditional love. The gospel says, “God accepts you just as Christ is. God has ‘contraconditional’ love for you.” Christ bears the curse you deserve. Christ is fully pleasing to the Father and gives you his own perfect goodness. Christ reigns in power, making you the Father’s child and coming close to you to begin to change what is unacceptable to God about you. God never accepts me “as I am.” He accepts me “as I am in Jesus Christ.” The center of gravity is different. The true gospel does not allow God’s love to be sucked into the vortex of the soul’s lust for acceptability and worth in and of itself. Rather, it radically decenters people—what the Bible calls “fear of the Lord” and “faith”—to look outside themselves.
To say God loves us just as we are is still us-dependent. It can leave the door open for fear—after all, to say God loves me just as I am now isn’t necessarily to say he’ll still love me when I’m different; then too, conditions can always be added later, and God does seem to talk an awful lot about obedience. Alternatively, we can slide into complacency—I’m good, so I don’t need to change . . . which means I don’t need to grow. Maybe you’ve never seen a church led by people who stopped growing decades ago, but I have. It ain’t pretty.
As we are in Christ is a fundamentally different basis for God’s love for us, because it will never change even as we most definitely will. We are not perfectly fine as we are, and so we are being remade. At the same time, the work is already done, the battle won—we have been remade. We don’t see the finished work yet, of course, but in our experience we will be remade. God’s perfect love casts out fear, for fear has to do with punishment, and everything for which we might be punished has already been taken into account—and already taken to the cross.
That said, while we don’t have to obey God to earn his favor, we shouldn’t be surprised when John calls us to obey God’s commandments; accepting God’s free gift, by the very nature of that gift, presents us with a few challenges. For one, as John puts it, if you love the Father, you will love the Father’s other children, too. To use one of Paul’s metaphors, if you love Jesus, you will love his Bride, the church, as well. Last May at a presbytery meeting, I heard Dean Weaver speak about that—he’s the chief executive and chief shepherd of my denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church; he had not wanted to leave his church in Pittsburgh to take that position, but he felt compelled to do so because, as he said repeatedly, “I love the Bride.”
At one point, Dean said—I’m paraphrasing here—“If you tell me you don’t much care for me but you think my wife is wonderful, fair enough. If you tell me you think the world of me but can’t stand my wife, we have a problem.” I would say much the same, and listening to Dean, I realized that my commitment to the church and to preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ has the same heartbeat as his: for all she’s tried to kill me, I love the Bride. And I should; that’s how it should be. To shift back to John’s image, everyone who believes in Jesus is family. We don’t have to like them much, but they’re ours to love anyway.
Now, as I say that, remember Jesus’ definition of love, and therefore John’s, is not the same as ours. As I noted a few minutes ago, the world’s criterion is usually whether or not the other person feels loved, but John doesn’t use that measure because Jesus didn’t. John measures our love for others by the degree to which we’re obeying God’s commandments; no doubt he remembered Jesus’ admonition recorded in Luke 14:26: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” No, we’re not supposed to actually hate anyone, but we’re called to obey Jesus even when those around us want us to do something completely different. If we want to be his disciples, we need to stand before those who will call us haters, traitors, and conflict instigators, accept that they have made their judgment, and follow him anyway.
Which means, in part, to love them anyway—and to love them how? Contraconditionally. Not to commit to love them “if they . . .” [fill in the blank]. Not because we find a way to convince ourselves they’re acceptable just they way they are. God calls us to love them as they are in Christ—which means learning to see them as they are in Christ, not just as they are in this world. Easier said than done, to be sure, but the thing about what you see is that it tends to have a lot to do with what you’re looking for. Do we look at people with the hope of seeing what they are becoming in Christ, or are we looking for something else?
Of course, even if we learn to see others as they are in Christ, loving them that way still isn’t easy—especially when they’re calling us haters for obeying Jesus instead of them; and yet John says, “Loving God means keeping his commandments, and his commandments are not burdensome,” which sure sounds like he thinks it’s easy. Here’s the thing, though: not burdensome doesn’t mean not hard, not costly, or not painful. It’s not about how easy it is to obey God’s commandments, it’s about our attitude toward his commandments. We still find some of them fiercely hard, but the more we’re filled with and shaped by his love, the less we see them as burdens to bear and the more we see them as a clarion call to a better way to live.
To give you an illustration, one of the best things ever about being a fan of the Seattle Seahawks was watching our Hall of Fame left tackle, Walter Jones. Big Walt would drive defensive linemen back ten yards before they knew what had happened. On pass plays, he’d stretch out one arm, grab a pass rusher, and put him flat on his back. He was as big and strong as a truck—and he got that way by pushing them around. Literally. Part of his workout every offseason was pushing a three-ton Escalade around a big parking lot near his house. You’d see pictures, and from his face the man was in pain. That hurt to do. But was it burdensome? No. He did it gladly, even joyfully. Why? Because that’s part of what it took for him to be what he wanted to be—a dominant, Hall-of-Fame force at one of the game’s key positions. That struggle wasn’t a burden, it was a blessing, because through it, he grew, he got better, and the physical gifts God gave him were realized in his performance on the football field.
The bottom line here is twofold. One, God’s purpose is to build us up in integrity, not just as individuals but as a community: as we are being made one with Christ and made whole in ourselves, we are being made one with one another and made whole as his body. Two, God is doing the work, through his Son our Lord Jesus Christ, by the power of his Holy Spirit. He isn’t doing it from the top down, through the power of laws and rules and regulations, enforced by the fear and pain of punishment; he’s doing it from the inside out, by the power of love. Jesus has made his home in us, filling us with his love, so we can make our home in him. Our part is not to create our own integrity, individual or corporate, by our own efforts, out of our own wisdom; our part is to receive and respond to his contraconditional love for us, and thus to let him draw us into his slipstream, to be carried along in the work he’s already doing. Our part is to pray, in the words of our next song, “Teach me how to work and praise trusting that I am your instrument. . . . Send me out within your ways knowing that the task is finished.”
That means, as Larry Crabb put it, the pressure’s off: the instrument isn’t responsible to bring the work to successful conclusion, only to participate in it. If the task is already finished, we can’t ruin it, only contribute to it. The Lord has already built his table, and he has already prepared it for us. The promise made is already kept, sure as sunrise: we will gather with him around this table, and not only will we get to eat with him, we’ll get to serve with him.
“Optical Illusion?—Sunken City” © 2012 Rachel Samanyi; image has been cropped slightly to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic