The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  Perhaps the hardest group to which to sell Paul and his liberating doctrines is to the gay community. This is understandable, for no group today suffers more from the stigmas made legitimate by centuries of Christian interpretation of scripture. Blacks were always within the church although in separate institutions, and women were always in the church although diminished in expectations and responsibilities, but homosexuals, as such, have not been seen to be either a part of the church or an object of its ministry.

  Yet there are millions of homosexuals who have found their sufferings, often at the hands of the church, to be an instrument of freedom and not of bondage. They have seen in Paul’s towering images of reconciliation in II Corinthians 5, and of transformation and renewal in Romans 12, a new identity that is based not on their sexuality but on their redeemed nature in Christ. Having been formed once in the image of God, which we read in Genesis, they are now formed again after the likeness of Christ, who, in the words of the ancient church fathers, “elevates their humanity that they might participate in his divinity.” Knowing this, and the actions of Christians notwithstanding, the homosexual hears Paul’s words in Galatians 5:1, “Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free,” as an invitation to liberation and participation in the community of the faithful. The Christian homosexual knows that his sufferings at the hands of Christians have in fact brought him nearer to God, for God is always where suffering is to be found. Who better than the Christian homosexual today can read Romans 5:1–5, and know from personal experience not only what it means, but that it is true?

  Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.

  There Must Be More to This Than That

  Writing in 1919, in the bleak shadow of the “war to end all wars,” W. Somerset Maugham said, “It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.” As with most literary pronouncements, there is some truth in this one. We have all read, even the least literate of us, of characters poisoned by suffering, made old and mean-spirited before their time. The petty little scorekeepers who dignify their daily dose of deprivation as “sufferings” are with us on every hand, “whinging away,” as the English say, embezzling sympathy, and suffocating all and sundry with their sense of how well they are bearing up under unbearable burdens. The clergy run into this sort of person all the time; it is, alas, a characteristic of garden-variety Christians, many of whom fill the churches.

  Whether suffering ennobles or embitters, most Christians have no idea of what real suffering is. This does not mean that there is not enough tragedy and calamity to go around. We know that there is. It does mean that as a rule most modern Christians in the industrialized West, if they think of suffering at all, think that it happens to other people or, if it happens to them, that it is the exception rather than the rule of their faith, and that it must be a stroke of bad luck which God or the minister needs to explain away in a hurry. In churches whose gospel is success, prosperity, glory here and rapture now, suffering is clearly not in God’s game plan for them; it is an aberration.

  This is what makes Mother Teresa so disturbing to the modern sensibility. She is so disturbing to the world as we know it, and to the church as we believe in it, that we must get her out of the way as quickly and as thoroughly as possible by making of her a saint, for saints, whether living or dead, as we all know, are virtually harmless.

  I met Mother Teresa some years ago when she came to Harvard to speak at Class Day, that great gathering of seniors on the day before Commencement, and then on the next day to receive an honorary degree. I was asked if Mother Teresa and her entourage, which consisted of one nun, could use my office as a place to rest for a few minutes before her speech. I was delighted to offer her my room, and she was duly brought in and I was presented to her. I tried to make small talk, but saints, I discovered, are not very good at small talk. I told her that I and millions of others thought that she was doing a great work in Calcutta. She fiddled with her beads and said, “It is Jesus.” I made several other feints at chatter but she was obviously on a different plane, and so I chose the wisest course of all, that of silence. When the university marshal came to collect her and to take her out to be presented to her audience of more than twenty thousand expectant listeners, he turned back to me and said, “I bet that was a deeply moving experience.”

  In retrospect, I suppose it was. Here was a woman who makes no apologies for the suffering in the world. She doesn’t pretend that she is “solving” the matter, nor does she pretend that the suffering she sees does not exist. In fact, if one dared to criticize a living saint, one might say that her quietism simply compounds the problem of the poor by doing nothing to address the social and moral root of the problem. She would not make a very good Gingrich Republican.

  My impression of her was that she was tough and crusty, not frail and gentle as she appears. She is, after all, a nun, one of God’s infantry, and she has spent her life on the front lines. It was no less a converted cynic than Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist and author, who brought Mother Teresa to the attention of a wider public through his book about her of some years ago, Something Beautiful for God. When asked what “good” her work of caring for the dying in the streets of Calcutta did, what its lasting social value was, and how she could go on in the face of remorseless suffering, she replied,

  Without our suffering our work would be just social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption. All the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed. And we must share it, for only by being one with them can we redeem them by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God.

  Unlike Somerset Maugham, Mother Teresa seems to remember that both suffering and redemption have something to do with Jesus Christ, the one in whom, for the Christian, suffering is manifested, redeemed, and transcended. That fact, central to the Christian enterprise and symbolized in the cross upon which Jesus was executed, has been so long undermined by a false gospel of Christian triumph and success that it is almost impossible to recover for the edification of the church. Protestants have long beguiled themselves with the notions that they worship a victorious and risen Christ, and thus an empty cross. Unlike their Catholic and Orthodox brethren, they will not make their devotions to the broken and bruised Jesus hanging down in garish Roman detail from his crucifix, and so the Protestant churches are filled on Easter but empty on Good Friday. The faith that is formed out of such a travesty of the gospel is one that is unfamiliar with suffering, incapable of enduring it, and unable to recognize the work of God in it. Those who worship at the church of the costless cross literally “have their reward,” as Jesus says. Literally, what they see is what they get, a convenience-store religion which may provide what one needs in the short run at great price, but which is incapable of sustaining one over the long run at any price.

  The reason that the dying ask to see the cross before they die is to be reminded that Jesus has been where they now are, and that by his grace they are now to go where he is. Suffering, of which death is the ultimate expression, they know by the cross is a means, and not an end. They know that death was as real to Jesus as it is now to them. They know that he was not rescued in the nick of time. They know that when his hour was come he had to meet it, and that there was no way out; and they know also that that is true for them.

  Knowing this, they also know that in the cross Jesus made it
through and that he came out on the other side; their prayer is that what was promised and achieved in Jesus may be achieved for them as well. It is not for nothing that we sing, in the memorable verse from “Abide with Me”…

  Hold thou thy Cross before my closing eyes;

  Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies;

  Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee:

  In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

  That cross represents suffering not set aside from life but suffering that springs from life, and is found within life itself. It is the most orthodox of Christian doctrine that the Savior does not save us from suffering, but is with us in and through suffering. It is hard to remember that truth when the cross becomes an empty object of bronze situated between two candlesticks and often obscured by flowers, but we forget it at our peril.

  Where in the world, then, does one look for hope? Not for optimism, mind you, but for hope? On the basis of the biblical witness one looks first to the places of suffering and of stress. That means that if we want to see where God is more likely to be found in this world, in these last days of the twentieth century, we look, for example, at South Africa, where for so long suffering was the context of life for both the oppressed and the oppressor. Yet who cannot fail to see in that “beloved country” of Alan Paton’s old novel a place alight with the stirrings of hope? Where else might we look? To Northern Ireland, of all places, that place of which the airline pilots used to say, “We are now approaching Belfast; please set your watches back three hundred years.” Here, in the place where the Troubles define normality, peace seems to be holding. It is unsteady, to be sure, and a bomb could go off tomorrow and back we would be, but it nevertheless represents the biblical principle that hope is spawned and is only hope in the place that appears to be hopeless. Even in the Middle East, where the peace process was so brutally endangered by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, we may look to hope as emerging out of suffering, for I am convinced that it was the fear of peace and the fear of the triumph of hope over bitter experience that caused the assassin to kill both the dreamer and the dream. It didn’t work with Joseph. It didn’t work with Jesus. It will not, I believe, work with Rabin.

  If global politics is not the model in which to try out this principle, where then is hope to be found among the people? Where the sufferings have been the greatest. That means that we look to those who have been excluded and placed on the margins, to those who by the terms of the world are not successful, to those who, in Jesus’ words, “suffer and are persecuted.” It is not simply that we expect now, as the result of our raised consciousness and improved scholarship, to find a place for blacks, women, and homosexuals within the household of faith, and perhaps even in the Bible. It is that the place for creative hope that arises out of suffering is most likely now to be found among blacks, women, and homosexuals. These outcasts may well be the custodians of those thin places; they may in fact be the watchers at the frontier between what is and what is to be. If, as Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Unearned suffering is redemptive,” then those who have suffered most, particularly at the hands of other Christians, have the most to give to a world of tribulation.

  All who know suffering may well stand in their debt, and all who suffer may well have something to give.

  Chapter 11

  The Bible and Joy

  I have never met anyone who has won a big-time lottery, but I have always been fascinated by the television accounts of those who have won millions from such places as the Publishers Clearing House. All I have ever got from the Publishers Clearing House is a lot of magazines, and so I am impressed with those who get that splendid check from Ed McMahon. Invariably the winners are surprised, and who wouldn’t be? They usually say something like “I’ve never won anything in my life!” “It can’t be true!” “This can’t be happening to me!” “How did this happen to me?” “At first I thought they had made a mistake!” We know the truth of their reactions, even if at times that truth seems to be a little rehearsed or premeditated. One of the great contradictions of our culture is that while on the one hand we can be described as optimistic, on the other most of us do not expect good news, and we almost always assume that real news is bad news. In the days of telegrams few people ever sent good news by wire; that could wait for a letter or even for a visit. When the Western Union boy appeared on his bicycle at your door, you knew that he carried bad news. When today you say to your companions at work that you have just won a million dollars, they laugh uproariously, and then, calming down, they say, “Come on now, get serious!” Serious news could not be as good as that.

  Yet the essence of that which Christians both receive and preach, the gospel, is called the “good news.” Good news in the Bible nearly always comes up unexpectedly, catching by surprise the individual who is its beneficiary. When Moses encounters the burning bush and the call of God within it to lead his kinsmen out of slavery in Egypt, Moses does not rejoice. He asks how this can be, and he doubts the wisdom of God’s choice of him; he further doubts that the people will accept his leadership, and pleads ineloquence as a reason not to accept this commission. Jews look upon the work of Moses as their ultimate act of deliverance, the sign that God was particularly with them, and they keep the remembrance of this deliverance as their holiest day. Christians too recognize the primary agency of God in this act and the election of Moses to perform it, and thus he becomes the first of the prophets. To Moses, however, this word from the Lord does not come to him as good news, at least initially. It is a task, a burden, a responsibility for which he may well be unfit, but God has made an offer that he cannot refuse, and in the remorseless spirit of such offers Moses accepts it, but not with joy.

  Moses is in some anticipation of Mary, who also receives rather unexpected tidings—hers from the angel Gabriel. Mary has been so often depicted as weak and submissive, “the handmaiden of the Lord,” or, as one angry feminist once put it, “the doormat of God,” that we forget the feisty and challenging nature of her initial response. To the salutation of the angel Gabriel, she asks, “What kind of greeting can this possibly be?” To the news that she is to bear a son, Mary, no fool though she may be young, asks, “How can this be, seeing that I do not know a man?” Rather than rushing to anticipate her humility or to make an argument about the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, we might do well to pause and ponder her wariness, her caution, indeed her reluctance to being pushed into joy. We know, as do the Jews with Moses, that this is a great thing, and we imagine that something of our joy must be hers, but she is caught unaware, and when we encounter her in this conversation with Gabriel she is a long way from joy and rapture. It is only after she visits her cousin Elizabeth, as recorded in Luke 1:39, that Mary catches up with the joy that lies before her. Her song, known now as the Magnificat, begins, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”

  The examples of Moses and Mary and their slouching toward joy have always been a comforting set of examples for me, teaching me as they do that joy is an elusive consequence of something else, and not a first cause or primary habit of mind. This was important for me to remember, for the evangelical tradition in which I was brought up placed a high premium on joy in principle, whereas in fact the tradition was rather joyless. I can recall rather joyless people reading dutifully Psalm 100, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands…” and Psalm 98, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth…” Our hymnbook even had a section in the topical index called Joy, but we sang those hymns only at the evening service and at the midweek meeting, never on Sunday morning. It was just as well, for I found it difficult to be joyful on command, and it was all the harder to comply when I learned that the grammatical form of the Hebrew in Psalm 100 was in fact the imperative. When I and others would be asked at evangelistic meetings if we didn’t feel the joy of Christ in our hearts, I usually winced, because just then, and on cue, I usually didn’t. I am grateful now for th
e inability to follow that command to be or to feel joyful, for from that inability to be joyful on command I learned a most important lesson: Joy is elusive; it cannot be summoned forth like an actor’s tears. Joy is a response and not an initiation, and it comes at those moments of encounter with thin places, when we see more than we have reason to believe. I shall say more about this elusive quality of joy later, but now I wish simply to claim joy as one of the elements of religious experience by which people make sense and meaning out of what John Habgood calls “undeserved happiness bubbling to the surface in thanksgiving.”

  One does not often think of Presbyterians as a joyful people: decent and orderly, yes, but not given to spontaneous expressions of joy. It is hard to think of them knowing quite what to do with “undeserved happiness bubbling to the surface in thanksgiving,” and after all, it was Charles I who said that there was nothing more dangerous in all the world than a Presbyterian fresh off his knees. Charles ought to know. Yet that most Presbyterian of all documents, the Westminster Confession and Catechism, a product of the Westminster Assembly of Calvinistic divines held in London from 1645 to 1652, and the basis for historic Presbyterianism, says that the whole duty of man is “to love God and enjoy him forever.” There we have it: joy as a command, joy as a duty. No wonder joy is so elusive. Perhaps we all ought to wear sweatshirts and display bumper stickers that say TAKE JOY SERIOUSLY.