Surprised by God

by Chris E W Green

  Perhaps that is where we too often find ourselves: believing strongly—but in misunderstandings of God’s word. We trust God as provider, but rely on our own sense of need. We trust God as healer, but assume we know what health is. We trust God as deliverer and protector, but expect that deliverance to come on our own terms and in our own time. In these and in countless other ways we are so much of the time taxed by false expectations and bad desires, waiting on God to do what God is not going to do—at least not in the way that we expect it to be done. And so we move from suffering to suffering, from frustration to frustration, from disappointment to disappointment, not because God is unfaithful, but because our expectations of God are stubbornly perverse. We have turned the bread of God’s promises into stones of distrust.

  What are we to do, then? How do we right our expectations? We must contemplate the living God as he has made himself known to us in Christ. And we must give time for that contemplation to convert our imaginations, to free us from the illusions that blind us and from the passions that enslave us.

  In many ways, our move toward a mature grasp of the truth begins in the recognition that God is not in control of what happens in the world, and that all that we experience in this world is at best an incomplete realization of God’s will for us. Perhaps we want to think God is in control because of our own fantasies for control or our own anxieties of being controlled. Regardless, we have to come to terms with the fact that God is not in control—even as we confess in faith that God is sovereign.

  ***

  Saying God is sovereign means that God is not at the mercy of what happens in the world, does not suffer change as all creatures must, and is not in any rivalry with, much less under the control of, some other power. God is not and cannot be caught off guard or surprised. God is God and everything that exists does so only in radical dependence on his sovereignty.

  But sovereignty is utterly other than what we have known as control. Control makes something act in ways false to itself. It violates, overpowers, coerces, masters. Control takes away freedom, forcing someone or something to do what is against its own nature or will. And God, as creator, simply does not—and indeed, cannot—do that kind of violence. God gives being to creatures, affording them their freedom, their integrity. To say that God is sovereign is to say that God does not need control to get his will done. He does not have to destroy our freedom to express his own; he does not have to subjugate us to make himself known as Lord. God’s sovereignty is such that his freedom is not at odds with our freedom, and his Lordship does not subjugate but frees and empowers and fulfills. Creatures overpower; God reigns. And that reign is absolutely identical with God’s love.

  I recently heard a sermon in which the preacher argued that God, like the engineers at Disney World who work from a control center underground, is “at the controls,” monitoring what is happening with us, assuring that we have the best time possible. But nothing could be further from the truth. God is not standing at some remove, observing what is happening with us, acting in ways that secure us against trouble or difficulty. God is not a mind that observes but a spirit that acts and interacts. But that interaction happens over time (and upon time) in ways we cannot imagine or anticipate.

  Luther said that if all we had to go on was our experience of the world, we would have to conclude either that God does not exist or that God is evil. But by faith we see more than our experience of the world: we see God, and hear his promises to set all wrongs right. Until the end, therefore, when God’s will is finally fully done, we have to maintain a distinction between what happens and what God is doing, trusting that nothing happens apart from God’s will but that not everything that happens is itself God’s will. Or to say the same thing another way, everything that happens takes place within the will of God but not everything that happens is the will of God. What is more, nothing that happens is God’s will in fullness. Whatever happens, then, and whatever God does, we are left waiting for the fullness of God’s action, and so we pray, even after God has acted, “Let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10). We will keep praying this prayer until the end of all things, which finally God will answer that prayer.

  In 1993, while on assignment in Sudan, journalist Kevin Carter took a photograph of a young girl, nearly dead from starvation, with a vulture hulking nearby, waiting for its prey to die.

  What are we to say about this moment? How is it related to the will of God? And what of all the other moments of tragedy, injustice, and evil that take place in the world? Why doesn’t God intervene to save this little girl? Or the thousands of other children who starved to death during the famine? If God can stop it from happening, then why doesn’t he? If God cannot stop it, then what do we mean when we talk about God being sovereign? We need not say that God “had a plan” in which the death of this child played some necessary part. And we don’t need to say that God could not do anything about it, not even because of chosen self-limitations: God does not have to be less than God for creatures to be all that they are. It is best, I think, to say that this death took place not as the will of God, but within the unfolding of that will of God. Difficult as it is for us to imagine, that moment, like every moment, remains open to the will of God—God even now is still active then and there, in a time closed to us as past. Hence, we must patiently endure until God’s will is finally, fully done. And when that will is done, then we will see that God indeed is good, that even death cannot separate us from his love.

  This is the heart of our hope: until the end of everything, God never does everything God can do. That is why we pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. For now, we live in the tense moment between what God has done and what God has yet to do. “Now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face” (1 Cor 13:12). This is why the earliest Christians prayed, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus”: it was a cry for God to finish what he has started. And so for this little girl, whose name we do not know, we pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, and we wait expectantly, confidently for that to happen in the end.

  ***

  In history, God has not yet acted fully—except in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In him, we have seen already what we do not yet see anywhere else for anyone else. As the writer of Hebrews says: “Now in subjecting all things to [human beings, as promised in Psalm 8], God left nothing outside their control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus” (Heb 2:8–9a). That is, we do not see human beings in their rightful, promised place. We do not see the world set right. But our hope is that what has already happened to Jesus, what is already true for him as the Last Adam and the head of new creation, will be true of us too in the end. We believe that God already has done everything God can do for Jesus, but not yet for us—and so we live by faith and not by sight.

  At first, this may seem like anything but good news. But whatever happens to us, whatever comes or goes in our experience, good or bad, fortunate or unfortunate, we can know God is not through being God yet, not through doing what he eternally purposes to do, and when God’s will is finally fully done, all things will be made right. Until then, we must avoid both naiveté and despair. We must resist the temptation to distrust God’s goodness, and we must refuse to trust our experiences of the world. When God is all in all, everyone will know what we see already not by sight but by faith. In the meantime, we remain faithful, hoping against hope in a God for whom all things are possible and in whom all things not only have their beginning but also their rightful and joyous end.

  Chapter Seven

  Christ’s Death Lives in Us

  “So then death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.”

  2 Corinthians 4:12

  “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Lent always comes at just the right time: just as we are all falling-down d
runk with the cares of this life, buzzed out of our minds with never-ending, day-to-day worries. Every year, we need time to sober up, time to get our heads clear and our feet steady under us again. Given the state our routine leaves us in, we need time to prepare ourselves for the unimaginable shock of Good Friday and the even greater shock of Resurrection Sunday. Wonderfully, that is precisely the time the church has given us in the Lenten season.

  Over the season’s forty days, we have the chance to pull ourselves together. With whatever measure of faith has been graced to us, we have the chance to get ourselves ready for what’s to come. We have the chance to give ourselves with renewed energy and seriousness to fasting and to almsgiving, to self-denial and to sacrifice. We have the chance to make room for God at the heart of our lives, both by what we give up and by what we give away.

  During Lent, we not only fast occasional meals, familiar luxuries, and shallow entertainments. (We’re not doing this for self-improvement or our health, after all.) Like Christians have been doing for the beginning, we fast from hasty words and needless chatter, from contemptuous and mistrustful thoughts, from angry and bitter feelings. We fast from unwarranted judgments about ourselves and about others. We give up self-hate. We give up impatience with our children. We give up fear of strangers and hatred of our enemies. And we give away food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, shelter to the homeless. We visit the sick and the imprisoned. We bury the dead with honor. We offer instruction to the ignorant, counsel to the doubting, comfort to the sorrowful, reproof to the erring. We forgive those who have wronged us, and bear with those who trouble and annoy us. We pray for everyone and everything.

  ***

  After his baptism and before his temptation in the wilderness, Jesus fasted for forty days. He fasted not to provide an example, but to make it possible for our fasting to work good in us. He fasted so our fasts need not be merely religious. As we live the Lenten season in the spirit of Jesus’s fast, we find we are being put in touch with our real (as opposed to our imagined) needs, and with our absolute (as opposed to our conditional) neediness. We also find ourselves being made increasingly aware of our neighbors and their needs, needs that—we suddenly realize—are simply more important than our own.

  Lenten spirituality, we might say, is one of the moods of contemplation. It is a heavy mood, and painted in dark hues. By grace, Lent reminds us that we are creatures, that our lives are not our own, and moves us into the kind of prayer that this realization makes possible. The truth is, we exist only because God calls us into and upholds us in existence. As Scripture says, it is in him that we live, move, and have our being. As Robert Jenson has said, if for some reason, and against all possibility, God were to decide right now that we are no longer worth sustaining, we would immediately cease to be. And what is more, we would never have been.

  By grace, Lent reminds us that we are dying creatures, that we are nothing more than dust—strangely animated and self-aware dust, to be sure, but dust nonetheless. On Ash Wednesday, especially, as the poet Cheryl Lawrie says, “Our egos and esteem are held up/to the brutal mirror of the finite.” Lawrie call us to come to terms with the fact that in the imposition of ashes, we suffer a hard reminder: “Know that you will end/The world will continue without you.” In the words of the prayer books, “From dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (cf. Gen 3:19).

  We need not make friends with death, but we do have to come to terms with the fact that we’re not going to get out of life alive. In my friend Jason Goroncy’s wise words:

  . . . death may indeed be, in some sense, life’s enemy. But it’s an enemy that, like the strange promise of resurrection, appears to be woven into the warp and woof of life and so of ministry in God’s world. And whereas it sometimes may be an enemy from which to flee; at other times it may be the enemy we must embrace as an expression of love’s final hope.

  By grace, Lent reminds us that we are sinful creatures, that we are going to need, again and again, throughout the course of our lives, to be forgiven and reconciled.

  We find it difficult, if not impossible, to hear this truth rightly. We almost always hear talk of sin as a moral judgment. We imagine that admitting we’re sinners is an acknowledgment that we’ve had bad thoughts, that we’ve done bad things. But that misses the mark entirely. We are called not to be moral (by the standards and orders of our society) but to be holy (as God is holy). Sin, therefore, is not the failure to live a good, clean life but the refusal to let God’s goodness come alive in us for the good of others. Sin is whatever stifles or frustrates the fullness of joy in our neighbor’s life. Sin is the unwillingness to take the risks that loving our enemies requires. Sin is anything and everything that is done unlovingly, anything and everything that is done in bad faith, anything and everything that leaves us hopeless. As St Paul says, “whatever is not of faith is sin” (Rom 14:23).

  I had a dream recently in which several friends and I decided, during a church service, to share our worst faults and offenses with one another. One by one, we took turns giving voice to our inward ugliness. But as we shared, I had this growing sense that something was terribly wrong with what we were doing. And, just as I realized it, a pastor stepped forward and called everyone to pray a blessing over me. That dream reminded me that there’s all the difference in the world between exposing my faults and confessing my sins.

  Of course, we almost certainly do not know our faults as well as we think we do. But without question we do not know our sins as well as we think we do—especially those sins that most seriously grieve God and that most deeply wound our neighbors. We need God to make us aware of them in his time as it is good for us. As Hauerwas says, Only God’s favor makes it possible for us to know and acknowledge our sins. Knowing that we’ve sinned and how we’ve sinned is already a beginning of salvation.

  Lent may be heavy and dark, but it is not dour or hopeless. Above all, by grace, the season reminds us that we are beloved creatures. And without that realization, we cannot pray faithfully. Lent is not about my creaturely mortality and sinfulness considered on their own terms. Lent is about what happens to my creaturely mortality and sinfulness as they are assumed by Christ and transfigured, taken up into the divine life and made holy with God’s own holiness. God would rather not be God at all than to be God without us. In Christ, therefore, God has taken our creatureliness, our mortality, and our sinfulness as his own. Precisely as the sinful, dying creatures that we are, we are loved. And precisely as the sinful, dying creatures we are, we are called in the Beloved, Jesus, to enjoy God and to work with him for the good of the world.

  ***

  Sharing in God’s work means living Christ’s death and letting Christ’s death live in us. This is the lesson Lent teaches, and what contemplation makes possible. And it’s a defining theme in the writings of St Paul. Take, for example, what he says in Colossians: “for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (3:4). Or what he says in Romans: “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” (6:3). In 2 Corinthians 2:14–16, he expresses the theme in one of his most difficult, haunting images:

  But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things?

  Here, Paul seems to have in mind a Roman triumph—the triumphant celebratory parade through the capitol after an emperor or general had won a great victory. In these moments, the entire city would gather to celebrate, welcoming the victorious leader and his troops with flowers and incense, songs and dances. The troops would bring in their train all the treasures they had claimed, and all the prisoners they had captured, prisoners now shamed in defeat and doomed to
a life of slavery or death. Startlingly, Paul imagines himself and his ministry team as God’s captives, spectacularly paraded in a triumphal march before the world, the stench of death—Christ’s death—heavy on them, “the aroma of Christ” their only glory. Paul returns to this image in 2 Corinthians 4:8–12:

  We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.

  ***

  On Ash Wednesday, we have our faces marked with ashes in the shape of a cross, signifying that we are both-at-once sinners for whom Christ died and saints who have died with him. This ashen cross reverses the first mark we read about in Scripture, the mark God put on Cain. Having murdered his brother, Abel, in a jealous rage, Cain is met with a curse, and he cries out to God in protest (Gen 4:13–16):

  “My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.