Surprised by God

by Chris E W Green

  We continue to live in a world “east of Eden,” a world in which brother turns against brother, fathers turn against sons, strangers turn against strangers, and neighbors turn against neighbors—a world of unbroken cycles of violence and unbreakable systems of injustice. But we live in the midst of that very world as the Body of the once dead, now risen Christ. Cain fled from the Lord’s presence, marked by God for his protection. We go out into this world as the Lord’s presence, and the mark on our bodies proclaims we are already dead.

  Christ’s death is alive in us; therefore, we can, again and again, in ways conscious and unconscious, die to ourselves. We can die to our ambitions. We can die to our judgments. We can die to our fears. We can die to our prejudices. We can die to our rights. We can die to our common sense. The wonder of it is we find ourselves just by losing ourselves. We “come alive” just in the experience of dying to ourselves. “Death is at work in us” to be sure. We are, as St Paul says, “always being given up to death for Jesus’s sake” (2 Cor 4:11). But just so, life is at work in others. And to be dead with Christ is to be hidden in his embrace of the Father, at home in the very heart of God.

  Chapter Eight

  What Happens with Those God Loves

  “Lord, he whom you love is ill.”

  John 11:3

  Jesus’s story, unlike all other historical events, did not simply or merely happen at a particular moment to certain people. Because of who he is, the story of Jesus continues to happen to all of us, enfolding us in its happening in anticipation of the final happening that carries creation into its fullness in God. A Gospel reading, like the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead, does not merely report something Jesus once did for one man and his sisters. In John’s telling, therefore, Lazaraus’s story performs for us the here-and-now coming of Jesus. As we read in faith and in hope, the very same Jesus who presented himself to the characters in this story re-presents himself to us. Lazarus’s friend is also our contemporary.

  As readers of this Gospel from Origen to the present day have noted, John’s stories are made to work as master-parables for the life of faith. Even the minutest details in these stories (think, for example, of the woman leaving her bucket at the well or the man by the pool taking up his mat after he is healed) are mysteriously freighted with significance. Lazarus, called back to life but still bound in his grave clothes, figures for us what Romans 8 describes as the conflict of “flesh” and “Spirit.” Even after we have been baptized into Christ’s death and filled with the Spirit of his new-creation life, we remain bound by the “grave clothes” of the old humanity (“Adam”). Long after we are delivered from slavery in Egypt, we find that we still engage the world as slaves. We are delivered from death not only to life-with-God but also life-with-neighbor. We are saved not from one another, but for and to one another. And so continually we have to have our minds renewed, our hearts purged, our imaginations sanctified, our loves reordered. We have continually to be converted not only to Christ, but also to Lazarus.

  ***

  John Chrysostom, commenting on the story of Lazarus, observed that “many are offended when they see any of those who are pleasing to God suffering anything terrible.” Yet the hard truth is that those who are “dear to God” are no more exempted from the sorrows of this life than are non-believers. Nor would they want to be, Still, now, no less than then, it is a hard truth to hear that someone we love—and someone we know loves God and is loved by God—is ill. We inevitably find ourselves asking some form of this question: why does an all-powerful, all-good God allow any evil or suffering at all? If God in fact does love us, and if, as my eight-year-old son puts it, God “has it in him” to keep us from sorrow, then why is anyone ever ill or in trouble? There is, in short, no good answer for us to give to that question. We can offer no adequate theodicy, no righteous justification for God. Instead, we have to live with what we have received: the hope that when all is said and done, God will show himself to be worthy of our confidence. Until then, we pray and we wait. We pray the prayer of the prophets—“How long, Lord?”—and the prayer of the apostles—“Come quickly, Jesus.” Above all, we pray the prayer of Jesus— “Father, let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

  As with the blindness of the man in John 9, so with Lazarus’s terminal illness—and with all illnesses and disease in all times and places: it is “for God’s glory.” But this does not mean that God first imposes illness so that he can later dramatically heal it. God’s work does not need to be staged for effect, and God never needs to rely on tricks of timing to demonstrate his power. Illness—disease or suffering of any kind—is what happens in a world gone wrong, a world in which God is willing that his will not be done, at least not all-at-once. And yet it’s precisely that kind of world in which God’s will can be done mercifully and redemptively. God’s glory, then, is made known only as there is truly a need for mercy and time for redemption to take shape.

  ***

  To say that all illness/disease is for God’s glory also does not mean that God is glorified by our need for him. God does not need our weakness to make his strength obvious. He does not need darkness for his light to be visible. God needs nothing, not even our neediness. We cannot remind ourselves too often of this truth: God does not stand out in comparison to any creaturely reality because God, as creator, is not in competition with creaturely reality.

  Finally, to say that all illness/disease is for God’s glory does not mean that God is glorified in the power displayed in meeting our need. It is not as if God has abilities that he needs to showcase, powers that he needs to show off. God is not a conqueror but “more than a conqueror”—altogether beyond any and all comparison and just so beyond any and all conflict. Only because divine strength is not the opposite of human weakness can it be perfected in that weakness. This is why Jesus says to the disciples that he is glad for their sake that Lazarus has died: “Lazarus isn’t asleep. He’s dead. And for your sake, I’m glad that I was not there to keep him from dying. After I have awakened him from his sleep—or, as you think of it, after I have raised him from the dead—your eyes will be opened to what you’d never have noticed otherwise.” As Augustine says, “Lazarus has to die so that when he is raised the disciples’ faith might be raised with him.”

  Again and again, John’s Gospel confronts us with ironic misunderstandings. Here, the disciples—like the master of the wedding feast (John 2), Nicodemus (John 3), the woman at the well (John 4), the man born blind (John 9), as well as the Pharisees and “the Jews” (John 6–9)—misunderstand Jesus’s words and actions. And yet, in a doubling of the irony, the disciples’ misapprehension is in some ways truer than their apprehension would have been. When they think that Lazarus is only asleep, they cannot imagine why Jesus is worried for Lazarus. Their incredulity at Jesus’s concern is unmistakable: “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be alright” (John 11:12). But when they realize that Lazarus is in fact dead, they panic. Their faith is so weak, their fear of death so strong, that they are sure they are going to their own deaths by following Jesus to Bethany. Their feelings move further away from the truth as their understanding comes to a better grasp of the facts.

  As Rowan Williams has said, in this story we find Christ on trial. Martha and then her sister Mary face him with the same protest: “if you had been here, Jesus, our brother would not have died.” “The Jews,” too, wonder why, if he can save others, he does not save Lazarus, whom he so obviously loved. Strikingly, Jesus does not defend himself. And he does not silence the questions that arise. He simply asks them to take him to the tomb: “where have you laid him?” And they respond: “come and see” (11:34), a phrase that recalls other moments in the Gospel, including Jesus’s invitation to his first disciples (1:39), Nathanael’s call to Philip (1:46), and the Samaritan woman’s call to the people of the city (4:29). Jesus does indeed follow them, showing that he has come not only to welcome us into his reality
—“I go to prepare a place for you”—but also comes to be welcomed into our reality, however dark, however cold. In this, Jesus reveals the sacred heart of godliness, the beauty of God radiating from a human life. To quote Williams again:

  Saints are people who don’t silence us, but let us speak out of what is most real to us, even if it’s painful, even if it’s challenging. A saint is somebody who says to you, “You have God’s permission to be yourself, even if that means pouring out the anger, misery, guilt, confusion.” And a saint is somebody who says, “Let me come with you to where it hurts.” A saint is someone who says, ‘‘Trust and you will see what you never imagined,” because the saints in the Church are above all the people who give us hope, the people who show us that things can be different, that humanity doesn’t have to work in a sort of cyclical, miserable reworking of resentment, unhappiness, and selfishness. Saints break that open and they tell us, ‘‘Trust God and God alone knows what you will see in his world, and what you will see of him.’’

  Meeting Martha’s grief, Jesus assures her by identifying himself: “I am the resurrection and the life” (11:25). We might say, as St Augustine does, that he is the resurrection because he is the life. But it is no less true that the life he promises us is the life of resurrection—and so a life that comes on the far side of death. He is our life because he is the resurrection; in other words, God does not save us from death but through it. Jesus is the answer to his own question, which he put to Ezekiel: “Mortal, can these bones live?” This is why he can promise Martha that those who believe in him “even though they die . . . never die.” Just as darkness is light to God, so death is life to him.

  Like the woman at the well returned to Samaria, Andrew returned to his brother, Simon Peter, and Philip had sought out Nathanael and convinced him to come and see Jesus (John 1:35–51), Martha, having confessed her confidence in Jesus, returns to call her sister. When Mary goes to him, she kneels at his feet—in recollection of her earlier kneeling to listen to his teaching (Luke 10:39) and in anticipation of her later kneeling to anoint Jesus’s feet with pure nard in preparation for his death and burial (John 12:1–7). In this, she models for us the heart of faith.

  Jesus, John tells us, is “deeply moved” and begins to weep. But why is he so moved? Why does he weep, knowing what he is about to do for Lazarus, for Martha and Mary, for “the Jews,” for the disciples? John does not tell us, and so we are left to wonder. Obviously, we know he does not weep because Lazarus is dead. It may be, as many have contended, that he is agitated by the unbelief of those who have gathered at the tomb, but that can only be true in the sense that he pities them. It would seem that he does not weep merely to show that he is human (although of course, as many of the church fathers observed, his tears do reveal the depth of his humanity). And I would argue that he does not weep merely to show us how to grieve (although, as Chrysostom suggests, his weeping shows that weeping for the dead is not inherently faithless and ungodly). Be that as it may, even if we cannot finally say what moved Jesus to tears, we can be sure that Jesus weeps because he is taking into himself human experience in its fullness. As Rowan Williams has said, Christ carries our grief in his love. Later in the Gospel (20:11), Mary Magdalene weeps at Jesus’s tomb, revealing that Jesus has entered so fully into the human reality that he knows both what it is to weep and what it is to be wept for, what it is to grieve and what it is to be grieved. His identification with us is absolute and entire, encompassing not only our life but also our death. What is ours, he takes as his own so that what is his, we may receive as our own.

  Even though Martha believes in Jesus and trusts his promise to raise her brother from the dead, her protest—“Lord, there is a stench!” (11:39)—shows that she (like Alyosha in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov) cannot suppress her fear and disgust at what death has done to her brother. We should not fault her for it. Jesus doesn’t. He simply reminds her of the promise: “you will see the glory of God.” In truth, we should be wary of the naïveté that disguises itself as “faith,” because it deadens us to the realities of our mortal existence. But we should also be wary of any kind of despair disguised as “realism,” because it deadens us to the presence and the promises of God. Either way, it strips us of our humanity and renders us incapable of seeing—or being seen as—the glory of God.

  I never read this story without thinking of Franz Wright’s “The Raising of Lazarus,” and, especially, the ending lines, which capture the shock and horror and wonder and bewilderment that must have descended on everyone that day:

  Peter looked across at Jesus with an expression that seemed to say You did it, or What have you done?And everyone saw how their vague and inaccurate life made room for his once more.

  The ambiguity of that last “his” is perfect. Does it refer to Lazarus? To Jesus? And why is the life of the onlookers “vague and inaccurate”? Because they have not yet learned how to live the life they’ve been given? Because they have yet to die, and so cannot know what their lives mean? Because they have not yet figured their response to the gospel that Christ forces on them? The answer, I think, to all of these questions is “Yes.” This is a Gospel story; therefore, it is about both Jesus and Lazarus—to make room for one is to make room for the other. And the Gospel makes clear that the only way to live an accurate life—to live truthfully, accessibly—is through radical identification with Jesus in his care for our neighbors. As his disciples, impossibly saved from death, we have to join him in his journey to where it hurts most We have to roll away the gravestone from our lives and the lives of our neighbors—even if that means we expose a deep corruption. We have to make room in our lives for Christ to call the dead to life so that we can take up in his Spirit the work of stripping away the “grave clothes” that bind them to their past. We should have no illusions: not everyone will rejoice in what we do. And we won’t always take joy in it ourselves. But like Thomas and the other disciples, like Martha and Mary and “the Jews,” all we have to do is show up where Jesus is—and wait for him to do what only he can do.

  Chapter Nine

  Turning from God for God’s Sake

  “Leave your gift at the altar . . .”

  Matthew 5:24

  “Fasting is better than prayer . . . almsgiving better than both.”

  Clement of Rome

  Not all religion is good religion. If, as St James says, good religion is care for widows and orphans, then there must be bad religion, religion that cares nothing for those most in need because it is solely consumed with itself. St Paul warns us it is possible to have faith that moves mountains and to give our bodies to be burned and still not to be living and dying in love. And that kind of religion—even when deeply felt and rigorously practiced—is simply worthless: it is self-serving, self-determined, self-glorifying. In spite of appearances and protests to the contrary—“Lord, Lord, did we not . . .”—it ultimately has nothing to do either with God or with grace, and does nothing to transform us into the Christlikeness for which we are made.

  In a stunning word, no less powerful now than when it was first given millennia ago, the prophet Isaiah, speaking for Yhwh, condemns such bad religion in the starkest terms (58:5–10):

  Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly . . . .

  God is no less clear about what good religion requires than he is about what bad religion entails: “remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil .
. . [and then] offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.” Just so, the divine light shall rise in the darkness, so that all will flourish in mutual blessing.

  We may summarize Isaiah’s prophetic vision in this way: piety does not please God; only charity does. Whatever good they do for us, and however crucial they are for our witness to others, we do God no favors with our songs, our prayers, our fasts, our offerings, our sermons. He has no need of gifts from us, even if he delights in receiving them when they are offered faithfully. It is for our own good and the good of others that he calls us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices. He delights in us clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and the imprisoned—so long as we do it in love. He delights in us welcoming strangers into our homes and sharing meals with our enemies—so long as we do it in love. He wants us lovingly to “break every yoke”—doing all we can (in his power, not our own) to free others from whatever oppresses them—because that is when we are being what he has created us to be.

  ***

  This call to serve the poor—that is, anyone in need and within reach of our care—is at the heart of the life of faith. If, as St John puts it, the love of God is alive in us, then our religion matters less to us than does our neighbor’s need. Cyprian of Carthage, in the spirit of Isaiah, warns us that “prayer without almsgiving is barren.” To that end, we have to “fast” even from our religion, our spirituality, in order to “taste” the suffering of others. This is the essence of the Eucharist event, which makes us to share in the sufferings of Christ and his sacrifice for the life of the world.

  I don’t mean to suggest that God hates our worship or that care for others is all there is to the life of faith, of course. The Christian life is a life of movements, a life that Jürgen Moltmann describes as breathing: we inhale in worship and then exhale in witness the very life of God. Or, in the words of Christoph Blumhardt, every one of us must undergo two conversions: first, from the world to God; then, from God to the world. And these movements do not happen once, one after the other, but at the same time and over the entire course of our lives. As people of faith, we must always be moving both toward God and away from God—always for God’s and our neighbor’s sake.