Through a Mirror, Darkly
Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message
September 10, 2014
“There is no way that the scriptures, rightly understood,
present God as an eternal torturer. Yet many Christians seem to believe this,
and many are even held back from trusting God’s goodness because of this ‘angry
parent in the sky’ that we have created. The determined direction of the
scriptures, fully revealed in Jesus, is that God’s justice is not achieved by
punishment, but by the divine initiative we call grace, which enables us to
bring about internal rightness, harmony, balance, and realignment with what
is.” (--Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, Job and the Mystery of Suffering, p. 57)
We
have many false ideas about God and the world and many of these come from
inadequate translations or misunderstandings of scripture. There are bad ideas contained in the Bible,
to be sure. But when we come to learn
to read the bad passages and ideas in light of the good ones, we start to see the
overall message of the whole canon of scripture and many of our wrong ideas about
God are corrected.
Here
are several ideas and phrases that many of us have gotten from the way we have
heard scripture read and taught, followed by possible alternate phrases or ways
of saying them that cohere better with what the whole of scripture teaches
about God.
Judgment, God
as a Judge: The basic Hebrew idea of shaphat (judgment) is the setting of things right. That’s why the Book of Judges is not about
guys in robes and white wigs sitting at a bench and rapping gavels. It’s about military heroes who vindicate the
oppressed. The Day of Judgment is the
day when all that is wrong is set to right.
When we say in the Creed that Christ will come to be our judge, we are
saying he will come to set all things right.
Flesh, the
Desires of the Flesh: This image, used by
Paul, often is taken as something dirty, evil, and in absolute polar opposition
to God and God’s plans for us. But Paul
knew as well as anyone that when God created us in creation, he declared it
very good, and that our bodies are very much a part of what God intends in
us. He uses the stoic idea of “the
flesh” as a kind of shorthand in opposition to “the mind.” A better rendering of the idea in our age is
“that part of us that opposes God,” or “the self that opposes God.”
Sin, sinners: We often think that this means only deliberate
disobedience or rebellion against a command or teaching of God. But it means anything that makes us fall
short of what God intended when God created us, anything that alienates us from
God, ourselves, or each other. It is, in
the words of the Enriching our Worship confession
of sin, where we have opposed the will of God in our lives, denied God’s
goodness in ourselves, each other, and the created world. It is what enslaves us, the bad we have done
ourselves or that done on our behalf, and the good things we have left undone,
the skills and gifts not developed, the ideals not pursued. Sin thus conceived
is not simply a crime for which punishment must be exacted (either from us or
by proxy by some kind of transferred punishment), but rather an illness or
weakness from which we must be healed, strengthened, and a disruption of
relationship for which we must be forgiven.
Grace
and Peace,
Fr.
Tony+
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