Extra Credit Podcast

Scripture uses a variety of terms to describe the human self (e.g. body, soul, spirit, mind, and heart). Last week we discussed the human self in its integrity. We are both embodied souls and ensouled bodies.

This week we take a look at the human heart with its shallows and its depths. Fortunately, last October we had Dr. Chris E.W. Green with us for our theology conference and he lectured on a theology of the human heart. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for us to revisit a bit of his excellent teaching within the context of our wider study of what it means to be truly human.

In class we watched a shortened version of one his lectures. (The podcast I’ve attached is the audio from the lecture we watched Wednesday night).

You can watch the full lecture here:

You can also find the first lecture here and the Q&A session here.

The Deep Unity of the Self

What does it mean to be a human self? What constitutes it? We will all be familiar with a similar vocab bank: body, soul, spirit, mind, heart, etc. It’s also probably not much of a stretch to assume that most of us have been taught that human beings are composed of two (or three) parts: body and soul (and spirit).

It’s often of assumed that these composite parts of the human self are separate and discrete things that we can treat in isolation. But in Scripture there is a lot of overlap between these terms. Different biblical authors (and writers throughout the church’s history) use these words differently. Sometimes they use them with a lot of precision in order to make important distinctions, but sometimes precision isn’t the goal. 

For instance, words like spirit/soul can be completely interchangeable in some biblical texts. Think of Mary’s song in Luke 1:47, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Is Luke using this language to make a distinction between the soul and the spirit? Is he trying to be precise? Do souls have the specific job of magnifying and spirits handle the rejoicing? Some might want to make that case, but in my reading this is sort of a poetic doubling, a literary device.

I think what’s being communicated is that Mary–as one whole person–is magnifying and rejoicing. It’s not so much that there are two regions inside her—one called “soul” and the other called “spirit”—Mary is the single subject here. The act of magnifying and rejoicing is something that involves Mary’s whole person. Not simply her soul and spirit but also her body (lungs, vocal cords, and lips as she sings)!

Biblical authors and theologians might intend to be precise and make distinctions at times, but very often there is a lot of overlap in the way these terms get used. It all depends on the writer and the context.

But I do think this is key: there is no hard and fast way of using the language of soul, spirit, mind, heart. Our problems come when we decide in advance exactly what these terms have to mean and then read our own arbitrary definitions into the biblical texts. You have to read a biblical author/theologian on their own terms and try to figure out what’s important to them and see the distinctions they want to make. 

There isn’t one easy schema that the Bible always uses. But that’s what many of us will have learned. Think of the common saying: “You are a soul but you have a body.” Or: “You are a spirit, who has a soul, that lives in a body.” The problem with systems like this is not that they claim humans have spirits and souls and bodies. The problem is that these words are not always used in technically precise ways that are uniform across Scripture. 

Something in us craves for these neat and tidy definitions and distinctions, though. I think it is a uniquely modern craving. We view ourselves as machines or computers and those have separable parts. And the key to scientific knowledge—or so we think—is to break everything down to its smallest components. The smaller the better.

Breaking things down and taking them apart allows us to analyze them. And we think that what something is in its smallest parts reveals the deepest truth of it. Knowledge comes by dissection.

But say you are in a biology class that is dissecting a cat. The professor says, “We are going to split up into groups and this group will study the heart, this group the brain, this group the stomach, etc… and when we come back together we will share what we’ve found.” You will definitely gain plenty of information about the anatomy of the cat. But there is one thing you won’t have access to: the cat! Because in order to dissect it, you had to kill it.

I think the truth of what it means to be human is found not in dissecting us down to our parts and studying them in isolation from one another, but rather the deepest truth is found in the whole. Being analytical and breaking things down to their smallest bits is a really helpful thing, but true knowledge comes on the other side of analysis. It comes in encountering.

This doesn’t mean we can’t distinguish between the parts of the human self. We can. But those parts aren’t what they are in isolation from the other parts.

Our thinking needs to be more christological. Jesus Christ has two natures. He is fully divine and fully human. But the truth of who he is can never be found by breaking him down into his natures, but only in the wholeness of his person. Does Jesus ever say or do anything without being simultaneously fully divine and fully human? No. To truly know Jesus we encounter the him in his personhood.

Put otherwise, full knowledge comes not in mere analysis (breaking things down into parts), but in synthesis (unity of the whole).

Neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues that because our brains have two hemispheres we have two ways of attending to the world: analysis and synthesis. Breaking things down to grasp the bits and the parts on the one hand, and seeing the whole picture on the other. Obviously you need both, but the end goal should be synthesis.

One of the most fascinating examples McGilchrist gives to show the difference is a semi-rare condition called “face-blindness.” People with face-blindness (prosopagnosia) have a harder time recognizing faces. This is usually due to a traumatic injury or developmental issues in the right hemisphere of the brain.

But here’s the weird thing. People with face-blindness are not blind. It’s not that they can’t see faces. They can. They can see facial features like noses, eyes, ears, and mouths. But what they are unable to do is recognize whose face it is. They can see the parts of the face, but they can’t see the whole thing at once and identify it.

For most of us, it’s the opposite. We see faces as wholes, as singular things, and we might even struggle to describe the parts of a person’s face that we know very well. 

(I could talk about face-blindness for hours. Malcolm Gladwell recently had an episode on his podcast Revisionist History on face-blindness that was really great. One man they interviewed said that he will regularly have to pause a movie to ask his wife who a character is. She usually says something like: “Honey that is still Robert De Niro, he just has a hat on now.”)

Of Earth and Spirit

The truth is that the typical hard and fast distinction and separation of soul from body (“You are a soul and you have a body”) is not quite right. In Genesis 2:7 we read: “...then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”

The human being that God creates in his image is taken from the earth. Humanity is derived from a piece of earth. That’s who it is. The church’s temptation from the beginning was to see the body as dirty, defiling, and evil. The body is bad so it needs to be shed.

But in Genesis we get a completely different picture. Human beings are taken from the dust of the ground but that ground is not the cursed ground of Genesis 3, it is the blessed ground. We are taken from the earth that God called “good!” Your body is a good gift from God. Without it you wouldn’t be you.

The christianities that have shaped many of us have often undercut the importance and the goodness of the body (“You only have a body.”) But the truth is that a person’s body belongs intimately to who they are. Our bodies aren’t prisons, or shells, some exterior thing that can just be cast off.

I think we can put it this strongly: Human beings do not ‘have’ bodies. We are bodies.

But we are not only bodies. God doesn’t just mold us from the dust of the ground. He breathes the breath of life into the body. This breath/soul is life, it animates the human being. The soul is not an abstract gas that floats around until it is pumped into human lungs. The soul (nephesh in Hebrew and psyche in Greek) is the concrete bodily life of a creature. The soul is the whole person.

We have to hold both things simultaneously: We are embodied souls and we are ensouled bodies. 

Without either one we are not in the image of God. And neither one is what it is made to be without the other.

Oftentimes people will point to 2 Corinthians 5:8 to prove that we are souls who only have bodies. Paul writes, “We would rather be absent from the body and to be present form the Lord.” On the first reading it does sound like it is our body that needs to be shed in order to be present with the Lord.

But if you read the whole passage you will find that Paul is actually making the exact opposite point.

“For we know that, if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to be further clothed with our heavenly dwelling, for surely when we have been clothed in it we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan under our burden because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.” (2 Cor. 5:1-5).

Paul seems to think that a disembodied existence would be a dreadful thing. It would be sub-human. We do not want to “shed this mortal coil” and be a “naked” soul. That wouldn’t be comfortable or fitting for us.

The goal is not to take off this body and become a naked soul, but rather to be “further clothed” with a resurrected body, a body that is incorruptible.

To be disembodied is to be less than human.

Being Re-Membered at The Lord’s Supper

This separation and dismembering of the human person can lead to misunderstanding what salvation actually is. God intends to redeem us as whole persons: body and soul.

Think of another popular passage we regularly misread. In Revelation 3:20 Jesus is speaking to the church in Sardis: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.”

We usually hear this verse and think that it is talking about “asking Jesus into your heart.” But the passage says nothing about that. (We easily forget he is talking to people who are already in the church.)

So, what is it about? It’s about eating with Jesus. And not a spiritualized eating. Really eating—bodily. Jesus calls his church to gather at his table and eat a meal of bread and wine. It would be hard to do that without your body.

But eating with Jesus does not only involve your body. It involves the whole of who you are. The communion meal is bread and wine, but it is not merely bread and wine. In eating this meal we are participating in the very life of Jesus (1 Cor. 10:16).

The earliest Pentecostals were adamant about this. The communion meal is not merely a meal of bread and wine that brings Jesus to our memory. They insisted that Jesus is actually present in the meal. We feast with him as we feast on him.

When we eat the bread and drink the cup we are communing with Jesus as whole persons. Our bodies are engaged along with our souls (and our spirits, hearts, and minds). The supper is an all-embracing reality.

God created human beings as body and soul, and that’s how he is saving us. In the incarnation Jesus has taken to himself the totality of what it means to be human. He has a human heart, a human mind, a human soul, a human spirit, and a human body. If he didn’t take all of these things to himself, then we would not be completely saved.

Our tendency is to denigrate the body and exalt the soul, as if that’s what’s really important. The truth is that most of us would rather not be human. We would prefer to be something more, something more lofty. That was Adam and Eve’s sin. In wanting to become more than human they tried to become like God. But they didn’t realize that God is God precisely as a human.

C.S. Lewis says that the perennial human temptation is to be more spiritual than God. But:

“There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life in us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”

Jesus has ordained that our fellowship with him take place at a meal.

The Lord’s Supper is a remembering. But it is also a re-membering. It takes the broken and disconnected pieces of our lives and re-members them, makes us whole.

This is the work of Jesus. Jesus is out to re-member you. And he does this by calling us to eat this meal “in remembrance” of him. As often as we eat the bread and drink the cup we re-member Christ. He makes us members of his own body in our eating. The Spirit gathers us up—body, soul, heart, mind, spirit—and brings us into the wholeness that is Christ.

And all this happens over a shared meal.

As Rowan Williams memorably put it, “It is, perhaps, the most simple thing we can say about Holy Communion, yet it is still supremely worth saying. In Holy Communion, Jesus Christ tells us that he wants our company.”

He wants your company. Not just a piece of you. Not just your soul or your mind or your heart. He wants to eat with the entirety of you in order to make you entirely you.

Being Human as Vocation

Becoming truly human is not just a matter of being, but of doing (hence the “becoming truly human”). In truth, being and doing are not separable, but are always one—our being is always a doing. Put otherwise, when the Spirit unites us to Christ we are not only given Christ’s identity (being), but Christ’s vocation (doing).

Psalm 8:6–8, riffing on Genesis 1-2, describes the human vocation: “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, a son of man that you care for him? You made them a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honor and put everything under their feet.”

The author of Hebrews quotes Ps. 8 but riffs on it: “As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus…” (Heb. 2:8). Yes, we were created to have dominion over creation, but we do not yet have the dominion God means for us to have.

The human vocation is only fulfilled, for now, in Jesus—the pioneer of our faith. What is true of him, will be true of us. As Chris Green says, the human vocation is nothing less than a share in Jesus’ lordship, Jesus’ dominion over all creation. But we know that his “lordship” is not a “lording it over” creation, but rather a serving of creation. 

Put another way, becoming truly human is a calling to become priests. Priestly work is mediating work. It is about reconciling two parties, it is about peacemaking, building bridges, and making connections.

But this is a calling for all humanity. It is a calling to a responsibility, a burden for others before God.

The Image of God: Relationality

Genesis 1 says that God created human beings in his image and after his likeness. But what is that image and likeness? The text is sparse and ambiguous. It leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Scripture invites us to fill in the spaces it leaves.

The most common answers that have been given to the question of what makes us in the image of God are either 1) faculties or 2) capacities we possess. Is it our faculty of reason and knowledge that makes us in the image of God? Is it our capacity to be virtuous and holy?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that it is neither our won faculties or our capacities that make us image bearers. Rather, he suggests, is it is that we are created free.

“To say that in humankind God creates God’s own image on earth means that humankind is like the Creator in that it is free. To be sure, it is free only through God’s creation, through the word of God; it is free for the worship of the Creator. For in the language of the Bible freedom is not something that people have for themselves but something they have for others. No one is free ‘in herself’ or ‘in himself’--free as it were in a vacuum or free in the same way that a person may be musical, intelligent, or blind in herself or in himself. Freedom is not a quality a human being has; it is not an ability, a capacity, an attribute of being that may be deeply hidden in a person but can somehow be uncovered…”

Bonhoeffer is saying the image of God in human beings is found in our freedom. But our freedom is not a faculty/capacity or a quality that we possess in and of ourselves. Our freedom is found in the face of our neighbor, not inside ourselves. Our freedom is not a freedom from our neighbors, but our freedom for them.

Freedom is not something you own. Freedom is a calling. It’s an event, a doing. It is a responsibility. Freedom can only arise in our relationship to the other.

“Being free means ‘being-free-for-the-other’, because I am bound to the other. Only by being in relation with the other am I free.”

This is a very different definition of freedom than the one we typically conceive. Freedom for Bonhoeffer is something that happens between me and you, not something I possess all by myself. It happens to me through you. This is a definition of freedom rooted in our relationality rather than our individuality. 

In other words, the image of God is fundamentally relational. Being the image of God is not something that I have all by myself without you. It is something we have only together—through our relationship to one another.

But where is he getting this from? Notice the text of Genesis 1 actually says.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

The image of God is found in our relationship to what is other than ourselves. He creates humanity male and female. This is unity in differentiation. Humans are different from one another, and in that difference they are one.

Bonhoeffer puts it like this:

“The creature is free in that one creature exists in relation to another creature, in that one human being is free for another human being. And God created them [male and female]. The human being is not alone. Human beings exist in duality, and it is in this dependence on the other that their creatureliness consists.”

But how is this difference from one another what makes us in the image of God? Because God is not God alone. God is Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit. In God there is relationality. God just is the relationships between the Three Persons. What makes God God is the relationships between Father, Son, and Spirit. He is one precisely in that he is three.

Humanity is made in the image of God in that we are constituted in relationship to one another. The image of God is in our inherent relationality.

What makes us human is that we are turned outward from ourselves to others. Our lives are created for the sake of others, not to be closed in on ourselves.

This is what makes the calling of becoming human a priestly calling. A priest’s work is about relationships.

Intercession: “Bone of my bone”

We can see that the human calling is a priestly calling most clearly in Genesis 2:15,“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work and to keep it.”

The phrase “work and keep” is carefully chosen. These words almost always appear in the Old Testament in reference to the job of the priests. Priests are to “work and keep” the temple (Numbers 3:7).

Genesis is picturing the Garden of Eden as a temple, as a Holy of Holies, with Adam and Eve as the High Priests of all creation. Eden is the temple for the sake of the world.

And this is precisely what priests do: they are not called to work in the temple instead of the world, but for the sake of the world. Or to put it another way: Adam and Eve are intercessors!

What does it mean to be an intercessor? Symeon the New Theologian says that an intercessor one who refuses to be saved apart from their neighbors. Paul in Romans 9 gives us an example: “I wish I were accursed and cut off for the sake of my kinsmen according to the flesh.” Paul wishes that he would not be saved at all if his kinsmen are not saved. Intercession is quintessentially priestly work.

Intercessors stand in for the sake of their neighbors and for the sake of the world.

Jesus, the great High Priest, is the true human not instead of all humanity, but for the sake of all humanity. He does what he does for the sake of the world! As Bonhoeffer never tires of saying, “Jesus is the man for others.”

And to be truly human in this way is to take up Jesus’ vocation. To live your life for the sake of your neighbor, for the sake of the world.

Think of Genesis again. In Genesis 2 God creates Eve from the side/rib of Adam and when Adam wakes up to see Eve, he has poetry on his lips: “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” 

This isn’t a merely a romantic poem. He is saying, “I can’t be myself without you, Eve. Now you make me who I am! Before you were here I wasn’t even myself. You are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!”

We all know this at a biological level. Who am I without my parents? Who am I without my children? Who am I without my friends? At a fundamental level these people make me who I am.

But while biology and natural friendship shows us something of the truth of what it means to be human, Jesus calls us to something higher. He says, “Even the tax collectors love those who love them back. I’m calling you to love your enemies.”

In calling us to love our enemies Jesus is calling us to a deeper intercession, a deeper humanity. When Paul says that he wishes he would be accursed and cut off for the sake of his kinsmen, he is speaking not only of his friends but even his enemies. Many of his kinsmen wanted to kill him, and yet he is saying: “I am not myself without them. I refuse to be saved without them. God, if you are going to have me, you have to take these people, too!”

That’s the work of an intercessor: to look at your neighbors, including your enemies, and say: “This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!”

When Jesus was hanging on the cross he looked at the soldiers who were crucifying him and cried, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do!”

This is the deep intercession we are called to. Jesus looks into the faces of his greatest enemies and all that he can think is: “These people are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. I cannot be who I am without them!”

This is the deep truth of the gospel: Jesus cannot be himself without you or me. But he also cannot be himself without our greatest enemies. This is the calling to priestly intercession.

When you and I gather to worship each Sunday morning, we are called to bring the bones of others with us. When we eat of the bread and drink from the cup, we carry the bones of our neighbors with us. We bring the bones of those who cannot be there with us and even those who, for the time being, refuse to be there with us. We worship for the sake of the world.

Why? Because we are called to be priests. This is what it means to be human.

The call to be human is a call to recognize that your neighbors (including your enemies) are “bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh.” We are called to carry the bones of the world before God for the sake of the world.

Chris Green sums it up perfectly:

“The church exists only to remind the world of its true nature and its true destiny in the kingdom of God… For now, however, we find ourselves called out from [the world], but only because we have been singled out by God to share in the work of making room for [the world]. We take on the ecclesial vocation always only on behalf of others—never instead of them, much less against them. We are the called out ones whose lives are dedicated entirely to collaboration with God’s work for those who have yet to hear or to submit to the call. The elect are elected always for the sake of the non-elect. The church is a remnant of the world, gathered from the world to be both a temple and a kingdom of priests for the world’s sake.”

Sin: Blocking the Flow of God’s Love

The way we speak about sin is key. The metaphors we use to speak about reality always end up “using” us. Our language isn’t merely a tool we use, it shapes the way we see reality. I want to juxtapose two metaphors for speaking about sin: breaking God’s laws vs. blocking the flow of God’s life/love. It’s not that one is wrong and the other is right. It’s that the overuse of the one has misshaped and malformed us, and we need a correction.

Most of us will have been taught to speak about sin as “breaking God’s laws.” That’s right, insofar as it goes, but it remains too impersonal and abstract. The human conscience loves the idea of a law that it can manipulate, weaponize, and control.

I think it could be more helpful for us to speak about sin as “blocking the flow” of God’s love and life for our neighbors. The legal metaphors for sin are too impersonal. The metaphor of “blocking the flow” keeps us anchored in the personal. It keeps our eyes focused on our neighbors.

Theologian Kathryn Tanner is puts it like this:

“God’s gifts can be blocked by our sins and the sins of others against us; but God does not stop giving to us because we have misused and squandered the gifts that God has given.”

Think of the “blocking” here as a garden hose. You can step on the hose and make the flow a little weaker. You can put a kink in the hose to temporarily cut off the flow. But you can store the hose in a kinked position for long enough that you create a break in the hose.

Think of sin as the ways we block the flow of God’s life and love to our neighbors and ourselves—kinking the hose in some way.

It is key to notice here that the water continues to run even if we clog the flow. God is always fully God to every human being. His love and life is always flowing to them. Our sins make it harder for them to receive that flow of life and love. Our sins are what make it harder for our neighbors to receive the good gifts God has for them. But the flow does not and cannot stop.

Sin is the harm we do to our neighbors (including ourselves). Anything that we do or fail to do that makes it harder for our neighbors to believe God, trust God, know God, and receive his love—that’s sin.

“A Sick Holiness”

The legal metaphors for sin, when they are used in isolation from other metaphors, almost always lead us to moralism. And moralism is, perhaps, the greatest enemy of the truth of the gospel.

Moralism is “preaching” that aims to get people to behave a certain way. It is an attempt to conform others to some system of morality. But the gospel conforms people to the Christ. The difference is easy to see: systems of morality are always dead ideas, Jesus Christ is a living person.

This is why when we define sin as missing the mark we should immediately think: Whose mark? Societies’ mark? My family’s mark? The democratic/republican party’s mark? My own personal mark? Some might say, “No! Sin is missing the Bible’s mark!”

But whose reading of the Bible? Saul’s? The Pharisees’?

Jesus challenges every system of morality precisely because he is alive. No moral order can capture him. No ideology can cage him in.

So it is key for us to see that holiness and morality are not the same thing.

Chris Green puts it like this:

“We often, always at terrible cost to ourselves and to others, confuse the sanctified life for a moral life. But the truth is, holiness is beyond morality and immorality.”

The gospel is not about making us more moral. In fact, the holiness that the gospel intends for us has very little to do with what consider to be morality and immorality.

Bonhoeffer makes just this point. In the Gospel accounts Jesus makes some very high moral demands on people: You have heard it said, “Do not commit adultery,” but I say to you if you so much as look on a woman with lust you have already committed adultery in your heart. With these high moral demands we would expect that he would hang out with the moral heroes of his world. That’s what Plato and Buddha did.

But when we read the Gospels we find Jesus among the morally weak and the outright immoral: Children, prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. (He even tells the moral heroes of his day that the immoral ones will enter the kingdom ahead of them.)

Why? Because God chose what is foolish and weak in the world to shame the wise and the strong. So, Bonhoeffer says: 

“Religion and morality contain the germ of hubris… In this sense, religion and morality can become the most dangerous enemy of God’s coming to human beings, the most dangerous enemy of the Christian message of good news. Thus the Christian message is basically amoral and irreligious, paradoxical as that may sound…”

We need to reckon with Bonhoeffer’s stark warning. Morality is one of the greatest dangers to the gospel. Do we believe that?

We often think of becoming “holy” as becoming sinless. But God wants more for us than to become blandly sinless. He wants us to be conformed to Christ, to be one with the Father as Jesus is. In Christ we see that holiness is never identical to being moral.

Think of Jesus’ life as the gospels tell it. Jesus is called “the holy one of God,” he is holiness incarnate, but he was repeatedly accused of being immoral by the moral heroes of his day. It was this charge of “immorality” that led to his crucifixion. Why? Because his way of life did not (and does not) fit within the moral standards of his day (or of any day). 

Jesus reveals to us how bankrupt all of our moral systems are. Our concepts of “goodness” have to broken open by the Spirit. To follow Jesus requires that we leave behind our own moralisms. Jesus and our morality cannot coexist.

Peter is a perfect example. Peter famously makes the true confession of Jesus’s identity. Jesus asks Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter responds, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus tells Peter that the Father has revealed this to him. He has made a true confession. God has spoken to Peter. But Peter’s true confession still ends up distorted by his own understanding of morality. Jesus responds to Peter’s true confession by saying, “And the son of man must go to Jerusalem and suffer.” “No!” Peter says. He won’t allow it! He’s still operating within his own understanding of morality. He hasn’t let Jesus show him what true holiness is.

Peter, like all of us, takes what God has said to him and squeezes it inside his own understanding of what is good and right. The words of Peter’s confession are true, but the sense he makes of them is wrong. He’s got the right words—“You are the Christ”—words that are truly from God, but he’s interpreting them within wrongly.

We have to “unlearn” our systems of morality in order to truly follow Jesus. We must allow the Spirit to tear down our conceptions of morality and replace them with genuine holiness—Jesus.

Chris Green concludes:

“We learn holiness only by unlearning ‘goodness.’ The call to holiness is a call to break free from morality, which, at its heart, is always about power and control.”

Holiness has as little to do with morality as it has to do with immorality. Very often in our circles, holiness is defined as a move away from the world. “The world does x, y, and z, so we DO NOT do x, y, and z. That’s what makes us holy/moral.”

But we have to ask: Who is defining the “mark” that must be hit here? Is it Jesus?

Just because you are moving away from the world does not mean you are moving towards Jesus. In fact, to move away from the world almost always means you are moving further away from Jesus. In the Gospels Jesus is most often found in worldly, immoral places—with the sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes. 

This is the problem with moralistic thinking: it confuses morality with true holiness. True holiness is always a move towards Jesus, not merely a move away from the world. 

Moralism attracts our attention to what it deems to be immorality (for many of us we have heard things like: smoking, drinking, dancing, the clothes you wear, going to the movie theater, etc.) But precisely by focusing our attention on these things, it hides the deeper sins of pride, greed, and self-righteousness.

Bonhoeffer calls this a “sick holiness.” “Sick holiness” is holiness defined by our own moral standards. We need to be cured from that deadly disease. Sick holiness might follow every letter of the law of God, but it ends up blocking the flow of God’s life and love to ourselves and our neighbors.

“All Sins Are Equal”

Right at the heart of “sick holiness” is something most of us have been taught about sin: “All sins are the equal before God.”

Intuitively we all know this isn’t true, but it takes some work to unpack. We’ve often made things that are not sinful out to be terribly sinful because of our moral systems (think of the catalogue of vices you’ve heard). But because we’ve said that all sins are equal we’ve made “minor sins” out to be “major sins,” which end up ignoring our deeper problems.

Not all sins are equal. They don’t all have the same consequences in our lives or in the lives of others. Some things we have done are deeply wounding and have caused tremendous havoc in the lives of our neighbors. But there are also things we have done that were wrong, but did not have the same catastrophic effects.

Scripture often talks about “sinning against God.” And we are called to confess our sins “against God and our neighbor.” But if sin is the harm we do to our neighbors, what does it actually mean to “sin against God”?

Is it that we can divide our sins up into two categories? Some of our sins are against God and others are against our neighbors? I don’t think so.

Theologically I think we have to say that our sins are never violating or harming God. God cannot be harmed by what we do. Our sins do not block the flow of God’s love and life that he has in himself. We actually cannot trespass against God directly. But we can violate his will by violating our neighbors.

The damage our sins do is not to God, but to ourselves and to our neighbors. All of our sins are against our neighbors and in that way they are ultimately against God.

But it also isn’t true that our sins are only against our neighbors. To sin against our neighbor is to sin against God. Why? Because of Jesus. Jesus is God who has become your neighbor. God and neighbor are held together in him—in one person!

As Jesus says to Paul on the road to Damascus, “Why are you persecuting me?” What we do to anyone we do to him. Jesus takes our sins against our neighbors personally. Every sin—no matter who it is against—is a sin against Jesus. If I sin against you, I am not merely breaking God’s laws, I am wronging you “in Christ.”

Thinking of sin as merely breaking God’s laws can hide this deep truth from us. The question always has to be: What wrong have I done to my neighbor?  How have I blocked the flow of God’s life to them? How have I made it harder for them to trust in the goodness of God and to believe in God?

When we think of all sins as being equal, we can easily become blind to the harm we’ve done to others because our attention is in the wrong place.

Here’s an example. Why is harmful and abusive speech sinful? Because it transgresses God’s law? Yes, but the reason runs deeper. The reason abusive speech is sinful is not that it breaks God’s law (as if there were a list of words you cannot say because God has forbidden them), but that it makes it harder for our neighbors to receive the love God has for them.

There is a sense in which it is true that all sins are breaking God’s laws. But even Scripture witnesses to the fact that not all sins are equal. In the Old Testament there are some sins that require stoning, but others don’t. The severity is different. In the New Testament Paul says that a man’s sins requires him to be excluded from the community of believers, but not all sins require this. 

When we say that “all sins are equal” what we are really doing is individualizing sin and reducing it to be only about me and God, all the while ignoring the harm we’ve done to others, which is the actual problem. And there are different degrees of harm we can cause to other people.

Think of a sliding scale, a spectrum running from “bumping into our neighbors” to “wounding our neighbors” all the way to “violating our neighbors.

Bumping into our neighbors just happens sometimes. And it isn’t always sinful. These are the ways in which we have been impolite or inconsiderate in a moment. Perhaps we have spoken to someone in the wrong tone of voice or not given someone our full attention. Or maybe we’ve offended someone because something we’ve done doesn’t fit within their understanding of morality. These things are not inherently sinful. I think we can place “vices” here, as well. It isn’t that these things are insignificant. They often can reveal a deeper problem within us. But moralism wants to focus our attention only here, on how we “bump” into others and inconvenience them.

Think of the garden hose analogy again. More often than not, “bumping” into others does not block the flow of God’s life and love to them. It’s more of an annoyance.

“Wounding” others is a different story. We wound others when we fail to show the love of Christ to the people around us. Usually we “wound” others by the things we have left “undone.” Wounds are not annoyances. They take special care and attention to be healed.

But then there is “violating” our neighbors. These are the ways we’ve sinned against others in high-handed ways. We’ve traumatized them. We’ve completely kinked the hose. We’ve made it almost impossible for them to receive God’s love. These are the ways we’ve marred their understanding of who God is. When we “violate” others we put them in critical condition. What they need is an E.R. in order to be healed.

But question always has to be this: Am I blocking the flow of God’s love and life to them? Am I making it harder for them to believe in God, to trust that he is good, to truly know who he is?

Moralism wants to keep us blind to the ways we’ve “wounded” and “violated” others. It keeps our attention firmly focused on our implolite behaviors, our vices, things that we can manage, so that we become self-righteous.

This is where the deepest danger of sin lurks. Pastors and teachers the most susceptible to wounding/violating others because of how we’ve spoken of God, the ways we’ve imaged him for others can be deeply traumatizing.

Parents are also very susceptible to this in their relationship with their children. We can become so concerned with how well-behaved our children are, that we deal with them in ways that mars their view of who God actually is. In our efforts to “fix” their behavior, we may be sinning against them in far deeper ways.

Obviously it isn’t only true of pastors and parents. We all become susceptible to this in the ways we talk to our neighbors—our coworkers and family members. 

We can be so concerned with moralism, with “fixing” moral behavior, that we make it harder for them to truly know God.

But at its heart sin is anything I do or fail to do to love others with the love of Jesus. Every person I meet, everyone I think about, I am called to love them with the full love of Christ. To unclog the flow.

When we start to understand sin in this way most of us will see that we hardly take a breath without sinning. And all we can do is throw ourselves on the love and mercy of Christ.

But the promise of the gospel is that his love never stops flowing—even to us moralists trapped in our moralisms.

Curved In On Ourselves

Last week I tried to argue that, contrary to much of what we’ve been taught, sin does not separate us from God. Many of us have heard that God cannot even look on it. But if the Gospel records are true we have to say, “Of course he can! If he couldn’t, how would he save us from it?”

In Christ we meet a God who loves sinners so much that, not only does he look on their sin, but he becomes their sin in order to free them from it. Sin doesn’t have the power to separate you from God.

For many of us, that’s tough to come to terms with. And it’s especially tough because there are texts in Scripture that speak of sin causing a separation, a break, or a fracture. 

If we start with Jesus, though, we can see that the separation that sin causes is not between us and God, but within ourselves. Sin separates us from ourselves. It separates us from our awareness of and sensitivity to God, our neighbors, and ourselves. Sin causes a lack of self-awareness.

In his lectures on the book of Romans Martin Luther famously defines sin as being “incurvatus in se,” or “curved in on the self.” Sin turns us in on ourselves and makes us self-absorbed.

I’m going to keep reiterating this because I think it is important for us to wrestle with: Many of us have been given doctrines of sin that are sinful. Or to put it in Luther’s language, those problematic doctrines of sin actually lead to a deeper “curving in” on our own selves. As Chris Green reminds us, “Nothing is so sinful as what we’ve said about sin.”

Sin Separates You From Yourself

The separation that sin causes can first be seen in Genesis 2 and 3.

In his lectures on Genesis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer observes that the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil are at the center of the garden. The trees are the center of Eden, and so they are the center of Adam and Eve’s life. It is significant that in a story in which Adam and Eve are the main characters, they are not at the center.

Bonhoeffer takes this to mean that it is God who is the center of Adam and Eve’s life. The tree of life is an image representing God. God is life. He is my life and your life. You and I do not have life in and of ourselves. Apart from God no one has life. In him we live and move and have our being. Adam and Eve are not their own center. God is their center.

So, in Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve enter the center of the garden to take from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they are attempting to make themselves the center of their own lives. They are becoming “gods against God.” They desire to know good and evil from themselves—with themselves as the center.

In this act of attempting to find their origin in themselves, they are becoming “curved in on themselves” as Luther says. Not curved toward God and neighbor, but self-absorbed. This is surely what God means when he says, “If you eat of the tree you shall surely die.” To live with yourself at the center of your life is to become deadened to your true life which is only in God. It is to create a false life on a false center.

Here’s Bonhoeffer expounding on this in Ethics:

“Man at his origin knows only one thing: God…He knows all things only in God, and God in all things. The knowledge of good and evil shows that he is no longer at one with his origin…The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God.”

Bonhoeffer speaks of separation here. But it is about Adam and Eve’s knowledge. It’s not that Adam and Eve have successfully cut themselves off from God. They don’t have the ability to do that. They can’t dictate who God is to them and who they are to God. But they can cut themselves off from their awareness and knowledge of their true center.

Bonhoeffer continues:

“But man cannot be rid of his origins…Man’s life is now in disunion with God, with men, with things, and with himself.”

To have yourself as your own center and origin, to live from yourself, to know good and evil from yourself, is another word for the conscience. The conscience is that faculty that adjudicates the rightness and wrongness of what you do. But based on what? Your own perception of good and evil. You are the center and the origin.

The reason Adam and Eve are in disunion with God is because they are in disunion with themselves! They’ve “created” false selves. They’ve alienated themselves not from God, but from their true selves. Their false selves are alienated from God. But why? Because they are an unreality. Those lives are lies.

Bonhoeffer’s argues that when Adam and Eve take of the fruit, the conscience is born. Before the fall Adam and Eve have no conscience. They know only God as their center and so they don’t have to decide for themselves what is good and what is evil. But when they make themselves their own origin, they make their own knowledge of good and evil their center. Their conscience becomes their new God (Sicut deus—Like God, gods against God). The good and evil that Adam and Eve now know are not the good and evil God knows, but the good and evil of their own choosing. Conscience is the problem the fall creates. And it’s a fracture within Adam and Eve.

Bonhoeffer is strong on this point:

“Conscience pretends to be the voice of God and the standard for the relation to other men. It is therefore from his right relation to himself that man is to recover the right relation to God and to other men.”

This is why the letter to the Hebrews says Jesus’s sacrifice is different than all the other sacrifices that have come before: Jesus’s sacrifice cleanses the conscience of the worshiper (Hebrews 9:9, 14). 

Think of how different that sounds from what we’ve often been taught. Many of us will have learned that Jesus has to die in order to set things right between us and the Father. We’ve been taught that the problem is between us and God, and Jesus’s death puts that right. But that’s not what Scripture says. Hebrews says that Jesus’s sacrifice changes us, not God. He cleanses our conscience, our perception, our awareness.

The separation that sin causes is a break within ourselves. We don’t perceive the world (and God) rightly precisely because we do not see ourselves rightly.

In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus talks about the eye being the lamp of the body. He’s talking about our perception. He says the light that is in you is darkness. Your perception is off. You and I think we know what good and evil are, but we are living by our own light—which is darkness.

(Don’t forget that John 1 tells us that Jesus is the light of every human. He is our light. He doesn’t become our light when we decide to let him be out light. That’s who he is. When we come to see him as our true light we are recognizing the truth about ourselves. In that process, we are becoming true, not making Jesus true. We live in a delusion (sin) that makes us think we have our own light, but it is darkness.)

This is the hope of the gospel: Christ has come to cleanse the conscience! Or to put it another way, Christ comes to reveal to us that our own conscience is not our true center—he is, and always has been! But we need that to be revealed to us. We need to be changed.

The work of Christ is overcoming the separation that is in us. The incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection do not change God—it changes us!

To say sin separates us from God is to say that God changes in his relation to us. But we know that can’t be the case. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever! We are the ones who change and need changing. God never once leaves us. As St. Irenaeus says, Adam never once escapes the hand of God throughout his life, especially when he is in sin.

To sum up: the conscience—according to Bonhoeffer riffing on Luther—is what curves us in on ourselves. It is the seat of sin. The conscience is what needs to be overcome.

In one of his lecture notes to the underground seminary at Finkenwalde Bonhoeffer puts it like this:

“Whoever is one, whole, unbroken, has no conscience. Those in the middle, between good and evil, have a conscience...Having a conscience means that a person is between good and evil. To every person conscience says: you did something bad, only because I know about good... As long as we have conscience, we cannot be as good as Jesus wants us to be. The goodness of conscience is something different from the goodness of Christ...Ultimately our conscience must die so that Christ alone may live within us. Where Christ alone is, conscience is no longer."

Or more simply, as he says in elsewhere, “Christ must become our conscience.” Christ is our true center and we must come to recognize it.

The truth of the entire world is that it has been reconciled to Christ—whether it recognizes it or not. He is the true center of all things. Any “world” that is not centered on Christ is not the true world. Any person who is not centered on Christ is living in their own false reality—their own delusion. But this is the point: it isn’t reality! Human beings in their true reality are those who are “accepted in the incarnation of Christ… loved, condemned and reconciled in Christ.”

Or as another Lutheran theologian, Robert Jenson, provocatively puts it: “Sin is simply man’s attempt to behave as if he were not reconciled to God through Christ.”

Anyone who lives in sin is not living into the truth of who they have been made to be in Christ. They are living in a delusion.

But that delusion is not a separation from God. It is a self-delusion. God is right there with every person in their delusion. The incarnation reveals to us just how far God is willing to descend: God even comes inside our own delusions. There is nowhere that we can escape from him.

Sin does have a “disorienting and deadening effect” on us. And, “as that damage is done, we begin to lose touch with ourselves… We are less and less capable of being straight and open with God.”

But God is never incapable of being straight and open with us. He is waiting for us where he always has been—in his Son Jesus Christ. He has never separated himself from us, but has always been present to us in our own separation from ourselves. Where is God? God is in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the place in which the world has been made one with God. And that is the truth about you and me and everyone we have ever met.

Self-Absorption vs. Self-Awareness

Sin curves us in on ourselves, but most of what we’ve heard about sin makes us more curved in on ourselves. As Chris Green points out, we are typically more concerned with managing our feelings of guilt than with the harm we’ve actually done to our neighbors. That’s the work of the conscience. As Bonhoeffer insists, the conscience keeps us from knowing God and our neighbors rightly because it keeps us from knowing ourselves rightly. (see 1 Cor. 4:4 and 1 John 3:20). The conscience keeps us self-absorbed, but Jesus brings us into self-awareness. The difference is crucial.

So much of the preaching and teaching that we’ve received aims at our conscience, our feelings of guilt, and motivates us to do whatever is necessary to alleviate our feelings of guilt, rather than making right the wrong we’ve done to our neighbors.

Focusing on our own feelings of guilt is not a move towards self-awareness but being driven further into self-absorption. Self-awareness is the ability to step into a room and know where you are and how you fit in that particular place. It’s knowing where you end and others begin. Self-absorption has no grasp of this. Someone who is self-absorbed can’t see their own edges, their own limits and boundaries. They are curved in on themselves.

We’ve all met people who are caricatures of self-absorption (remember, this is a problem of degree not kind). These people think they are the main character in every room they walk into. As self-absorption increases, self-awareness decreases.

Self-awareness can only happen as your conscience dies and Christ comes alive in you. “Where Christ alone is, conscience is no longer.”

Coming to see Christ as your true center overcomes the separation that sin causes within us. We don’t know ourselves truly until we know ourselves “in Christ.” True self-awareness can never happen apart from the presence of Jesus.

What grieves me is that so much of our preaching and teaching about sin usually throws people back on themselves and creates even more separation within them. It plays to their conscience and increases self-absorption. What our souls desperately need is preaching and teaching that direct us outside of ourselves to Christ.

This was right at the heart of the theology of Martin Luther. The gospel is a word that comes to us from outside of ourselves, not from within. Philip Cary summarizes Luther like this:

“Luther never looks inside himself to find Christ. It is precisely by taking hold of Christ outside us, in the external word of the Gospel, that faith brings Christ into our heart… If you want to learn a song by heart, you don’t listen to your heart but to the song, as the sound of it reverberates in the air and in your ears… Likewise, if you want to be united with Christ, Luther thinks, you must listen to the Gospel as it comes to you from outside, through your ears and into your heart. When you receive this word by faith, the form of Christ becomes your own, like the music of your heart.”

All of this is right. The gospel is an external word, not an internal word. But we need to say more. Although it is true that the gospel is a word that is external to us, we actually find our true center there. It turns out to be the very center of our being. It comes to us on the periphery of the false selves we’ve created, but it invites us to abandon those false selves with their false realities, and to find our center at the cross of Christ.

When the gospel comes to us, it does draw us out of our delusions, but it does not annihilate us. It makes us who we have always been called to be. It makes us true by giving us our true center—Jesus Christ.

Or to put it in the language we’ve been using: the word of the gospel calls us out from the separation sin has caused within us. It calls us out of our self-delusions, out of our false selves, and back home to our truth.

The voice that speaks the truth to us is not our own conscience, but the voice of that strange Galilean man who claimed to be the truth. That voice is the voice that called you into being, after all. And it still is.

It Takes Training To Be a Sinner

The movement from Adam to Christ is the movement from being born from below to being born from above. It’s the movement into becoming truly human as God is human.

But that movement involves a death. Paul puts it succinctly in Colossians 3:1—11. We have already died and our lives are hidden in Christ, but we must continue to take off the “old human” (Adam) and put on the “new human” which is being renewed in the image of the creator. Becoming truly human begins in a death (“you have died” Col. 3:3), but that death is an ongoing process (“Put to death, therefore…” Col. 3:5). That process is what the old Puritans called “the mortification of sin.”

The problem is sin. But what is it? How do we come to know what it is?

In talking about sin we have to be incredibly careful. But this is an area in which many of the teachers we’ve learned from have not been careful. Many of us have not been careful or prayerful in the way we’ve taught others about sin. Or as Chris Green memorably puts it, “Nothing is more sinful than what we’ve said about sin.”

To say the same thing another way, most of us have been given a doctrine of sin that is sinful.

The problem—as usual—is that we do not start with Jesus in our understanding of sin. Most of our doctrines of sin begin from our own abstract ideas of what sin must be and then we try to squeeze Jesus into those already-fully-formed ideas. But a doctrine of sin constructed this way makes it so that our ideas of sin are setting the terms for Jesus to fulfill, rather than letting Jesus show us the truth. The result is that we’ve cut Jesus down to the size of our own ideas of sin.

Stanley Hauerwas says that becoming a Christian is being “trained to be a sinner.”

“To be able to confess our sins is a theological achievement that our baptisms have made possible. For sin, as Karl Barth maintained, is only known in the light of Christ. Thus from Barth’s perspective, our fundamental sin consists in the presumption that we can know our sin without having become a disciple of Christ. In short, to be a Christian means we must be trained to be a sinner.”

We assume that because we are sinners we must know what sin is. But do we? Does an addict caught in the throes of their addiction really know the extent of their situation? Can they see their addiction and its dangers with any clarity? No! Only in the light of sobriety can an addict fully know the danger they were in.

Misdiagnosing Sin

Misconceptions about sin abound (but grace does much more abound!). Many of us will have been taught that sin separates us from God, or excludes us from the presence of God, or that God cannot even look on sin.

If we begin with Jesus we can see that none of these definitions of sin can be right. In fact, the gospel itself would make no sense if it were true that God cannot be near sin. Jesus—the one who is both truly human and truly God—is called “a friend of sinners.” When you read through the gospels not only do you find God constantly hanging around sinners, but it seems like that’s where he prefers to be.

This makes it all the more puzzling that so many theologians, pastors, and teachers continue to define sin as separation from God. If you read through a theology textbook (like Wayne Grudem’s systematic theology), you will find statements like “sin separates us from God” or “God cannot look on sin” and those assertions are typically followed by parentheses containing a Bible verse. (This is what people in the business call a biblical prooftext.)

It is true that there are many texts in Scripture that are difficult and require us to wrestle with them. But when you look up these texts that are often cited to prove sin separates us from God, what you typically find is that they aren’t difficult at all. In fact, they are usually making the exact opposite point.

Myth #1: “God cannot look on sin”

Habakkuk 1:13 is almost always cited in definitions of sin. “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.”

But when you read the book you realize that Habakkuk is complaining to God because of sin and injustice. He begins the first chapter saying, “‘How long O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?' Or cry out to you, ‘Violence!; but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?” (Hab. 1:2).

Habbakuk feels like God is making him look at and tolerate injustice. He knows God doesn’t like it, and he thinks God shouldn’t look on it either. But God tells him to watch. When we come to the infamous verse 13 that seems to say God cannot look on evil we find there is more to the story. “Lord, are you not from everlasting? My God, my Holy One, you will never die. You, Lord, have appointed them to execute judgment; you, my Rock, have ordained them to punish. Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing. Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?” (Hab. 1:12-13).

Habakkuk is crying out to God, knowing he is a God of justice. He says, “I know you are the Holy One and that your eyes are too pure to look on evil and you cannot tolerate it. So, why do you tolerate it?”

In other words, Habakkuk is saying, “God, you can’t look on/tolerate evil, so why do you?” The text is actually bearing witness to the exact opposite point.

What Habakkuk has to learn is that God’s holiness is not what keeps God from coming in contact with sin, but actually it is what makes it possible for God to be with sinners, cleanse them, and make them whole. That’s what makes him holy.

The point is not that God cannot look at sin, but that it is the “looking” of God that frees sinners from their sin.

In his lecture on Genesis 1:3—5, Dietrich Bonhoeffer notes that God creates by his word and then “looks” at what he has created and calls it good. Bonhoeffer argues that God’s “looking” at creation is what upholds it and preserves it in its goodness. God’s looking at his creation is what keeps his creation from falling back into nothingness. If God turns his gaze away from something he has made, it ceases to exist. 

God’s “seeing” is never a passive act. He is never a voyeur. He is not surveilling us. God’s “seeing” is active. It is a grace. When God sees his creation what he sees is the truth of what he has made: that it is good. Bonhoeffer’s point helps us to see that God never looks away from us, even in our sin. He continues to uphold and preserve us in the truth and goodness in which he made us.

Myth #2: “Sin is exclusion from God’s presence”

Genesis 3-4 are often cited to show that sin causes us to be excluded from God’s presence. Adam and Eve sin in the garden and are exiled from Eden. But as you read the text you find that God has gone into exile with them. The same holds true for Cain in Genesis 4.

Later in the story, when many of the Israelites are taken into exile in Babylon, it is again assumed that those in exile have been excluded from God’s presence. Those who are left in the promised land declare that wicked have been removed from God’s presence into exile because of their sin. But the prophet Ezekiel disagrees.

“Ezekiel responds by declaring exactly the opposite, namely that those in exile—though neither obedient nor virtuous—are in fact the preserved remnant (11:16–20), even going so far as to depict the presence of YHWH leaving the temple and Jerusalem and heading east, as though YHWH was joining his people in exile (11:22–24), where YHWH will himself be ‘a little sanctuary’ (11:16) for the exiles… YHWH remains present among the exiles. On this point, Dalit Rom-Shiloni observes, ‘exile does not [for Ezekiel] bring separation from God.’”

Myth #3: “Sin separates you from God”

We read in Isaiah 59:2 “But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.”

But, again, when you read the whole chapter you find that Isaiah is making the exact opposite point. Isaiah 59:1 says, “Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save,  nor his ear too dull to hear.”

Isaiah is not saying that God is cut off from sinners and can’t reach them because of their sin. He is saying that God can get to sinners even though their sins cut them off from their awareness of him.

The passage goes on to say that we are blind and cannot see justice, we look for justice but find none, our deliverance is far away. We have turned our backs on our God.

Isaiah 59:15–17 “15 Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey. The Lord looked and was displeased that there was no justice. 16 He saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm achieved salvation for him, and his own righteousness sustained him. 17 He put on righteousness as his breastplate, and the helmet of salvation on his head; he put on the garments of vengeance and wrapped himself in zeal as in a cloak.”

The separation from God is in our perception, our awareness, of God. It is true that our awareness is fractured, but Isaiah is saying that even when we are in this kind of sin and injustice, we are never outside of the reach of the hands of God. Because his arm is not too short (Isa. 59:1). What else can “his own arm achieved salvation for him” be referring to other than the cross of Jesus Christ? Jesus is the arm of the Lord that is “not too short.”

This, then, is the point of Isaiah 59: even if it feels like you are outside the reach of righteousness, you are never outside of his reach of his right arm.

Myth #4: “Hell is separation from God”

There is one text in the New Testament that seems to explicitly say that hell excludes us from God’s presence.

2 Thessalonians 1:9 “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…”

But things are never that simple. The book of Revelation seems to say the opposite. Revelation 14:10 “They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb.”

The text forces you to make a decision. Either we have to read 2 Thessalonians in light of Revelation or we must read Revelation in light of 2 Thessalonians. Are sinners shut out from the presence of the Lord in hell or are they in the presence of the Lamb?

If we start our understanding of who God is and what sin is with Jesus the answer is clear. Is Jesus God or isn’t he? This brings us directly to the heart of the idea that sin separates us from God. At the end of the day what this suggests is that Jesus is not fully God.

But the church teaches us to confess that Jesus is everything that God is and everything that we are—in one person. If we hold to that confession then we can see that the gospels witness to the fact that God himself has gone into God-abandonment (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). But he has done this so that we can know that he is present especially where he seems to be absent.

If God has gone into God-abandonment, then there has never been anywhere to hide from him.

As the psalmist says, “Where should I go to flee from your presence? If I go to the highest mountain you are there and if I make my bed in hell you are there!”

This is the promise of the beautiful gospel. In Christ we can hear God saying, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here. I gave you my one and only Son and you murdered him, but I transfigured that evil act into resurrection and the salvation of the whole world. I refuse to separate myself from you, and I refuse to allow you to separate yourself from me.”

Or as Lincoln Harvey has it:

“The only way the creature could separate itself from God is to take him in our hands and kill him. But God has always already chosen the event of separation as his life in Jesus Christ… And this means that nothing can separate us from the love that God is, because the event of the creature’s attempt to separate is the definition of his life.”

This is the true meaning of grace. No matter what you’ve done or will do, God will never leave you or forsake you. The truth is that you cannot separate yourself from him. That’s good news.

But the beauty of the mystery deepens: if God is to be true to himself, he cannot separate himself from you. In Jesus Christ, God has so tightly bound himself to you that to deny you would be to deny himself.

Not “How” but “Who”

Last week we began a study of what it means to be “truly human.” And we began with the truly human one: Jesus of Nazareth. It is not the case that Adam came first and then, when things went wrong, God sent his Son to be born of a virgin as a reaction to Adam’s sin. This typical way of thinking makes it so that Jesus is made in Adam’s image and—to caricature a bit—turns Jesus into Plan B.

Paul insists in Romans 5 that Adam is made in the image of Christ. In other words, Jesus comes first. This is hard for us to think. We know that Jesus is both truly God and truly human, but in order to make this all “fit” we split him in two (sometimes suggesting he is two persons: the eternal Son of God and then Jesus of Nazareth).

The problem with this way of thinking is that it begins with the two natures of Christ (human and divine), seeing them in some sort of competition and tension, and then tries to resolve the tension by some sort of math equation.

Hopefully you can already see the issue with doing theology this way around. This is to start with our own abstract concepts (humanity and divinity), rather than with the concrete person of Jesus.

In other words, we think we know what it means to be God and we think we know what it means to be human and then we try to say Jesus is both those things. This then creates problems for us to solve: How can the uncreated one be created? How can the infinite one be in time? How can the first one come in the middle? How can God die on the cross?

But as Dietrich Bonhoeffer points out in his Christology lectures, the first question of theology has to be “Who” not “How?”

Rather than starting with the seemingly incommensurable natures of Christ (human and divine) and then asking the question, “How do these fit together?” We must start with the concrete person of Jesus Christ. We must ask, “Who?”

We need to start with Jesus to know God and to know ourselves. This one—this person—is simultaneously God and Us.

Truly Human Being

To be truly human—to be human in the way that God is human—we must be fashioned into the image of Jesus, who comes before Adam. To become truly human is to move from Adam to Christ. We’ve got the “who” questioned straightened away. Now we can ask the “how” question. How do we move from Adam to Christ?

Ignatius of Antioch, a first century bishop who died around AD 108, wrote a letter to the Roman Christians while he was under arrest and on his way to being martyred. What he says is striking. His primary plea to the Christians in Rome is that they will not try to keep him from being martyred.

St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans:

“It is better for me to die in Christ Jesus than to be king over the ends of the earth. I seek him who died for our sake. I desire him who rose for us. Birth-pangs are upon me. Suffer me, my brethren; hinder me not from living, do not wish me to die…Suffer me to receive the pure light; when I shall have arrived there, I will be a human being [anthropos], suffer me to follow the example of the passion of my God.”

“Birth-pangs” are upon him as he is coming to his death. His death is actually his birth. “Hinder me not from living” is Ignatius’s way of saying “Don’t stop me from dying.” Only in his death will he truly come alive. Life and death have been completely reversed here. “When I shall have arrived there, I will be a human being.” He’s not yet truly human. He is “in Adam” now, but he longs to be made into the image of Christ through his death. Only then will he be “a human being.”

In other words, for Ignatius, to be put to death in the way Jesus was is to become a true human being.

Two Births

The movement Ignatius shows us is a movement from Adam to Christ through death and this is what it means to become truly human. But he isn’t making this up for himself. This is what Scripture explicitly tells us.

In John 3, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night. Jesus tells him that he will only be able to see the kingdom if he is “born from above.” Nicodemus asks how someone can be born again once they are old. Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:5—8).

Jesus is talking about two different births: one from above and one from below. Yes, Nicodemus, you are born from Adam—from below—but to truly live, to truly be made into the image of God, you must be born from above—born of the Spirit.

Paul picks up this same theme in 1 Corinthians 15:35—49:

35 But some one will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" 36 You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies…42 So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. 44 It is sown an animated body [soma psychikon], it is raised a spiritual body [soma pneumatikon]. If there is an animated body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living soul; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual which is first but the animated, and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. 48 As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. 49 Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.”

The movement here, as John Behr points out, is from Adam to Christ, from being an a body animated by breath (psyche) to a body made alive by the Spirit (pneuma). Adam has breath in his lungs, but that breath expires. Jesus is the Second Adam who—precisely by letting his breath expire—is raised a life-giving Spirit.

These are the two births Jesus spoke of to Nicodemus. The first one is a false beginning—in Adam. But the second is the true beginning of all that is created—in Christ.

Adam—Christ.

Breath—Spirit.

Psyche—Pneuma.

The Lord Kills and Makes Alive

Scripture everywhere bears witness to this movement from breath to Spirit.

Psalm 104:29–30 “When you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust; when you send forth your Spirit and they will be created.”

We have to notice the order. We often read a text like this and think: “Yes, of course. God is the creator so he gives us our breath and then he takes it away whenever he sees fit.” But the text doesn’t say that. It says that he takes away their breath first and then sends forth his Spirit and they will be created.

Many have noticed that Scripture speaks this way. Especially in a text like Deuteronomy 32:39, “I kill and make alive.” Once again the order is key. It is the killing that leads to the living. It is crucifixion and resurrection.

Origen: “In Scripture we always note that those acts which are ‘unpleasant-seeming,’ as I will name them, are listed first, then those acts which seem gladdening are mentioned second.' I will kill and I will make alive' [Deut 32.39]. He did not say, 'I will make alive' and then 'I will kill.' For it is impossible that what God has made to live would be taken away by himself or by anyone else. But, 'I will kill and I will make alive.' Whom will I kill? Paul the traitor, Paul the persecutor. 'And I will make alive' so that he becomes 'Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ.’"

Maximus the Confessor (on God telling Jonah that he will destroy the city of Nineveh): “God in truth both destroys and saves the same city…”

Martin Luther: “Thus when God makes alive he does it by killing…when he takes into heaven he does it by sending to hell.”

Karl Barth: “In Scripture we do not find the Law alongside the Gospel but in the Gospel, and therefore the holiness of God is not side by side with but in His grace, and His wrath is not separate from but in His love.”

This is the secret of God’s wrath: it is not something separate from his love, but is always found in his love. As George Macdonald memorably put it, God’s wrath is nothing but the furthest reaches of God’s love as we resist it.

God’s wrath is not like our wrath. Our wrath aims to kill and destroy, but God’s wrath aims to make alive.

Origen points out that in Galatians 5 “wrath” is not a fruit of the Spirit, but a work of the flesh! But God is Spirit and not flesh. So, when Scripture talks about God’s “wrath” it cannot mean what it means as a work of the flesh.

The wrath of God makes alive. Or, put otherwise, the wrath of God are “the hands of God” that Adam never escapes at any time in his life. The molding and and the shaping are the wrath, which lead us to being born “from above.” It is the wrath of God that takes away our breath in order that he might fill our lungs with his own Spirit so that we might become “life-giving spirits” just as he is.

The Gospel of John tells us that when Jesus breathed his last from the cross he handed over his spirit. But the Greek is really specific: “He handed over the Spirit.”

Jesus breathing his last from the cross is his breathing the breath of life into all things. He is the Life-Giving Spirit.

But he has to breathe his last. He must let go of his breath, and let the old Adam die. Adam must have his breath taken away—crucifixion. But in letting go of his breath he sends forth the Spirit—resurrection.

This is not so much “new” creation or “re-creation” as it is true creation. This was always what Genesis meant when it said that God formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into him. At the cross we are witnessing God’s act of true creation.

Martin Luther said that God created us in order to redeem us. That’s true. But we can be even more precise. God creates us by redeeming us.

But it is only in death that we find life. It is only when you let him take away your breath that you can become clay in his hands and be truly created.

God’s Hands in the Dirt

A few years ago I noticed that there are many of passages in Scripture where God has his hands in the dirt. He’s a working-class God, not afraid to get his hands dirty. This is one of the ways in which he differs from other gods of antiquity.

When I started looking into these passages I noticed that every time God “plays in the dirt” he seems to be up to the same thing.

The first passage sets the theme. Genesis 2:7 says, “…then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

It turns out that Irenaues of Lyons, a second century church father, was way ahead of me.

“Just as, from the beginning of our formation in Adam, the breath of life from God, having been united to the handiwork, animated the human being and showed him to be a rational being…For never at any time did Adam escape the Hands of God, to whom the Father speaking, said, ‘Let us make the human being in our image, after our likeness’ [Gen. 1:26]. And for this reason at the end, ‘not by the will of the flesh, nor by the will of man’ [John 1:13], but by the good pleasure of the Father, his Hands perfected a living human being, in order that Adam might become in the image and likeness of God” (Against the Heresies, 5.1.3)

Adam and Christ

Notice, though, that Irenaeus is suggesting that Adam was not made in the image and likeness of God immediately from beginning. He seems to be suggesting a process. Adam was made from the dust of the ground by the Hands of God, but throughout his life he never escaped those Hands. The Hands kept molding. It is only “at the end” that the Hands of God “perfected a living human being.”

Irenaeus is drawing on Paul’s comparison between Adam and Christ. Adam is the man made at the beginning, Jesus is the perfected human being at the end. Jesus is not made in the image of God but is the image of God.

The mystery of the incarnation, as the Council of Chalcedon has it, is that our Lord Jesus Christ is truly God and truly human. To know who God is we must look at Jesus. But if we want to know what it means to be truly human we also look at Jesus.

The mystery deepens. Chalcedon says that this one–Jesus of Nazareth–is both begotten by the Father before all ages and also born of the virgin Mary. In other words, this man Jesus—“Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim”—is eternal. There is a human being in the Trinity, and his name is Jesus.

So, while it seems that Adam comes before Jesus, in a truer sense he comes second. In Romans 5:14 Paul says that Adam is a “type” of the one who was to come. The word for “type” here is the Greek word for the impression left in wax by a signet ring. The type comes second, the signet ring comes first.

Like Irenaeus, many theologians have picked up on Paul’s point. Nicholas Cabasilas, writing in the 14th century, puts it like this:

“The old [Adam] was not the paradigm for the new, but the new Adam for the old…To sum it up: the Savior first and alone showed to us the true human, who is perfect on account of both character and life and in all other respects as well.”

And here’s Karl Barth (20th century) nodding in agreement:

“Man’s essential and original nature is to be found, therefore, not in Adam but in Christ. In Adam we can only find it prefigured. Adam can therefore be interpreted only in the light of Christ and not the other way round…Christ who seems to come second, really comes first, and Adam who seems to come first really comes second.”

To say Jesus of Nazareth comes before Adam is to say that something that happened in the middle of time is also before all time. To try to say what Paul (and the rest of the NT) is claiming about Jesus we are going to have to question our typical conceptions of what time is and how it works.

Jesus: Plan A or Plan B?

In Colossians 1:15—20 Paul makes more audacious claims about the man Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is “the firstborn of all creation.” All things were created by him, through him, and for him. But he is also “the firstborn from the dead.”

In other words, Jesus is both the first principle through whom all things were made (the Alpha), and the end of all things (the Omega).

Jesus has always been Plan A not Plan B. Put like that, everyone would agree. But surprisingly, the way we typically tell the story of the gospel makes Jesus Plan B. The story goes something like this: God created a world and made human beings in order to be in communion with them. But Adam and Eve rebelled against God, and God had to kick them out of the Garden. What was God to do? God devised a new plan to rescue humanity through his Son Jesus Christ. In this telling God’s Plan A was derailed, so he opted for Jesus as Plan B.

Apart from this being heretical, it doesn’t take Paul’s claims about Jesus seriously. Jesus was always Plan A. He was always the goal and intention of creation.

But we are left wondering: How is it that Jesus of Nazareth—a human being who lived in the middle of time—is simultaneously the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End?

Eternity and Time

In order to grasp the identity of Jesus, what’s required is a revisioning of time and eternity. Rather than starting with our own conceptions of how time works and then shoehorning Jesus into those conceptions, we need to start with Jesus and let him show us how time works. The Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson helps us do just that. Jenson’s theology was a relentless attempt to make Jesus of Nazareth the starting point for all our theological thinking.

Typically we start with our own categories and definitions as if those are just true and then we try to figure out how Jesus fits inside them. (This is precisely how we end up with a “Jesus as Plan B” theology.) Without realizing what we are doing, we think that God is in heaven the way we are on the earth and that God is in eternity in the way we are in time.

As Chris Green puts it, we think that heaven/eternity are conditions for God just like space/time are conditions for us. He is bound to them. He has to work from them and inside of them. But God has no conditions. God is not in eternity. Eternity is in God. God is not in heaven like we are on earth. God created heaven just like he created earth. He is his own space and his own time. He isn’t in heaven/eternity, heaven/eternity are in him.

With our typical categories and definitions of time and eternity we end up suggesting that the incarnation is a change in God that happens in the middle of time. In eternity past there was God the Father and with him was God the Son—but he wasn’t Jesus yet. He wouldn’t become Jesus until the middle of the story.

We are tempted to ask: What were things like in God before the incarnation? But here’s the point: there is no such a thing as before the incarnation in God. Remember what the Chalcedonian creed claims: Jesus is the one who is begotten of the Father before all ages. There is nothing before him. He is the Alpha and the Omega.

We assume that in the first century God dropped into our timeline and became Jesus (Plan B thinking!). But scripture is telling us that this life of Jesus–from his conception to his tomb–is the eternity of God. That’s what the resurrection means. God raises the man Jesus of Nazareth to be the form and content of his eternity.

This sort of breaks open our brains and shakes everything up. But that’s usually what happens when God is around. We need to let our brains be broken open right at this point.

Karl Barth can help break our brains open:

“In Jesus Christ it comes about that God takes time to Himself, that He Himself, the eternal One, becomes temporal, that He is present for us in the form of our own existence and our own world, not simply embracing our time and ruling it, but submitting Himself to it, and permitting created time to become and be the form of His eternity.”

Or more succinctly (as usual) here’s Robert Jenson:

“God took time from our time to be His eternity…”

“This God’s eternity is itself a temporal event: the resurrection of Christ.”

(This is not easy to think, but we shouldn’t be surprised. If we were talking about quantum mechanics or neurosurgery we would all expect it to be hard. We are talking about God and eternity! Of course it isn’t easy.)

The incarnation is not a change in God. As the book of Hebrews puts it, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” The life of the man Jesus turns out to be the Alpha and Omega.

Just think of what Jesus says about Abraham: “Before Abraham was, I Am” (John 8:58). Notice it is Jesus who says this.

The Gospel of John tells us that Isaiah saw Jesus’ glory (John 12:41). In Isaiah 6, Isaiah sees the Lord high and lifted up, seated upon the throne, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Who was he seeing? The crucified and risen Jesus!

The book of Revelation says that the crucified Jesus is “the beginning of God’s creation” (Rev. 3:14). How is that possible? It is possible because Jesus Christ is “the lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8).

So, as Jenson points out, the way scripture tells the story of Jesus reveals to us that all time spirals around the risen Jesus “like a helix.”

The incarnation is not merely another tick on the timeline of history, it is the foundation of all history. It is the ground of the timeline itself!

Or, to put it as boldly as possible: “Creation comes after Easter.” 

Baptizing Time

The story the Gospels tell about Jesus forces us to baptize our conceptions of time. Jesus occupies a strange relationship to time and space. He appears and disappears by coming through locked doors to meet the disciples. He appears to Isaiah! This is all just another way of saying that Jesus is the Lord of time and space.

And if this is so, then why can’t it be the case that it is the resurrected Jesus who walks with Adam in the cool of the day? Why can’t we even say that the voice that says. “Let there be light” is a voice that Mary would’ve recognized?

And if it is the hands of God that formed Adam from the dust of the ground, why can’t we say that those hands bore the nail scars?

Don’t we find this in scripture? Romans 4:17 says “[He is] the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.”

Jenson thinks the order here is important and that it is “a single concept.” God gives life to the dead man Jesus, and then calls all things into being out of nothingness. Or perhaps better: it is by raising Jesus from the dead that he calls things into being.

Creation comes after Easter.

We worship a strange God. Why shouldn’t our conceptions of time be fully baptized by the strange gospel of Jesus Christ?

History and creation have a purpose, but it cannot be discerned by sight. It is only by faith that we know that Jesus of Nazareth is the true Alpha and Omega of all creation.

The one who ate with prostitutes and tax collectors, the one who opened blind eyes and healed lame legs, the one who said, “Let the little children come to me,” the one who loved every human being he crossed paths with—that one is truly God. And he is also truly human. He is God as human.

This is the deep mystery of the incarnation: We look to Jesus to know who we truly are. But it is also true that God looks at Jesus to know who he truly is.

"The tree of life, the cross of Christ, the center of God’s world..."

Insider/Outsider Paradigm

The book of Ruth, as we’ve said, is subversive. It’s challenging the dominant narrative of the day as seen in people like Ezra and Nehemiah. Upon reading Deut. 23, Ezra and Nehemiah conclude that there are insiders and there are outsiders. God loves and accepts Israel, but he has excluded the gentiles like the Ammonites and Moabites.

Ezra/Nehemiah have set up what some sociologists have called a “bounded-set community.” Bounded-set communities are defined by a strong boundary that marks off the insiders from the outsiders. By making a strong distinction between insiders and outsiders, you make the identity of your community very clear, very black-and-white. It’s a simplifying move: “This line marks the insiders from the outsiders.”

In bounded-set communities it is the boundary marker that defines the community. That’s the most important thing. “Are you a pure-blooded Israelite? Or do you have Moabite blood?” This is the criterion that creates the distinction.

The book of Ruth was written to complicate this seemingly simple delineation.  

The genealogy that concludes the book makes the point clear. King David, the ultimate insider, is the son of Ruth the Moabite, the ultimate outsider. This is how the book of Ruth ends—with the boundary marker between insider and outsider blurred.

The Gospel of Matthew picks up where the book of Ruth leaves off: with an updated genealogy. Matthew gives us the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, but he does something odd. Matthew not only gives us the fathers of Jesus, but also a few of Jesus’ mothers. And the mothers Matthew decides to include are significant: Tamar the Canaanite, Rahab the Canaanite, Ruth the Moabite, and Bathsheba the wife of Uriah the Hittite.

The Messiah’s own family tree is filled with outsiders. As Stephen Fowl puts it:

Right at the outset of his Gospel, at the beginning of this story that seems to be by Jews, for Jews, and about Jews, Matthew inserts three Gentile women and ‘the wife of Uriah the Hittite’ into the genealogy of the Messiah. Through cunning, pluck, courage, steadfast love, and even murder, adultery, and unconventional sexual encounters, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba insert themselves, or find themselves inserted, into the story of God’s dealings.

Once again the boundary line between insiders and outsiders seems to be scrambled. Matthew plays on the insider/outsider paradigm throughout, sometimes making you think he’s reinforcing it. But if you read the whole arc of Matthew’s story, you can see that he is out to dismember it.

The Canaanite Woman

This makes it all the more puzzling when we come to the story of Jesus with the Canaanite woman. It’s an infamous story. Jesus seems to have a brief lapse in being Jesus. He seems not only unloving, but unkind. But, as Chris Green writes, “The spirit of Ruth the Moabite haunts Matthew’s [Gospel].” Something is afoot.

The Canaanite woman forces her way to Jesus on behalf of her daughter who is being tormented by an evil spirit. Jesus refuses to see her. He tells his disciples, “I came only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In other words, “I’m here for insiders, not outsiders like this Canaanite.”

The Canaanite woman persists. She makes her way to Jesus and pleads on behalf of her unwell daughter. Jesus rebuffs her again. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” Jesus reinforces the insider/outsider distinction again. But the woman seems to know Jesus better than that. She knows that his words cannot mean what they appear to mean. She knows his character.

“Yes, Lord,” she says, “but even the puppies eat the scraps that fall from their master’s table.”

Jesus responds, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”

If we’ve read Matthew closely up to this point, we already know that Jesus’ words cannot mean what they seem to mean. The spirit of Ruth is all over this text.

First, we have to recognize that this is a Canaanite mother. Matthew has already told us that Jesus has two Canaanite mothers in his family tree. Jesus and this Canaanite woman have a branch of their family tree in common. But this is not just a Canaanite mother, this mother bears a striking resemblance to the gentile mothers in Jesus’ genealogy. She shows cunning, pluck, courage, and steadfast love just as Jesus’ mothers did. She forces her way through the disciples to Jesus (pluck, courage), she goes back-and-forth with Jesus on what he should do for her (cunning), and she does this all for the sake of her sick daughter (steadfast love).

Just like her (and Jesus’!) mothers before her, she is an outsider who—precisely because she is an outsider—is a true insider.

This is the irony all throughout Matthew’s Gospel. At times he seems to be reinforcing the insider/outsider distinction. But if you read through Matthew, it is easy to see that he is subverting it.

Just a few, quick examples.

Magi.The first people to worship Jesus are the magi—gentile kings—following a star (astrologers!) that is leading them to the newborn Jesus. They come from “afar” (from other nations), bearing gifts for Jesus (gold, frankincense, and myrrh).

As Richard Hays points out, Matthew is playing on Isaiah 60 here.

1 Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. 2 See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you. 3 Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn…

6b They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.

The outsiders are insiders.

Blind and Lame. Throughout Matthew’s Gospel it is the outsiders who correctly identify Jesus—including the Canaanite woman. It is the blind, the lame, the lepers, the excluded who know that Jesus is “the son of David.” (See for example Matt. 9 and Matt. 20.)

Centurion(s). Matthew gives us two Roman centurions (outsiders) who recognize Jesus. The first centurion with a sick servant knows that Jesus has authority to heal. Jesus doesn’t even need to come to the centurion’s house. If he says the word, it will be done. Jesus says, “I have not seen faith like this in all of Israel!” This outsider has more faith than any insider.

The second centurion in Matthew is at the foot of the cross. The very one who had just nailed Jesus to the cross sees the truth. “Truly this was the Son of God.” None of the disciples are there at the foot of the cross in Matthew. They’ve all abandoned him. Only the outsiders remain.

The Great Commission. Matthew opens his Gospel with a genealogy of Jesus that includes “the nations” and he concludes with Jesus commissioning his disciples to go to “all nations” and make disciples.

In a very real way, the inclusion of the gentiles is “[the end-goal] toward which Matthew’s whole narrative has been driving.”

Matthew is intentionally blurring the lines between insiders and outsiders. Over and over again the outsiders are shown to “get it” while the insiders (the religious leaders and even the disciples!) do not.

The Cross, the Center of the World

The Gospel of Matthew (and Ruth) complicate and blur the typical understanding of insiders vs. outsiders. What Matthew offers in its place is what sociologists call a “centered set community.” In a centered set community it is not the outward boundary that creates the community but rather the magnetism of the center point.

In a centered set community it is not always easy to tell who is in and who is out (and that’s the point). The boundaries are porous, fuzzy, grey. They can’t be easily discerned (hence, the Canaanite woman!).

For Matthew (and Ruth) the magnetic center is the crucified Jesus. The question is not whether or not you are in based on some arbitrary boundary marker. The question is In which direction are you moving? Toward the center or away from it?

In his lectures on Genesis 1—3, Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that the cross is the very center of the world. It is the wellspring of life that draws all things towards the true center.

The trunk of the cross becomes the wood [tree] of life, and now in the midst of the world, on the accursed ground itself, life is raised up anew. In the center of the world, from the wood of the cross, the fountain of life springs up.

But the cross is the center of the world in a very peculiar way. The cross is not even the center of the city of Jerusalem, much less the world. The cross is located outside the city gate.

Eleven years later, while in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge, meditating on the way that the cross is the center of the world.

God lets himself be pushed out of the world and on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in thew world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us…Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering…Only a suffering God can help.

The way Jesus is the true center of the world is by being excluded from the world. He is not simply another object in the world, he is the center—the life—of everything in the world.

But because he is the true center he has to be pushed outside of the false worlds we’ve built. He cannot fit inside what we’ve made of the world. He is an outsider, excluded.

The only way for us to find our true center is to go to him outside the center of the city (Heb. 13:13). We are called to leave behind the worlds that we’ve made with our insider/outsider distinctions. God is overthrowing all that. His ways are higher than our ways. God does not predicate his kingdom on a boundary marker that separates insiders from outsiders. Rather, God predicates his kingdom on a magnetic center, the cross.

Jesus says that when he is lifted up on the cross he will draw all people to himself. This is the true center. The question is not whether you are “in or out.” The question is in which direction are you moving? Toward the center or away from it?

The outsiders in our world can see Jesus more easily precisely because they are outsiders. Because they have no stake in the false world with its false center, they can see Jesus more easily.

“Son of David have mercy on me!”

“Son of Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth have mercy on me!”

To know Jesus you have to acquaint yourself with his mothers.

Or to say the same thing in a different way: to see God you must acquaint yourself with the cross.

“The last thing God needs is to be noticed.”

A field trip with the old rabbis…

Chapter four of the book of Ruth completes the primary movement of the story. It’s a movement from emptiness to fullness. Our story began with empty bellies—bellies that had no food and no children. It began with three deaths (Elimelek, Mahlon, Kilion), but it ends with three births (Obed, Jesse, David). This is the perfect symmetry of a story told by a master story-teller.

In many ways the conclusion of the book Ruth is unsurprising. Boaz is able to redeem Elimelek’s land and marry Ruth. Ruth conceives and has a son. And they lived happily ever after.

However, the reader is left with more than a few things to meditate on: what is Ruth’s connection to David? What is the meaning of Ruth’s name? And perhaps the strangest question of all is the fact that at the end of chapter four Ruth disappears from the story that bears her name.

In considering these questions we take a field trip to the ancient synagogue and sit at the feet of the old rabbis. The rabbis have a wonderfully playful and imaginative way of interpreting the Scriptures—something we desperately need to recover. And the rabbis’ readings of Ruth are nothing if not imaginative and playful.

I owe most of what follows to Avivah Zornberg, a brilliant Jewish reader of Scripture, and her pointing out these rabbinic readings.

Stranger and Mother to Israel

Where Ruth ends David begins. This is true of the book of Ruth and the book of Samuel, but it is also true of their family tree. The last chapter of Ruth itself ends with a genealogy that ends with David.

In a midrash on the book of Ruth one of the rabbis brings up one of David’s most famous psalms, Psalm 119:

“At midnight I will rise to give thanks to Thee because of Thy righteous laws” (Ps 119:62).

Rabbi Phinehas commented in the name of Rabbi Eliezer b. Jacob: “A harp and a lyre were suspended over David’s head, and when the hour of midnight came he used to rise and play on them…” (Ruth Rabbah 6:1)

Midnight is David’s time for giving thanks to God. This is when he writes his psalms and plays his harp and lyre. But why does he do this at midnight? What connection is this rabbi making with the story of Ruth?

Ruth 3:8 tells us that Ruth sneaks into the threshing floor to “uncover the feet” of Boaz at midnight. This is when David’s great-grandparents were (at least) betrothed.

David knows his story. Because of this midnight liaison between Ruth and Boaz, David rises at midnight to give thanks to God.

The rabbis continue (Ruth Rabbah 6:1):

Another interpretation: “Because of Thy righteous laws”: the laws [punishments] You brought upon the Ammonites and Moabites, and the righteousness [loving-kindness] You did for my grandfather and grandmother, for if he [Boaz] had uttered to her [Ruth] one single curse where would I have come from? But You did inspire him to bless her…”

David rises at midnight to give thanks God for his righteous laws. But the rabbi here splits them in two: the law on the one hand and God’s righteousness on the other.

The laws (or punishments) were brought against the Moabites to ban them. But the righteousness (or loving-kindness) was brought on David’s grandfather and grandmother, Boaz and Ruth.

What was the righteousness (loving-kindness) that God did for Boaz and Ruth? The law seemed to demand that Boaz curse Ruth at that midnight liaison, but God’s loving-kindness inspired him to bless her.

The rabbis envision David thinking through the possibilities here. It’s as if David is thinking, “I almost didn’t exist!” In fact, he’s saying that some readings of the law (Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s) would prohibit even King David from existing. 

David is praising God at midnight because the blessing of his existence was so very close to being a curse. And David would never have “come.” He would never have “entered” the world.

The (dead) law would have condemned his grandmother and grandfather, but God’s righteousness, his loving-kindness, turned this curse into a blessing. Truly, though, the law has always had God’s righteousness and loving-kindness at its heart. And the rabbis know this.

David’s life is a miracle in more ways than one. This is why he wakes at midnight to sing his songs to the Lord—because his Great-Grandmother is Ruth the Moabite.

The meaning of her name…

Every interpreter of Ruth—almost without exception—loves to point out what all the characters’ names mean. Each of the names in the story have a sort of transparently obvious meaning: Elimelek means “My God is King,” Naomi means “Pleasant,” Mahlon and Kilion mean “Sickness and Destruction,” Orpah means “Nape of the Neck,” Boaz means “Mighty Man of Strength.”

But there is one name that is more opaque. What is the meaning of the name Ruth? Ruth’s name is ambiguous which has led to many, many suggestions of what it might mean.

Avivah Zornberg points out that at least one rabbi in the Babylonian Talmud provides a different meaning:

Ruth. What is the meaning of Ruth? R. Johanan said: “Because she was privileged to be the ancestress of David, who saturated the Holy One, Blessed be He, with songs and hymns.”

The Hebrew word for “saturate” is one of the closest sounding words to Ruth’s very odd name. The word “saturate” is not a word that is used often in the Hebrew Bible. But David does use it in one of his greatest hits—Psalm 23: “You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows [is saturated].”

To be saturated is to be satiated. It’s a movement from thirst to being inundated with water. So, why would Ruth’s name mean “saturate”?

According to the rabbi quoted above, it is because David—the one who saturates God with praise—comes out of Ruth. She is the overflowing cup from which David is born. The songs that all of Israel will end up singing to God begin with Ruth. She saturates.

As Zornberg puts it, “David was an unfolding of what was folded up in Ruth.”

The Disappearance of Ruth?

All this brings us to what is the most puzzling feature of the entire book of Ruth: Ruth ends up disappearing from her own story.

Ruth’s “disappearance” begins right at the moment her baby is born. Immediately the baby is in Naomi’s lap, not Ruth’s. The women all sing that a son has been born to Naomi, not Ruth. Ruth is also not mentioned in her own genealogy that closes the book.

But why? Is this the result of ancient Israel’s patriarchal society where women exist for the sake of men? Historically that may be true, but this text breathes with the breath of the living God. What can we make of all this?

Remember that Ruth is the one who saturates. Think of what happens when water saturates a plant. As the water soaks into the soil and makes its way down to the roots of the plant in order to fill it up with life, it seems to disappear from sight. It is not gone, though, it has moved to a more interior and vital position. In the same way, Ruth pours herself out into those around her, filling them up with her own love and life.

The rabbis have one last insight to offer us.

Zornberg points out that in the midrash the rabbis offer a sort of coda—an extension —to the end of the story of Ruth.

In the rabbis’ coda we’ve jumped ahead five generations to the court of King Solomon. We are at the scene of what will be his most famous moment, judging the case of the two mothers with the one baby:

Ruth the Moabite did not die until she saw her descendant Solomon sitting and judging the case of the prostitutes. That is the meaning of the verse, “And he placed a throne for the king’s mother”–that is Bathsheba; “And she sat at his right hand”–that is Ruth the Moabite. (Ruth Rabbah 2:2)

Ruth did not die until she saw her grandson Solomon judging this case. The text of 1 Kings 3 itself just says “There was a throne set for the king’s mother, and she sat at his right hand.” This obviously seems to be referring only to Bathsheba. But in a very imaginative and playful move the rabbi splits the verse to refer to two different mothers of King Solomon. He has Bathsheba sitting to the one side of throne and Ruth on the other.

Why is this the end of Ruth’s life? Why does she live to see this case in particular?

In this story from 1 Kings 3, two prostitutes come before King Solomon. Both of the women had babies, but one of the babies died during the night. Both women are claiming that the dead baby belongs to the other woman while the living baby belongs to them. There’s no way to know which woman is the true mother of the living baby.

So Solomon, in his wisdom, says that the living baby must be cut in two by a sword so that each woman can have half of the baby.

The one woman agrees to the plan. “Divide the baby,” she says, “Neither of us will have him.” But the other woman pleads for the life of the baby saying, “Give her the living child, but absolutely do not kill him!” And this shows Solomon who the true mother is. He just quotes the true mother: “Give her the living child, but absolutely do not kill him.” Then he adds, “That’s the mother.”

The true mother would lay her life down for the sake of her baby’s life.

Here’s what the rabbis are suggesting: where does Solomon get the wisdom he needs to decide a case like this? It must be from his Great-Great-Grandmother, Ruth.

Ruth is the one who clings so tightly to Naomi that they share an essential identity. Ruth saturates Naomi like water in a plant. The baby can sit in Naomi’s lap without Ruth losing the baby. Ruth is the true mother. She can let go of the baby precisely because she is the true mother, just as the true mother does in the story of 1 Kings 3.

And here is Ruth, sitting beside her grandson, Solomon, flanking him with Bathsheba, witnessing the fruit of her womb. 

Solomon has something of Ruth in him that allows him to know what to do. She has saturated him.

Ruth is happy to disappear in her own story. But she does it in the way God disappears in this story.

Have you noticed that God is not really an actor in the story of Ruth? Over and over again we read characters in the story ask God to do something that they themselves end up doing. Boaz prays that Ruth would find shelter in the shadow of God’s wing. But by the end of the story Ruth has found protection under the shadow of Boaz’s wing.

As Chris Green writes, “This story is incarnation.” God is fully embodied in the characters of this story. Their movements are God’s movements. Why? Because they have been saturated with his very life.

He is the water the plants need to truly live. It isn't so much that God has “disappeared” from the story, but that he has filled the entire story with his own life.

In this way Ruth shares God’s character: self-emptying love. The very heart of God is to pour himself out for the sake of others. As Philippians 2 says, “Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but rather he emptied himself by becoming a servant.” He saturates.

And when God empties himself it does not diminish him. God’s emptying is only ever a filling. This is what makes Ruth exactly like her God. God has no ego, and neither does Ruth. Ruth does not need to be center stage even in her own story, because her life has permeated and saturated all the other lives in the story. 

“The last thing God needs is to be noticed.” 

Ruth is both a stranger to Israel and a mother to Israel. In fact, she can only become a mother to Israel by virtue of the fact that she is a stranger to Israel. Jesus is a stranger to Israel and to this world. The closer he comes to us, the stranger he feels. But it is not Jesus that is strange and alien. What we’ve made of our lives is what is strange and alien. When he comes close you realize that he is not strange. He is home.

Ruth is the strange one who makes a home for everyone she loves.

She has no ego. She saturates the way God does. Unnoticeable at first, but once you see it, you realize you’ve discovered that the deep heart of creation is incarnation.