On the Golden Rule and Matthew 18

(Kenny)

A proposal: what if the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") is really at bottom the same thing as, "Treat other people the way you want God to treat you" -- and what if Jesus gave us the Golden Rule because He knows that God does, in point of fact, decide how to treat us based on how we treat other people?

When you think about it, there's a lot of Scripture that seems to imply that God takes His cue on how to treat us, from the way we treat other people. The parable of the sheep and the goats, for example, tends to be a source of distress to redneck Southern Baptists who want to fit everything into a simple Salvation by Faith Alone model, because the eternal fate of the nations is, according to Jesus, a matter entirely of what people did, not a matter of the profession of faith. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus famously says:

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!' (Matt. 7:21-23, NIV)

In the parable of the sheep and the goats, Jesus expands on what he means by "doing the will of my Father who is in heaven" -- and it seems (in that parable) to have everything to do with how we treated others:

"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

"Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'

"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'

"Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life." (Matt. 25:31-46, NIV)

And the Tanach weighs in as well: for example, "A generous man will prosper; he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed [Proverbs 11:25, NIV]," or, "Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry. My anger will be aroused, and I will kill you with the sword; your wives will become widows and your children fatherless [Exodus 22:22-24, NIV]."

So, if God treats us the way we treat other people, then that raises two obvious questions:

1. What happened to justification by grace rather than works?

2. Given the fact that even the best of us frequently treat other people like jerks, doesn't "you get what you give out" pretty much mean we're all hosed?

But as it turns out, the answer to the second question, is precisely justification not by works, but by grace set free by works -- once we understand one of the most critical insights of Christianity.

God is going to treat us like we treat other people. But we frequently are jerks to other people. But that doesn't mean we're completely hosed, not yet at least. What it means is that God now has on his hands Kenny, who has been acting like a jerk; and He intends to treat me like I treat other people. So that makes the following question absolutely critical:

How does Kenny treat other people when they act like jerks?

You see what I mean? Since we frequently act like jerks, and since God looks at our own behavior to others to establish the rules by which He treats us, the most important thing about how we treat other people is precisely how we behave to the jerks. And once you get that insight, you'll see it throughout the teachings of Jesus. For example, the Sermon on the Mount:

"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

It isn't Jesus' main point, but still, doesn't it come through very clearly that being nice to the people who are nice to us just doesn't buy us much -- it's how we treat the jerks that matters? And this is just one example of the way in which this basic principle underlies so much of Jesus' teaching, even when it isn't His main point.

But there are at least two places in which it is, in fact, His main point, two places in which He leaves no room for confusion on the point. Here is the parable of the unforgiving servant, from Matthew 18 (my reading of which, this morning, kicked off this whole post):

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?"

Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

"Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

"The servant fell on his knees before him. 'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.' The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.

"But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. 'Pay back what you owe me!' he demanded.

"His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'

"But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.

"Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?' In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

"This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart."

He couldn't possibly have made it plainer, could He?

And that brings us to my final passage for this morning. When Jesus' disciples asked Him to teach them to pray, He put smack into the middle of the Lord's Prayer one of the most fearsome sentences ever uttered by human lips, a sentence that I hear people repeat by rote every Sunday morning:

"And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us."

Every person who repeats the Lord's Prayer, of his own free will asks God to bind him to the rule that God will do to us as we do unto others. How does one say those words without fear and trembling? -- unless we really can look at our hearts and be confident that we hold no grudges or enmity against any of those who have wronged us. How many of us can really stand that examination? Ought we not see to it that one of the main businesses of our lives, is the rooting out in us of all resentments and all grudges, and the granting of peace and grace to all those who have wronged us, no matter how badly?

Thus the argument about grace and works turns out, as such arguments almost always do, to turn in the end on a false dichotomy, or at least to turn on life at the periphery of our relationship with God rather than on life at the deepest core. There is a place where the distinction between grace and works breaks down, at place at the very center of our life in Christ, a place where our works and God's grace meet and kiss each other. We are saved by grace, not by our works -- except that there is one of our works that is, actually, a precondition for grace: namely, our own granting of grace to others. There is one "work" that plays a direct role in our salvation, albeit even then in the role of a necessary precondition, not a sufficient agent.

And that "work" -- is grace.

The Valley of Vision

(Kenny)

My friend Butch sent me a Puritan meditation early this morning. I'm not sure Butch realizes that "contriti corde" is Latin for, roughly, "those whose hearts have been broken," though if he noticed the URL for this blog when he followed the link...well, that's a pretty big hint, dontcha think? ;-)

At any rate, R.I. and I each are, in our own ways, going through some bleak and emotionally exhausting times of externally imposed trial, taking our places in the fellowship of suffering that God's called and Chosen have through the centuries perforce known so intimately. Hence our daily prayer for each other; hence the name of this blog. And this meditation speaks exactly to where I, at least, am at the moment.

By the way, I believe it was St. Teresa of Avila who has the distinction of being perhaps the sole person ever to have bested God in repartee. I don't remember what bit of bad luck she had suffered, but it was one of that moments that every Christian has periodically when you suspect that God's going out of His way to make things more difficult than they need to be. St. Teresa, who was nothing if not outspoken, asked God bluntly, "Lord, why are you treating me like this?"

"Teresa," the Lord answered, "that's how I treat all my friends."

She fired right back. "Pues, por eso tienes tan pocos..." -- "Well, that explains why you have so few of 'em."

Here's the Puritan mediation "The Valley of Vision," which you can find in this collection (which, I might add, comes highly recommended by Butch).

Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly,

Thou hast brought me to the valley of vision,
where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights;
hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold thy glory.

Let me learn by paradox
that the way down is the way up,
that to be low is to be high,
that the broken heart is the healed heart,
that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
that to have nothing is to possess all,
that to bear the cross is to wear the crown,
that to give is to receive,
that the valley is the place of vision.

Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from deepest wells,
and the deeper the wells the brighter thy stars shine;

Let me find thy light in my darkness,
thy life in my death,
thy joy in my sorrow,
thy grace in my sin,
thy riches in my poverty
thy glory in my valley.

"Who gives generously to all without finding fault..." (repost from RedneckPeril)

(Kenny)

I originally posted this over at Redneck Peril back in September. Having had a few months to think it over, I might rewrite some of it a bit for reasons of style and clarity, but I think on the whole I still buy it.

I've been trying, throughout this divorce, to live out James 1:2 ("Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds"), and a while back, while re-reading James, I learned something about giving, I think. I was thinking through James 1:5, in which we are told that God gives his gifts haplos kai me oneidizontos -- "generously and ungrudgingly" is how the RSV puts it. So I was thinking about that and meditating on what that looked like, and realized it doesn't look very much like how I was "generous" to some very difficult people in my past -- that is, I worked very hard to be generous and I made a ton of personal sacrifices that I didn't at all have to make, but the responses I consistently got posed a challenge to me that I didn't realize I was facing and didn't until tonight realize I had failed.

Haplos (NIV and RSV "generously," Bauer/Arndt/Gingrich "simply, sincerely, openly, generously, without reserve") is a word whose full connotation I think I can best sum up as, "without ulterior motives." I have recently been witness to a person ("Mr. M." for Manipulator) who had an agenda he could not accomplish without making use of somebody else ("Ms. N.", for Ms. Nice Gal, gender set to female for pronomial convenience in the next few sentences). Now, Mr. M. knew that Ms. N. would not approve of the agenda in the service of which he intended to use her, and he set about gaining her confidence, hoping to gain enough of her trust to win some sort of confidential information that he could use -- by betraying those very confidences, obviously -- against "Mr. T." -- that is, his true Target. Now the guy who pulled this stunt -- do you think that I will ever again, for the rest of my life, get a favor from this guy without wondering what he plans to use me for? Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis: I fear the Greeks even -- indeed especially -- when they come bringing gifts.

Furthermore, because there are people like that in the world, even a genuinely sincere person can be suspected: I personally know what it is to have every attempt you make to be nice to someone interpreted in the worst possible light because the person assumes you are, so to speak, a Greek giver; and the tragic thing about that was that the only thing the guy accomplished by "defending" himself against me, was to stymie every attempt I made to help him become successful -- in the job from which he was ultimately fired. (That may be specific enough for some of my longer-term acquaintances to figure out to whom I'm referring, in which case I apologize to the gentleman in question -- but I take consolation in the fact that I am 100% certain he will never read my blog and thus will never have his feelings hurt by what I have just said. Plus he's probably too bloody stupid even to realize that he's the one I'm talking about...no, no, just kidding, really and truly.) And I have slightly more recent experience as well with another person who responded to every attempt I made to be generous with resentment and with imputation of vicious motives, and who not only took my efforts in the worst possible light but who furthermore tried to use a highly distorted version of them as a way to paint me out to be a bad person -- and when in self-defense I stopped making generous gestures, he complained to mutual acquaintances that I was a selfish and grasping and greedy and tight-fisted person because I wasn't giving him any help. (As you perceive, I have had some wonderful co-workers and very nice friends at church but I have also seen my share of dysfunctional vocational and social communities -- when I laugh at "The Office," I, like most Americans who've put in a couple of decades in the workforce, have plenty of personal experience fueling the laughter.)

Well, God isn't a Danaean: His gifts can be trusted. Not necessarily trusted to be pleasant (sometimes His gifts have to be trusted the way a child has to trust his mother's gift of a dose of castor oil or his father's gift of a sound spanking), but trusted to be sincere and straightforward and genuinely meant for the good of the recipient, not as some form of manipulation.

Try thinking of it this way (you'll see why in a minute): when God offers you a gift, you can accept it freely without worrying that He's hypocritically covering up some fault. You can just say, "Thank you," with equal sincerity and openness. God isn't a Greek and His horses aren't Trojan, if you want to put it that way.

(It dawns on me -- rosy-fingered, as it were -- that I ought not be assuming that everybody reading this is familiar with the Homeric cycle and the Aeneid and the story of the Trojan horse. Wikipedia, guys, wikipedia.)

Me oneidizontos is the flip-side, and I think the best way to capture its meaning here is "without insults." I don't quite like the NIV's "generously...without finding fault," because I don't think its point is sharp enough, and the RSV's "ungrudgingly"...well, they certainly know more than I do but that's still just not how it strikes me at all. Do you know the kind of person from whom you just hate to receive gifts because his whole manner and attitude in giving you the gift is demeaning and belittling? -- but you feel like you have to put up with it because beggars can't stand on their dignity. Only, after you've been hit with that a couple of times you're apt to decide you'd rather go hungry than accept his "generosity." Do you know the kind of thing I'm talking about?

One thing I know about husbands -- I hope somehow my daughters learn this before they get married because if they don't learn it they will inevitably find themselves living out Proverbs 14:1 -- is that there are things that we husbands need that we emphatically don't deserve; but the fact that we don't deserve them doesn't at all change the fact that we desperately need them and that the consequences of our being denied them are catastrophic, especially for our wives. And I think something analogous is probably true of everybody in some sense, and indeed probably in too many senses for us to hope to count them. Certainly at the level of salvation we need from God grace that we do not deserve; but I think it is true emotionally as well -- our whole lives are, or ought to be, one long process of continually coming before God with our requests even though we are not worthy so much as to gather the crumbs under His table. And it occurs to me tonight that one of my very favorite collects from the Book of Common Prayer -- Proper 11 -- almost looks as though it had been written without due attention to what James is trying to tell us.

Proper 11 reads, in part (the emphasis is mine), "Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask." Now, the godly men who composed this prayer wisely knew that there are lots of times in our lives in which we are all too aware of how little we deserve, and because of our unworthiness we dare not ask God. But James is saying simply, "If there is ever any time in which there is something you need from God and you dare not ask Him because of your unworthiness, then you don't really know God -- if for your unworthiness you dare not ask, then that's your fault, not His."

God gives sincerely and generously, without ulterior motive or hidden selfish agenda; He is no Greek giver; you need not suspiciously try to find fault with Him. And you need not worry that when you go to Him asking for wisdom He will remind you of your shortcomings and sneer at your needs and in the end give you His gifts only while making sure you are made bitterly aware of how much better He is than you: He will not find fault with you.

So now the real question is: how does my giving, stack up against God's? And what I've realized tonight is something that sheds a lot of retrospective light on that old relationship I referred to earlier, in which every time I tried to be generous to the guy, he turned it into an excuse to claim I was a vicious and evil person. Well, looking back now, I finally perceive that there is one respect in which my generosity has been deficient, and when I dig into it more deeply I find that I was not quite giving haplos and I was not exactly giving oneidizontos. Close, but not quite. And the reason I know I wasn't, is that I used to get so angry whenever he took my attempts at generosity and peacemaking and tried to use them to further my destruction.

Interestingly, as time went on he got less and less willing to accept any generosity from me, and I have realized that it is because there was an agenda behind my giving and because I did find fault. The agenda was the making of peace, an aspect of which I habitually expect (as would most civilized people) to be a response of gratitude. And while I was careful not to find fault (even in my own mind) when I was going to special trouble to be helpful to him, still I could sit in a corner and cry, "Heigh, ho," for gratitude from him for those gestures -- and the lack of gratitude infuriated me, whereupon I would find fault...not with the fact that he needed help, but with his striking lack of gratitude whenever I tried to help him.

But that means that my gifts were not given freely -- they were given with the expectation of gratitude, and in (it would seem) the service of a private agenda on my part of obtaining gratitude and graciousness from the dude, and I resented his failure to go along with my agenda in giving the gifts.

So, um, my bad there, is what I'm saying. And the sad thing is that every generous gesture I made with my agenda of making peace, seemed to wind up doing nothing but worsen and further embitter the conflict...for I was not giving haplos kai me oneidizontos. And my basic reaction was pretty much, "Well if THAT'S what I'm gonna get for trying to help, why the hell am I bothering?"

Which turns out, actually, to be a very good question, and we'll return to it for the final wrap-up of this post; but my immediate point is that it didn't occur to me to ask, "What in the world did I do wrong in the way I went about trying to help, that caused it to do so much harm than good?" I spent a long time asking myself, "Why does that S.O.B. act that way?"...but it's only tonight that I finally stopped wondering, "Why did he always behave so badly?" and started wondering, "Is it possible that I was behaving badly myself?" And the answer is: yes, I was; I was not living out my responsibility to be an imitator of Christ with respect to James 1:5.

So, I'm thinking about all of this with my New Testament open in front of me, and I suddenly realize God is addressing, with me, the question of, "Is THAT what I get for trying to help?" At that point God was finally able to get through that six inches of bone that apparently surrounds my brain, something along these lines: "Kenny, because of the attitude that has underlain your 'generosity,' if [that guy] had reacted with gratitude and had reciprocated your generosity with generosity of his own, then verily, verily, I say unto you: you would have had your reward."

Every good and perfect gift, even when it appears to come from other people, is, James famously says in this same chapter, from God. What I have realized tonight is that it works the other direction, too: my gifts to other people -- or at least to those annoying and socially-self-destructive persons who respond to generosity in a manner apparently calculated to ensure that one never again makes the mistake of treating them generously -- will only be good and perfect gifts if, even when they appear to go to other people, they are in truth gifts I offer to God. For then, if the person responds with bitterness and betrayal and insults rather than with gratitude and graciousness and reciprocation...so what? It wasn't really his present anyway. Every good and perfect gift we receive is from God; but every good and perfect gift we give, we give to God. And thus we need never complain that the Recipient of our gifts receives them ungraciously.

I'll have to think about this some more because it's a new thought for me and I probably don't really have it exactly right yet. But I think I'm a lot closer to the right attitude than I was before I sat down this evening with James. And certainly it's true that if, when I cast my mind back over the backstabbings and spittings-in-the-face and slanderings I've gotten clobbered with in exchange for trying to be nice to people, I find that as long as I think about what God was doing for me in the middle of that, it's actually possible to consider it pure joy -- but the moment I shift my focus to what the Mr. M du jour was doing to me, the joy is gone and I'm instantly seething with fury. And that doesn't do anybody any good at all.

Persons who set me straight in the comments will find I am grateful for the correction.