What if I were to
let you get on your soap box with the following unfinished conditional clause:
If I were God, I would (fill in the
blank). If I were God, I would have
eliminated that large pit in the avocado.
Think of how much more guacamole you could get from each avocado without
that big pit. If I were God, I would
have finished creating the human foot by making every pinkie toe
beautiful. If I were God, I think I
would have left the cockroach on the R & D table. If I were God I would not have allowed the
coming into life experience people such as Hitler or Stalin. How would you finish this conditional clause
if you were given a soap box?
When we have
finished speaking and begin to look at our statements, we might find that we express
an intolerance or impatience for many things in this life. Such intolerance or impatience might be proof
that at heart, we are all utopians in wanting a better life and a better world.
What our
intolerance and impatience would also express is that if to truly be God is to
allow freedom in the world, then we could not be such a God. If to be God means to be the most patient of
all beings, then we would fail at the task of being God, because as we look at
things that are evil or occasions of innocent suffering, we do not think that
we can have such patience. In our
temporal pain and suffering we are too willing to sacrifice “freedom” for
automatic or robotic good outcomes.
Would good be good, if it were automatic or robotic?
In the parable of
the weeds and the wheat, Jesus presents the message of a tolerant and patient
God. In the biblical writings, God was
not always been presented with such patience.
In the story of the great flood, God is presented as seeing the human
community to be so depraved that he has to use a great flood to rid the earth
of its evil population and save only eight people. And what does his saved hero Noah do after he
comes out of the ark? He gets drunk and
curses his son.
By the time Jesus
comes, God is seen to be much more patient and God’s patience has to do with
the fact that good and evil have true meaning because of freedom. To limit human experience to the sole
ascendency of good or evil would be to remove freedom and also the definition
of good or evil.
The parable of
wheat and the weed gives us an insight about God’s tolerance and patience. But it does not suggest that we should just
wait until a final day of judgment before we do anything about improving our
world.
What it suggests
is that catastrophic intervention would mean destroying the potential good crop
of the future because of the presence of some inconvenient inter-mingling pesty
weeds. Some of the legal penalties of
the Old Testament law were catastrophic in nature, sometimes called the law of the
claw, an eye for an eye, a tooth or a tooth, and a life for a life. There was a law that said an insolent child
should be stoned to death. What sort of
future redemption is present in such catastrophic reactions?
Catastrophic
intervention is the chief mythology of Hollywood. In action adventures, catastrophic
intervention by a hero doing super human martial and military acts wins the day
in less than two hours. This virtual
cinematic myth is rotten with the rage of a perfect one who knows that good and
evil are so clear cut that good can be forced with the rage of catastrophic
intervention. Such cinematic myths do
not have the patience necessary for the way life really is. Nor do they represent the patience of God.
How can we come to grow in the patience of God? How
did Jacob come to have patience? Jacob
came to have patience by believing that he had a future and for him to have a
future, he had to escape from the wrath of his twin brother Esau, whose birth
right he had tricked from him. Jacob
escaped to an unknown future and in his night of sleep he had the dream about
the angels ascending and descending upon the ladder from heaven. In this dream, Jacob was reassured that there
was and would be messengers from another realm who could bring messages to his
own realm of comprehension to enable him to be patience with the unfolding
events of his life.
St. Paul was aware
of the tolerance and patience that he needed to have with himself and he also
preached of a cosmic patience that we need to have with this world. If Paul did not come to have patience with
himself, he would have said, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. He participated in the stoning of Stephen;
therefore he too deserved to be stoned.
But if Paul had died of a stoning, the entire mission of the Gospel to
the Gentile world would not have happened in the way that it did. Being complicit in murder is perhaps a great
weed in one’s life that would challenge one’s right to live and go on. How could Paul forgive himself and accept the
forgiveness of Christ? The severity of
his murdering ways cried out for a great redemptive mission in his life.
What did St. Paul
call the conditions of weed and wheat of this life? He called it the condition of futility. Futility is when we hope for so much more
than can become actual. Futility is when
we know that the aspirations of hope cannot be accomplished in the span of an
action movie, or even in a span of one’s lifetime. Futility is when our actual lives seem to
tell us that our hope is not valid and we are to be pitied for being so
delusional.
But the Gospel of
Jesus and Paul would tell us today that the experience of the Spirit in our
flesh is in fact proof that the wheat of hope will someday be ascendant for
us. The experience of God’s Spirit even
in our actual weakened conditions of our flesh is the proof itself.
Let us today
accept our limitation as beings who are much less than God. In our limitations, we do not have the
capacity for catastrophic intervention in this world, nor do we have the
ability to know that we have the best vision of what is truly good. What we do have is the presence of the Spirit
of God in our lives to inspire us to begin to do a little weeding in our own
patches. O, Spirit of God, what kind of
weeding do I need to do to rid my life through personal choices of the things
that hinder more excellent human fruitfulness?
I often worry
about apocalyptic fatalism of some people who wish for a catastrophic end of
the world as we know it. They assume a
position of God in thinking they truly know from their precise and certain
Bible knowledge who is good and who is bad.
Let us not be so certain that we know how the situation of futility in
our world, country, community, family or personal lives can be resolved in a
final way.
But let us be
certain about the Spirit of God in our futility to be energy and power of hope
and patience with us and with each other.
And let us get busy by the Spirit of God to do a little weeding in the
patches of our lives. Amen.
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