More on tough questions and cheap answers
I was talking to my friend Brent today. Ok...let me paint the picture for you a LITTLE more clearly. I lived in Madiun in East Java. He lived about 50 km to the west in Solo (aka Surakarta). I took a trip to his house and he took a trip to mine. We're more like brothers or close cousins than just "friends", but getting all gooey over it isn't a "manly thing to do."
Brent writes songs. He has written them as long as I've known him, and we met when I was 12. In high school, he lived across the hall from me in the "Hostel", a dormitory for missionary kids in south Jakarta. We were in the most amazing choir together in 9th grade and he wrote one of the songs in our repetoire. I made a very important contribution to one of his songs...I told him how high tenors should be able to sing. With all of my worldly knowledge of being a tenor in a high school choir for AT LEAST six months!!
Anyway, he and I were talking about the "why" questions. Why did this happen to me? Why did I lose my job? Why does a child get sick and die? I noted that in the book of Job, we have no record of God directly answering Job with regards to the "why" questions. Brent commented that the "why" questions have to do with our sense of our own rights. And how we want to be treated. And how we want to figure into God's universe.
Now, I don't usually take conversations that I have and run to my blog and publish them. I feel privileged to have and to keep confidences. But I think Brent was getting to the heart of the issue on the concept of tough questions.
Is our tough question intended to seek real Truth? Or is it simply there to make us feel better? And if the tough question only makes us feel better, won't any answer do as long as, well, we feel better? Where's the Truth in that?
I think the "why" questions are important, by the way, and God never says that we have no right to ask them. But he does reserve the right to respond to our prayers as HE sees fit. (After all, he is God and we're not. He made us, we didn't make him or make him up.) But the why questions need to come from THIS perspective:
"Why is God so merciful and kind?"
"Why is he patient with us?"
"Why did God send Jesus to die?"
Normally our why questions reveal OUR character all too well. These why questions get to the heart of HIS character. And if we can answer THESE questions Truthfully, then the answers become transformational for us if we want to be like him.
I grieve over cheap answers, by the way. Cheap answers often hide the true character of God. The Pharisees of Jesus' day created a "hedge" around sin by adding more rules and regulations. Their purpose sounded noble: they didn't want people to take chances with sin, and the hedge kept them from even the possibility of sinning.
But the Pharisees knew that those hedges were man made. So they played games with them. One of the hedges worked like this:
You know you're not supposed to work on the Sabbath. So let's figure out what work you might be doing. Well...lifting things is work. So we'll define one act of work as lifting your feet to walk. If you walk to far on the Sabbath, then you're working and you're no longer resting. If you have nails in your shoes, then you're working and you're no longer resting.
So (echoes of Bill Maher) NEW RULES:
1. No wearing shoes with nails on the Sabbath.
2. No leaving your neighborhood on the Sabbath.
But the Pharisees found the second of those rules restrictive. And they noted that if there was ANYONE they were related to in the next block over, then that was family and was really part of their neighborhood. So they would string together neighborhoods and declare that, for the secret society of Pharisees and their families, it wasn't work unless you left the stringed-together area.
Now I love those of the Jewish nation and of the Jewish faith. I agree with the papal comment that they are like our older brothers in the faith. Surely, though, you can see the enormous weight and the enormous gaming of your system of faith that has occurred through the rabbinical system? I'm not saying ALL rebbes/rabbis game the system. But you have to admit that some (and perhaps a LOT) have?
The Pharisees were looking for a cheap, easy way to deal with the Law. But God doesn't want to deal with it cheaply. He wants the Law to confront us, to convict us, and to convert us. He wants us to realize that we are unable to undo sin...that just like a glass isn't the same after it's broken, that we're not the same because of sin. That the sacrificial system was a temporary solution to an eternal problem.
The name Israel can be translated "struggles with God." Most English translations use "wrestles," but I'm convinced that struggles is a more faithful translation. God confronts us in every way when he woos us. He confronts our spirit, our mind, our physical strength, and our emotions. He is God of reason as well as God of faith. Perhaps he didn't write hedges around his Law for a reason? Perhaps that reason is so we will struggle with precisely who he is by struggling with what his Law means.
What's my proof text for that? Jesus says over and over "You've heard it said....but I tell you..." in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-8.) He said that not only is it adultery to sleep with someone you're not married to, but it's adultery to undress her with your eyes. He said not only is it murder to kill someone, but it's murder to call him a fool in hatred.
On one hand you have all of the Pharisees (and all of the philosophical thinkers and religious leaders of the world) thinking they've got God boxed in...under control. And on the other hand Jesus takes intimacy with God to a level that had never been proposed before...to the level of an individual, HIDDEN desire.
So to both my Jewish older "siblings" and to my Christian fellow pilgrims, might I ask you to not be satisfied with cheap answers? Dig deep...past the obvious and past the usual. God isn't in the fire or the earthquake or the whirlwind. He isn't in the everyday. He's in the unusual. He's like the treasure in the field that once you find out about it, you sell all of your possessions and go buy the field in order to "own" the treasure in it. No cheap answers, please...only ones based on extravagant love.
Brent writes songs. He has written them as long as I've known him, and we met when I was 12. In high school, he lived across the hall from me in the "Hostel", a dormitory for missionary kids in south Jakarta. We were in the most amazing choir together in 9th grade and he wrote one of the songs in our repetoire. I made a very important contribution to one of his songs...I told him how high tenors should be able to sing. With all of my worldly knowledge of being a tenor in a high school choir for AT LEAST six months!!
Anyway, he and I were talking about the "why" questions. Why did this happen to me? Why did I lose my job? Why does a child get sick and die? I noted that in the book of Job, we have no record of God directly answering Job with regards to the "why" questions. Brent commented that the "why" questions have to do with our sense of our own rights. And how we want to be treated. And how we want to figure into God's universe.
Now, I don't usually take conversations that I have and run to my blog and publish them. I feel privileged to have and to keep confidences. But I think Brent was getting to the heart of the issue on the concept of tough questions.
Is our tough question intended to seek real Truth? Or is it simply there to make us feel better? And if the tough question only makes us feel better, won't any answer do as long as, well, we feel better? Where's the Truth in that?
I think the "why" questions are important, by the way, and God never says that we have no right to ask them. But he does reserve the right to respond to our prayers as HE sees fit. (After all, he is God and we're not. He made us, we didn't make him or make him up.) But the why questions need to come from THIS perspective:
"Why is God so merciful and kind?"
"Why is he patient with us?"
"Why did God send Jesus to die?"
Normally our why questions reveal OUR character all too well. These why questions get to the heart of HIS character. And if we can answer THESE questions Truthfully, then the answers become transformational for us if we want to be like him.
I grieve over cheap answers, by the way. Cheap answers often hide the true character of God. The Pharisees of Jesus' day created a "hedge" around sin by adding more rules and regulations. Their purpose sounded noble: they didn't want people to take chances with sin, and the hedge kept them from even the possibility of sinning.
But the Pharisees knew that those hedges were man made. So they played games with them. One of the hedges worked like this:
You know you're not supposed to work on the Sabbath. So let's figure out what work you might be doing. Well...lifting things is work. So we'll define one act of work as lifting your feet to walk. If you walk to far on the Sabbath, then you're working and you're no longer resting. If you have nails in your shoes, then you're working and you're no longer resting.
So (echoes of Bill Maher) NEW RULES:
1. No wearing shoes with nails on the Sabbath.
2. No leaving your neighborhood on the Sabbath.
But the Pharisees found the second of those rules restrictive. And they noted that if there was ANYONE they were related to in the next block over, then that was family and was really part of their neighborhood. So they would string together neighborhoods and declare that, for the secret society of Pharisees and their families, it wasn't work unless you left the stringed-together area.
Now I love those of the Jewish nation and of the Jewish faith. I agree with the papal comment that they are like our older brothers in the faith. Surely, though, you can see the enormous weight and the enormous gaming of your system of faith that has occurred through the rabbinical system? I'm not saying ALL rebbes/rabbis game the system. But you have to admit that some (and perhaps a LOT) have?
The Pharisees were looking for a cheap, easy way to deal with the Law. But God doesn't want to deal with it cheaply. He wants the Law to confront us, to convict us, and to convert us. He wants us to realize that we are unable to undo sin...that just like a glass isn't the same after it's broken, that we're not the same because of sin. That the sacrificial system was a temporary solution to an eternal problem.
The name Israel can be translated "struggles with God." Most English translations use "wrestles," but I'm convinced that struggles is a more faithful translation. God confronts us in every way when he woos us. He confronts our spirit, our mind, our physical strength, and our emotions. He is God of reason as well as God of faith. Perhaps he didn't write hedges around his Law for a reason? Perhaps that reason is so we will struggle with precisely who he is by struggling with what his Law means.
What's my proof text for that? Jesus says over and over "You've heard it said....but I tell you..." in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-8.) He said that not only is it adultery to sleep with someone you're not married to, but it's adultery to undress her with your eyes. He said not only is it murder to kill someone, but it's murder to call him a fool in hatred.
On one hand you have all of the Pharisees (and all of the philosophical thinkers and religious leaders of the world) thinking they've got God boxed in...under control. And on the other hand Jesus takes intimacy with God to a level that had never been proposed before...to the level of an individual, HIDDEN desire.
So to both my Jewish older "siblings" and to my Christian fellow pilgrims, might I ask you to not be satisfied with cheap answers? Dig deep...past the obvious and past the usual. God isn't in the fire or the earthquake or the whirlwind. He isn't in the everyday. He's in the unusual. He's like the treasure in the field that once you find out about it, you sell all of your possessions and go buy the field in order to "own" the treasure in it. No cheap answers, please...only ones based on extravagant love.
posted by greg.w.h@11:18 AM link-to-post
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