i'm just being honest here. i could care less about sacrificial love. unless you're caring for a small child, the idea of sacrificial love presupposes a world in which people abuse or mistreat each other. if all adults actually treated each other well, like the kingdom of god requires, we would never have need for a love that risks death, or love that risks battering, or love that makes us exhausted and empty. someone who loved you would never ask you to sacrifice for her. of course kindness matters, of course it is the only thing that matters, of course i want to buy you a hamburger when you have no money, of course i will sit by your side and lather your lips in chapstick every half hour when you are immobilized in a hospital bed, but not because it's a sacrifice. i do it because i love the shit out of you. because you're a human being, and you matter so much, and i hate to see you suffer, and i love to see you happy. real love is no sacrifice at all, real love is an overflow of the heart. when you do something sacrificial for me, not just one something but a neverending stream of somethings, you are not making my life better, you are not filling me with love, all you are doing is saying see what a good person i am, how tirelessly i serve others, and that just makes me feel like a selfish loser. if you find yourself giving and giving and never getting from me, i don't want you to pick up my slack, i want you to tell me dammit, because if that is the case, then i am not loving you as you deserve. sometimes i will listen to you when i don't feel like listening, and sometimes i will clean up the kitchen even though it is your turn and even though it irritates me, because these are the little sacrifices that make life together work, that make a relationship real, but they are not by any means the pinnacle of moral fortitude. we should not be striving to sacrifice ourselves more. we should be striving to value each other so much that mutual care is nothing but a joyful exercise.
you say that if god does not punish my sins, then injustice runs rampant, you say that at the cross justice and mercy kiss, at the cross god found a way to exact justice for every tiny little thing i've ever done wrong, while still showing me nothing but grace. this is another place where you say love without sacrifice is dead, god's love is a costly love, it doesn't cover a multitude of sins like grace would do, it sees failure and misguided self-preservation and all those other things you call "sin," and it says there will be blood, and only after, and then there will be grace. and see, you had me until the blood part. number 1, how does innocent suffering of a lamb or a jesus ever right any wrongs? why can't you see that more innocent suffering leaves us more guilty, not less? this setup has the exact same result as "sacrificial love" between humans; i never feel any consequence for my failures, or my evils, so i have no motivation to stop doing them, so i continue to take advantage of you. two, why does god find it so hard to forgive the sorts of things i find so easy to forgive? and/or the things he commands me to forgive seventy times seven? is it because he is "holy" and "just?" if so, you have just made god's holiness into a handicap. and three, what if the desire for justice is rooted in cruelty? because i think it is, i think it is the desire to make suffer those who have made us suffer, which is to dehumanize them, to care nothing for their pain, to repay evil with evil. it's a natural desire, but it is also the opposite of love, no? what if jesus' death was meant not to give us an example of supreme sacrifice, but to shock us into recognizing that the system of retributive justice leads to death? and that we can only fight evil by standing against that cycle of violence? reconciliation, repentance, love, these things come not from retributive justice, but from right understanding. we mistreat each other because we don't understand how much life matters. or because we had good intentions and didn't understand the consequences of our actions, or maybe, even, because we wanted someone else to suffer as we have suffered. if we confront these misunderstandings at their roots, we're a lot more likely to bring about reconciliation and repentance than if we load them onto jesus' innocent shoulders.
i have so much in common with christianity, i have wandered back into the fold and am so happy to be here, but whenever this understanding of jesus comes up, which is sort of the core understanding of christianity for most people, i feel myself disengaging. what can ya do. i know that the framework of me being hopelessly sinful and jesus being endlessly loving is worn out for me, it doesn't work. but that doesn't mean i don't share with christians a common desire for the kingdom of god that jesus talked about in his stories.
anyway. none of this was an issue in the least until today, when my christian wanderings led me to think it was a good idea to visit a pca church with a friend. most other christian groups i participate in don't seem to notice much of anything different about me, but those presbyterians sure love to talk about "the basics." i am glad, though, i think it's fun to revisit these questions. i am also hoping these presbies can redeem traditional theology for me a little, because they care about it so much, know it inside and out, but they practice it so beautifully, they seem like such sweethearts. we will see.
1 comment:
boom.
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