Issue 1.2 | February 2018
In this Article: how God uses the failures we experience, as individuals and as a Church, to return us to our high calling.
Perhaps you are like me, and your heart lifts high at the sight of wild country: mountains, unending forests, or vast plains. It is as if the hand of God has not yet been interfered with by the hand of man. There is little such wilderness left today. The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching, huge tracts of rainforest are wiped out for ranching, and in the centre of oceans, as far from human presence as one can go, large plastic islands are forming. “Humans are a virus,” a friend once said to me.
That is not the Bible’s view of humanity, but it is the Bible’s view of our impact. You and I were born to be monarchs. We were called to be shapers of the world, sons and daughters of the God who is King. Formed from dust but invested with his likeness, we were made to bring his wisdom and love to bear upon every sphere of creation, and every creature within it. Instead, creation groans (Romans 8:22).
Failed Monarchs
The desire to do well, to make great things happen, and to do so artfully, begins in our identity as royal children. It is a regal instinct, flowing from the core of who we are. The problem, as we saw in the previous article, is that we have long preferred to be under our own management.
Seating ourselves on the throne of divinity rather than the throne of humanity for which we were made, we exchanged monarchy for monstrosity. Made in the image of God but divorced from him, we remain great, but also greatly distorted. Having fashioned ourselves in our own likeness, we do not reveal God to creation, but instead subject it to our self-made caricature of God. We are failed monarchs. Even the good we do for one another and the world invariably carries within it some hidden, backward step. As I wrote elsewhere recently:
Facebook wanted to connect us to information and to one another: they delivered this, but they also helped deliver an epidemic of anxiety, polarization, and virtual mob lynchings. Apple (and Samsung, et al) wanted beauty, simplicity and utility applied to a variety of tasks in one device: along with these benefits, virtually every smartphone user also suffers addiction and cognitive fragmentation.
Failure, the Intervention of Grace
Grace is the rescue of failed monarchs.
The first instalment of God’s grace is the failure that invariably follows when we try to be our own god. Failure is the interruption of a disaster in the making. By removing Adam and Eve from the garden, where they had access to the Tree of Life, God curtailed monstrosity. He set a boundary of grace around evil.
The second instalment of God’s grace is the forgiveness he made possible by taking death upon himself when, as Jesus, he was crucified on a Roman cross. Here, he emptied failure of its power, comprehensively. The power of human wilfulness, the power of sin, the power of unpaid debts, the power of human and demonic oppressors, and the power of death that follows in the wake of all these things: each is voided on the cross.
This correspondence of failure and grace is very hard to swallow. We are so enamoured with performance that we are suspicious of grace. The biblical message of undeserved favour (grace) is so radical that when you play it out fully, it risks being heard as an implicit dismissal of God’s call upon his people to holiness, to embody his Kingdom in character and in initiative. We hear grace as permission to disobey.
As one might say, holiness and obedience are not best illustrated by consistent failure in the Church. In the words of Paul: “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!” (Romans 6:1-2). This is cheap grace, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it, grace used as an easy escape, as a glib justification for passivity, apathy, or sloppiness — for disobedience. Cheap grace is not a gift humbly accepted, but a utility appropriated for personal use. It is not mercy received, but license seized. Cheap grace keeps a bankrupt monarch on the throne of faux-divinity.
We think grace grates on our high standards, but what it really grates on is our pride. Paul, who comprehended perhaps more fully than anyone the extravagance of Christ’s grace, shows us that it is not an apathy towards sin (or righteousness) that is at stake. More profound is “confidence in the flesh” (confidence in one’s capacity apart from God) — to which he himself claimed a right (Philippians 3:4):
“But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss … I consider it excrement, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own … but that which is through the faithfulness of Christ* — the righteousness that comes from God and is by faithfulness … Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” (3:7-12)
Failure exposes the flesh and confounds its efforts. Our failures are perhaps less distressing to God than to us, not because he is comfortable with them, but because they aren’t the main problem. His grace in Christ has more for us than just forgiveness. Forgiveness deals with the problem of sin. But God is also dealing with the sinner.
Holiness, the Fruit of Grace
Grace is the end of sin and the beginning of holiness. For grace to be both, for grace to change a life, requires the death of the recipient. To receive God’s gift of grace is to acknowledge defeat, failure, and guilt. It is to relinquish the governing centre of the universe to the One who is all wisdom and power and love.
Only at this point does grace begin the work of restoring a monarch: “those who lose their life for my sake will find it,” said Jesus (Matthew 16:25). Grace sets the stage for the one quality that, perhaps before all others, prepares us to be “doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude” ourselves (James 1:22). This is the quality of humility.
The Servant Queen
In Luke 7:36-50 we encounter a deeply moving story in which we find Jesus at dinner in the home of a prominent religious leader, a member of the Pharisees. The dinner is gate-crashed by a prostitute (whom Luke refers to from the perspective of those gathered: as a “sinful” woman, v.37). A profound discussion ensues in which the Pharisee is warned and the prostitute liberated.
“Do you see this woman?”, [Jesus said], “I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” (v.44-46)
The difference between the Pharisee and the prostitute is not that the Pharisee has sinned less, therefore been forgiven less and therefore loved less. The difference is that the Pharisee, who measured his spirituality by his qualities, and not by grace received, does not fathom the reality that he is as much a sinner as the prostitute. He has sins, but has never seen them. In his self-righteous conceit, he has no name for them. The prostitute, however, knows her sin, and knows too the grace she has, in contrast, received from Jesus. Her whole being overflows with a grateful and humble love for him. Her love is marked by exquisite generosity. What she gives is her whole self.
This is what grace does. It names, judges, and puts to death that which chains us to ourselves. It pours, without measure, the balm of forgiveness. Jesus lifts us up by the chin and speaks, not just a word of kindness, but of profound love. In his word of grace, we hear our true name, our true identity for which we were made: not the arrogant little self-made god of our own design, but a son, a daughter, a vessel of the One God who spoke all existence into being.
Through death and forgiveness combined, grace restores us to our call by altering something deep within us. In removing shame and granting dignity, grace removes any need for us to be concerned for ourselves. It produces humility, freeing us into generosity towards others. In Luke’s story, there is no more shamed slut. There is only a servant queen. This is good news, by the way, for us as a Church; for we are the Bride of Christ, but have often behaved like a whore.
The Servant Church
It is difficult to think of a quality more productive in any aspect of Christian life than humility. It is the essential quality of the two most basic areas of Church life: inward service and outward service.
Inward Service
We frequently forego unity between churches because we fear compromise in the essentials of the Christian faith. But when we do so, we end up compromising anyway and, perhaps, more seriously, for we have compromised in that very characteristic and behaviour that demonstrates that Jesus is in us. If Jesus’ work on the cross is the theological centre of Christian life, then humility is its practical centre, for Jesus’ work of grace was born and lived out in a posture of total humility:
“If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love … then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition … but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who … made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant … humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:1-8)
Unity is not agreement or conformity, but what happens in spite of strong reasons to disagree and disapprove. Before it can be a visible reality, unity has to be a behaviour. It is humility, enacted as mutual submission. Submission, as an act of shared grace, binds the disagreeable together. Unity is humility worked out in community.
Outward Service
The unity of the Church is our primary witness to the world. It is the miracle that shouldn’t be. It is the sign of crucified hearts. The practise of humility and servanthood between Christians and churches is the first thing that will be “proof” to the world that Jesus Christ, who himself is known by his self-sacrificing humility, is in our midst.
Humility is also the ground for every kind of service we undertake in our relationship with the world around us, be it evangelism or social action. Either one is belied as being of the Lord if humility (and, it follows, servanthood) is not at its heart. Every act of love — whether my sharing of the Gospel or my caring for the poor or my campaign for justice — is empty if at its heart it is not characterized by humility.
The Art of Sacrifice
Cheap grace is a means of keeping God at arms length, making it false religion. Neither can our relationships with others in the world and Church be at arms length — this is also false religion. To enter the world of the other as a submitting servant is the art of sacrifice. We find this perhaps the hardest thing to do, because it controverts every instinct of our flesh. But to do so is to live out the essential dynamic of the Gospel. To do so is to be the monarch we were made to be.
A Graced Church
We have indeed been called to great things; greater, according to Jesus, than anything he did (John 14:12). Throughout history we find the people of God, monarchs in the making, showing up in the most extraordinary ways: in the rescue of babies from Roman garbage heaps, in refusing to leave the sick while urban masses fled epidemics, in the subversion of empires, in the transformation of forgotten tribes, in the pursuit of science, in the abolition of slavery, in service to the poor, in the rescue of abused animals, in the preservation of secular and religious literature in the Middle Ages, in the art of cathedrals and the Book of Kells, and in the last time you loved your enemy. These are the kinds of deeds that flow from those unthroned by God’s grace.
Brought to the end of ourselves by grace, we are free now to follow in the steps of Jesus, the truly great King. In human estimation, which uses the calculus of control, the path he has led us into is the path of folly. To paraphrase Paul: “Religious people demand miraculous signs and rational people look for wisdom, but we preach Christ [the Divine Monarch] crucified: a stumbling block to the religious and foolishness to the rational” (1 Corinthians 1:22-23).
In following Christ, however, we find a third installment of his grace: his Holy Spirit, by whom we come alive to the things of God, and by whose power, one day, we will be raised from the dead. “It is no longer I who live,” Paul wrote, “but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the body I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God*, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).
Whenever we, as individuals or churches, stray from this cruciform path — whenever we, driven by our desperate desire to do well, clamber back onto the throne that can only be God’s — his kindness will bring us up painfully short. We long to be a wonder show before the watching world, but failure and grace drive us to the discovery of the ages: that what is wonderful about us is God’s love for us, shown in his grace to save us, and now at work in us through the Spirit of Christ.
God will stick to his foolish ways and use a weak and humiliated Church — but a graced Church. Therein we are his wonder show, until whatever age he chooses to come.
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*Some may notice here my translational choice for the words usually rendered “faith in Jesus” as “the faithfulness of Jesus”. The linguistic arguments for this rendering are strong, but whatever one’s conclusion, either translation supports clear themes present in Scripture: of our trust and obedience (faith) and of God’s unrelenting covenant faithfulness.
Note: a part of this article formed the original conclusion to the previous article, The Humiliated Church, first published in an earlier form in the December 1999 issue of Theologically Speaking, a publication of African Enterprise South Africa. I have taken that original ending and substantially rewritten it for Cruciform.
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