The irrupting gospel

One of the most refreshing developments in recent Western Christian theology is the rediscovery of the Kingdom of God concept in the gospel. Jesus led the in-breaking of the presence of God into the world in a variety of stunning ways, including healing the sick, casting out evil, and feeding the hungry. He brought justice to the down-and-out. He had control over every aspect of nature in order to show us what the world ought to look like – that the world was not intended for suffering, despair, and oppression, or decay, but that we were intended to live in a physical and spiritual world of harmony, peace, joy, and life.

Gospel definitions?

What is the gospel?

For Christians, we hear the word so much that sometimes we don’t even bother to try to define what it is. On one level, this would seem to be a problem, because the gospel is the very center of Christianity. How can we know what it is if we can’t define it?

According to the gospel of Mark, the gospel is at least this: that the Kingdom of God was inaugurated by Jesus when he came to the earth. There’s a lot to unpack there, including the presence of God in Jesus and his power over evil, nature, hunger and death. And even though Mark does not say that the gospel is “Jesus loves you” or “justification by faith,” he would likely say that those things are included. The question is, “why didn’t he?”

Mark defies the Western desire for definitions in that he does not try to boil the gospel down to a set of principles. For Mark, the gospel was all about sharing the stories of Jesus in such a way that people were forced at almost every turn to make a decision about him. I have come to find that evangelism is much easier when I do the same.

The good guy

“Pardonner, c’est son metier” (To forgive is, after all, his profession) – Voltaire

In the course of trying to apprehend things greater than ourselves, one of the questions that often arises is, how could a “good” God permit pain and suffering and injustice? I’ve posed that one before, and it’s a good question, because it goes straight to the heart of God’s character. In letting the response unravel before me, though, I often felt myself unsatisfied and frustrated with the conclusions of my own logic, and perhaps even more distant from God than before I decided to inquire.

But one of the things I’ve endeavored to do, in parallel to answering that question, is to open up my Bible and find out who God is on his own terms, shedding the pristine images I had as a child and coming face to face with the awesome, terrifying, and inscrutable. It’s a slow process, not unlike chiseling away at a block of granite in order to discover the sculpture hidden within. Sometimes you go for a very long time wondering if you’ve just disfigured a sheer piece of rock, until at last you come to something that actually resembles a ripple in a robe, or a finger on a hand.

In doing so, it has become increasingly clear that the formulation I had about God as “good” needs refining. I had always perceived that God, as “good,” must be fairly pleasant and innocuous. Moreover, he ought to know that he is obligated to be nice, since (so I thought) his simple character demands it. That is, I think, what Voltaire was saying in the quote above.

How presumptuous it was of me to think that God was just a “nice guy”! Just like a young girl who finds that sort of personality in a young man to be sweet but unexciting and predictable, we emasculate God by tying his character to a vanilla-coated abstraction of “good.”

The God of the Bible is unpredictable, shattering, not to be reckoned lightly. Interestingly, many cultures of the world outside of western Christianity have a similar formulation of the creator God. They know that a creator God fashioned the world, and sends good things, such as the rain, but who knows what he will do next? Even the rain doesn’t follow a timetable. He can give life, but he can take it away at any moment.

It’s against this backdrop of the creator God’s basic character that one begins to process just how shocking the recorded events of the Bible must have been to those who experienced them firsthand. God didn’t love because he was constrained to do so by a puny, “aw-shucks” personality. He was more like the guy with the dark shirt, deep voice, and large muscles in the back of the room who everyone is afraid to disturb. That’s the guy who took the initiative, put himself on the line, and decided to love the very people and world he could have crushed for insolence. That’s how God is “good.”

So, why does God continue to allow pain, suffering, and injustice? I’m not completely sure at the moment, but I will be one day. In the meantime, I trust that he will set those things right because he showed us how he would.

Where are we?

The Church is always in a state of crisis and its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it.

-Hendrik Kraemer

Every now and then, you hear something that makes you sit up straight. The Church is always at the precipice, straddling between danger and opportunity. That's not a criticism but rather a description of the reality in which the Christian finds him- or herself. It's all about being the embodiment of Christ in the world, and where you go to do that, and what you talk about, and who you talk about it with. We've been lulled to sleep if we think that there is no longer any danger and there is no longer any opportunity associated with being the Church. There are the projects in downtown New Orleans or Detroit, or the wrong side of any major city worldwide, the majority world in Africa and Asia, with desert and famine and war, and all kinds of people in all kinds of places who need to meet the one person we know. Where are we?

Why do this?

For the service of the church.