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| The First Temptation— "Command that these stones be made bread." William Blake |
Sin is top of mind. A good creation exists all around us. A very good creation peers back at us from a phone selfie setting or, perhaps even, a mirror. Our status before God – his creation, his servant, his image – should be without question. Then we began to question it. We wanted a different status so we changed it. We rejected who we are and who God is. We were created to be one thing but began to pretend we were something more and so we became something less. Sin crowded out who we were, who we are. Grace crowds out sin.
Mercy and justice are seemingly impossible cousins. We witness horror and we demand justice. We want evil dealt with. We fear what will happen to us if justice is not carried out. We echo the psalmist, pleading with a just God and praying he will not allow our enemies to stand above us and to shame those who are “wantonly treacherous.” When we see sin, justice is the only answer. Until, of course, we see that sin is in us too. We commit the horror and others call for justice. We are the evil that our neighbours want God to deal with. The psalmist is afraid that we will stand over him. We echo the Psalmist again, pleading with a merciful God and praying that he will overlook our past transgressions. When we see sin, mercy is the only answer.
It is likely too simplistic to say that I want two different responses to sin – mercy for me (or, if I am feeling particularly charitable, us) and justice for them. At times though, I see such a distortion of God’s image in the mirror that I am doubtful that justice is even remotely relevant to God. How could a just God tolerate this, I ask as I drag a razor over my neck and a brush through the cream in my hair in the hopes that people don’t ask the same question when they see me approach. Still, though, I normally crave mercy for me. I normally crave mercy for the people my ministry serves. I also demand justice for the people and structures that cause such ministry to be needed. I feel confusion at times wondering what to do with the reality that I am party to such structures and sometimes the people I serve are among guilty. Sometimes I want the line between mercy and justice to be absolute. Sometimes I want it to be so fuzzy that I cannot distinguish between the two. Perhaps this is why the prophet Micah includes “walking humbly with my God” in his exhortation. I am neither smart nor holy enough to know how to love mercy or act justly. I need humility so I can turn to God to take care of these.
Sin is top of mind because justice and mercy are at the heart of today’s scripture readings. The readings show that both are part of God’s character. The story of the flood destroys nearly the entirety of creation. Noah and his family and some of the animals are saved but everyone else is gone. Justice is served, except not entirely. God first makes a promise to Noah that such an execution of justice will never occur again and he, second, puts a visual reminder for himself to keep this promise. It does not take long for sin to come back into the world and it remains. Noah gets drunk enough to pass out naked and his son teases him; a tower to heaven is built to show our power and importance; the father of God’s chosen people lies; the chosen rescuer of the chosen people behaves as if he can force God to act; a king after God’s own heart orders a married woman into his bed and then murders her husband. Still, a just God looks up, sees a rainbow, remembers, and I am sitting here writing this instead of dreading a forecast predicting more than a month of constant worldwide rain with fear in my heart. How can this be?
Justice and mercy are shown in the psalmist’s prayer. He is honest with his sin. He knows that it is there and it seems to have been a way of life in his younger years, rather than an odd slipup slightly off the path of righteousness here and there. He knows he is in the wrong. He could very well be one of those evil people we look at when we demand justice from God. He also knows there are consequences for such behaviour. A just God cannot stand sin. Yet, there is the prayer: Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for your goodness’ sake, O LORD! Faithful prayer does not assume that God is obliged to answer it with a yes, but a faithful prayer would not be given without the assumption that God may indeed say yes. The God who can act with justice, it seems, is also recognized here as the God who can act with mercy. How can this be?
Ending consecutive paragraphs with the same question implies that I am leading to an answer, and indeed I am leading to one that I would like to suggest. God’s mercy and God’s justice are demonstrated in how God the Father relates to God the Son and how God then relates to us. The answer to how this can be, then, is Jesus.
“Jesus” is too cliché of an answer to be given much credence unless there is some explanation as to why he answers this question. I think Peter – one of his best friends and the foundation of his church – explains why. Jesus as God is a God that demands justice for sin. When we invited sin into this creation we did not distort a faceless god’s image. We did not damage a nameless god’s creation. We did not reject an impersonal god’s rule. We turned our back on Jesus. Jesus, then, gets to gather with the Father and Spirit to decide a course of action. The God of justice decided that justice needed to be carried out and that sin needed to be destroyed. It seems that God had two options for doing this. The first is to eliminate the possibility of sin on earth by destroying one of the only two creatures – people and angels – that we know to be capable of sin. God could have resolved the problem of creation by eliminating the bit of creation that caused the problem, similar to the way the supercomputer HAL reasoned that the best way to protect a spaceship’s mission was to eliminate a man named Dave. The second option is suggested by Peter: Christ also suffered for sins one for all, the righteous for unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison who in former times did not obey… Jesus, the just God known but not yet entirely recognized by the Psalmist’s prayer, showed himself to be the merciful God who was willing and able to gather sin, assume its essence, destroy it by allowing himself to die, and then regain his own life to offer this fulfilled mercy to us, the creatures that invited sin into creation and are the very reason such mercy is necessary.
That such a God would reach out with mercy should leave us full of wonder. There is something else, though. Jesus did not only carry out justice on himself as God. He also did it as one of us, a human. As a human, Jesus was baptized and received God the Father’s blessing, went to the wilderness, and returned to declare that the Kingdom of God was close by. His time in the wilderness was not without incident, however. He was given ample opportunity to sin and he did not seize it. When given the chance to grasp his equality with God, he did not even though he could. This stands in contrast to us, who though we did not have equality with God, tried to grasp it. The man who walked out of the desert, telling people to repent and hear the good news, is able to demonstrate what a created life should be. The good news – that repentance is possible and that creation can be restored – was told to us by a creator God who was now part of his creation, about to assume the punishment that justice demanded despite the fact that only every other person who ever lived was deserving of such justice, and would thereby show creation the ultimate in mercy. Something bad is coming. Sin is top of mind. Something better will follow. Grace will be top of mind.
Attribution for artwork: Blake, William, 1757-1827. The First Temptation—" Command that these stones be made bread.", from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54291 [retrieved February 18, 2018]. Original source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ParadiseRBlake2.jpg.
Scripture readings are from the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B: https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu//lections.php?year=B&season=Lent
Further Reading:
Attribution for artwork: Blake, William, 1757-1827. The First Temptation—" Command that these stones be made bread.", from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54291 [retrieved February 18, 2018]. Original source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ParadiseRBlake2.jpg.
Scripture readings are from the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B: https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu//lections.php?year=B&season=Lent
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