Repent for the Kingdom II: Choosing Trust

Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17

Christian dogma is in full bloom in these readings: Abraham gained eternal life as the father of many nations because of his “faith” in God’s promise, according to the story in Genesis, and the corroboration in Paul’s letter to the Romans.  The lawyer (teacher/leader) Nicodemus sneaks off to talk to Jesus in the middle of the night and finds out that the only way to “see the kingdom of God” is to be born again, by water and the spirit, and to “believe in the name of the only Son of God.”

“Faith” is clearly “belief” as far as the writer of John’s Gospel is concerned.  “Trust” in God’s promise – the Old Covenant – has been replaced with “belief” in a violent God that sacrificed his only son in order to save humanity from darkness and evil.  But that action apparently was not enough even for John, because his Jesus says, “No one can enter God’s domain without being born of water and the spirit,” i.e., baptism.  In the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) Jesus says that the way to God’s realm of justice-compassion is open to anyone with eyes and ears; Paul insists that God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion has arrived with Jesus’s death and resurrection, and we are invited to participate in that realm here and now; in John’s interpretation, the way is blocked by water as effectively as the return to Eden is blocked by guardian angel fire.  

Does “repentance” mean baptism, or a conscious, continuing struggle through the flames for distributive justice-compassion?  The war between the worlds that defined Jesus’s life and teachings has been joined.

The Elves that concocted the Revised Common Lectionary should have continued the speech John has Jesus say to Nicodemus.  That might have pointed to a possible dialogue with Paul’s treatise on justification by faith (trust) in the free gift (grace) made possible by Jesus’s death and resurrection, discussed in the readings for last week (Romans 5:12-19).  After declaring all those who don’t “believe” in him as condemned already, John’s Jesus continues:  “And this is the judgment:  the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds [works?] were evil.  For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.  But those who do what is true [works?] come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in [as part of] God.”  So there are good works and evil works.  But John, where is the trust that God – through Jesus – has acted in the world to restore justice-compassion?  Where is the invitation to join the risen Christ in the ongoing program?

John uses mystical language, which barely succeeds as metaphor in the 21st Century because so much of it has already been interpreted to make Jesus’s message exclusive.  If John had Paul’s letters to refer to, he either misunderstood them or rejected the argument.  John clearly does not agree with Paul that “to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.”  What has become conventional interpretation (which began before John’s gospel was written) would insist that “the ungodly” are those who do not believe either in the Jewish God or the Christian Messiah.  Paul is saying that whoever trusts the message – whether Pagan or believer – is made “righteous” [saved] through the free gift of God’s grace.  John insists that the “free gift” comes with a price.  Repentance – turning away from “pagan” ways – is accomplished by water and the spirit in the ritual of baptism.  Only then is grace bestowed and the realm of God found.

It is a short hop that requires no thought to arrive at the conclusion that the only way to be saved from sin is through baptism.  Once “sin” became equated with “sex,” and the dogma that all humanity is fallen beyond redemption because the only way that human life is transmitted is through sex (original sin), baptism became the only way that infants could be saved from eternal hellfire and damnation.  The final act at the closing end of life became the words of absolution, and anointing with oil.  What went on in between (faith as belief versus good work) was the subject of heated debate among theologians, and the source of constant, nagging doubt – if not despair – on the part of the people of ever being allowed into the realm of God.  By the fourth century, this debate and doubt had become attached to political power, and the course was set for western civilization into piety, war, victory, and uneasy peace.

John equates darkness with evil, and light with good.  But post-modern, post-Christian mystics know better than that.  Only by embracing and living through the darkness can the turn be made once more to the light.  Twelve-step programs (“tough love”) hang all their effectiveness on the fact of human psychology that only after hitting bottom can people trapped in addiction – whether medical, chemical, or behavioral – begin to come back.  Any artist will be happy to witness to the universal experience of creativity:  the novel, the painting, the idea, the solution – comes from the darkness, from nothing.  God’s realm – the natural earthly world – teaches very clearly that only after a time of incubation in the dark earth does the seed sprout into life.  Matthew Fox calls it the via negativa, in his countering theology of original blessing.  That theology (Creation Spirituality) got him into permanent trouble with the current pope (then Cardinal Ratzinger, in charge of church doctrine – the former Inquisition), and ultimately thrown out of the Dominican Order.  John’s Jesus did have it partially right.  The church still prefers deliberate scientific ignorance that attempts to keep people in darkness about God’s realm.  But in Fox’s words, “Christ is the light of the world, which we now know is made only of light.  Flesh is light and light is flesh.  We eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and love that light” (Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh (Harmony Books, New York 1999) p. 271.  

Paul argues, “the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith [trust].”  Paul is not talking about Roman law in this instance.  He is talking about religious law, which demands an outward sign of an inward covenant, such as baptism or circumcision, to separate “them” from “us.”  But separation, or hierarchy, are anathema to Paul, as they should be to Christians today.  Once one joins the ongoing program, which is the great work of distributive justice-compassion, there is no longer any distinction to be made between male or female, slave or free, Jew or gentile, or any of the other means by which humans determine who is “in” and who is “out.”  So even though the community that John was writing for may have been in a struggle for survival that demanded a litmus test for membership, such a requirement flies in the face of Jesus’s open and inclusive ministry.  

Christian tradition that demands an outward sign to prove one’s status as “saved” such as being “born again” through the “baptism of the holy spirit” or the public declaration that Jesus is your personal lord and savior, commits the same error as the Corinthian and Roman Christians that drove Paul crazy.  “For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. . .” whose free gift is there for all without qualification.