the late Ben Zygier
As Scotland gets the tail-end of the snowstorm which covered Eastern USA, this morning’s blog picks up the Episcopal daily reading along with a headline from world news:
Mystery prisoner who died alone in Israeli prison was Australian and former Mossad spy
HEBREWS 12
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely,* and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us,2looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of* the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.
3 Consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners,* so that you may not grow weary or lose heart.4In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.5And you have forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as children—
‘My child, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, or lose heart when you are punished by him;
6 for the Lord disciplines those whom he loves, and chastises every child whom he accepts.’
7Endure trials for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children; for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline?8If you do not have that discipline in which all children share, then you are illegitimate and not his children.9Moreover, we had human parents to discipline us, and we respected them. Should we not be even more willing to be subject to the Father of spirits and live?10For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share his holiness.11Now, discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
12 Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees,13and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed.
14 Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
“Then are ye..”
When I was training for the ministry of the Church of Scotland almost fifty years ago, in Glasgow, a senior minister told me that when he was feeling particularly thwarted by his very authoritarian Kirk Session, he comforted himself by repeating part of Hebrews 12: 8 in the King James Version. I marvelled at his evangelical piety until I got to my desk and looked it up. The comforting phrase was, “then are ye bastards”……
Of course, the author of Hebrews didn’t mean it to be used in this way. Rather he was trying to persuade his readers that the trials of life should be treated as God’s fatherly discipline. All fathers discipline their own children, he reminds them, so you should be worried if you have no trials, for that would be a sign that you are illigitimate!
I’m not sure if I would have invented this explanation for suffering. It assumes that because God controls everything, he must send suffering into our lives for some purpose-if not as punishment, then as discipline, to increase our faith and endurance. I would certainly never try to use that idea to comfort some one who was ill, or who had undergone some misfortune; and if someone tried it on me in a bad time, I might smack them one.
The alternative, which seems too awful to some believers, is that God isn’t in control of everuything that happens. After all, they may ask, what’s the point of a God who’s not in full control? That’s not what we invented God for! Quite. The God we invent is in charge of everything, but the real God, the one revealed in the Christian Bible is not. He creates a perfect world, peoples it with creatures, invents humanity and OOPS! that was a big mistake, and before God knows it he’s barely managing to keep up with his humans and their capacity for evil. He chooses a special people to be his righteous witnesses and before he can say Nebuchadnezzar, they’re lying and whoring and killing like everyone else. Worst of all when he plays his final card and sends his son into the world, he only manages to convince a few fishermen before he’s rubbed out on a cross. And all the time, as Jesus noted, towers fall down on good and bad alike, and the sweet rain falls on the just and the unjust. God’s in control? Don’t make me laugh!
Yes, I know we can tell the whole story in a way that spares God’s blushes, but surely there’s a better alternative. If God’s creatures, not just his humans, but all his creatures, are to be more than automatons and are to have an approppriate measure of free will, then maybe that involves God giving up control, leaving space for the will of his creatures and for pure accident, in the life of his universe. It would certainly appear that the behaviour of the smallest particles of matter is not predictable. Within the laws of physics there is room for the random and the unpredictable. My Christian faith allows me to believe that the universal process is nevertheless contained within the eternal love, in whom we live and move and have our being; but that love is as much a letting be as a making be. Even more mysteriously, the Creator has from the outset shared the suffering as well as the joy of his creatures; and in his Son submits to evil and death, as a sign not only of his love, but of a victory which is as yet not fully revealed.
behaviour of matter is unpredictable-a star blows up, a supernova
So we might come back to Hebrew’s idea of a fatherly God who asks us to bear the necessary pains of an un-controlled creation as well as the unnecessary pains of human evil, to bear them as part of the discipline of the family of God, knowing that the father himself accepts the same discipline. And is that it? Is that all we can hope for? No as Hebrew’s chapter 11 tells those who live by faith against the odds, “God is not ashamed to be called your God; he has prepared a city for you.” Until we get to that city, we can live as God’s legitimate children, sharing the discipline of creation.
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