Tad's Life

Here's another bit of what I'm reading at the moment. This is from Brennan Manning's Abba's Child. It's a couple of pages from the last chapter, "The Rabbi's Heartbeat." Manning's writings had a large impact on Woody Phillips, our former mission president, when he hit his mid-life "wall."

The book is an "old friend" that I picked up again this spring when I was recommending titles to Liam. I'm very glad I did. It's like the voice of a pastor for me.

The question at hand, not stated by Manning, but that most interests me is: what is "normal" Christian life? What is our primary goal? My answer is: the central task of the Christian life is faith. To believe the Gospel more and more deeply. To count more fully as the years go by on Jesus' death and righteousness as my only answer to what I find deep in my heart as I come to know God's great Heart. A life of repentance and faith that brings humility and joy and the fruits of the Spirit at work through the Gospel.

Anyway, here is Manning. I've highlighted the quote that led to my title for the post.

Sebastian Moore made this astonishing confession “It has taken me thirty years to understand that the admission and forgiveness of sin is the essence of the New Testament.”

Before assigning him to a slow learners’ group, let us examine carefully our own comprehension of sin and forgiveness. To what extent are we truly reconciled to God and ourselves, and to what degree do we actually dare to live each day as forgiven men and women?

For most of us the generic confession of sinfulness comes easily - i.e., all human beings are sinners, I am human, therefore I am a sinner. A hasty examination of conscience reveals minor infractions of the Law, or what Roman Catholic locution calls “venial sins," This vague admission of wrongdoing is necessary in order to qualify for membership in the community of the saved. But saved from what?

Our blindness to the sinfulness of the late Mother Teresa exposes our superficial understanding of the mystery of iniquity lurking within every human being. Her heroic works of charity shield us from the truth of her inner poverty as well as from our own. For if we emulate her sacrificial love in some small fashion, we are lulled into a false sense of security that persuades us that we have no need of repentance today When the little Albanian saint humbly confessed her brokenness and her desperate need for God, we are either uncomprehending or we secretly suspect her of false modesty.

Paul Claudel once stated that the greatest sin is to lose the sense of sin. If sin is merely an aberration caused by oppressive social structures, circumstances, environment, temperament, compulsions, and upbringing, we will admit the sinful human condition but deny that we are sinners, We see ourselves as basically nice, benevolent people with minor hang-ups and neuroses that are the common lot of humanity. We rationalize and minimize our terrifying capacity to make peace with evil and thereby reject all that is not nice about us.

The essence of sin lies in the enormity of our self-centeredness, which denies our radical contingency and displaces the sovereignty of God with what Alan Jones calls “our sucking two-percent self.” Our fascination with power, prestige, and possessions justifies aggressive self-assertion, regardless of the damage inflicted on others. The impostor insists that looking out for Numero Uno is the only sensible posture in a dog-eat-dog world. “Those unwed mothers made their own bed," shouts the false self. “Let them lie in it!"

The evil operative within us resides in relentless self-absorption, in what Moore calls “our inescapable narcissism of consciousness.” Therein lies the source of our cruelty, possessiveness, jealousy and every species of malice. If we gloss over our selfishness and rationalize the evil within us, we can only pretend we are sinners and therefore only pretend we have been forgiven. A sham spirituality of pseudo-repentance and pseudo-bliss eventually fashions what modern psychiatry calls a borderline personality in which appearances make up for reality.

Those who stop short of evil in themselves will never know what love is about. Unless and until we face our sanctimonious viciousness, we cannot grasp the meaning of the reconciliation Christ effected on Calvary’s hill.

Humility, recovering alcoholics like to say is stark raving honesty. Recovery from the disease cannot be initiated until the deadly denial dwelling in the subterranean personality of the drunk is exposed and acknowledged. He or she must hit bottom, arrive at the moment of truth when the pain it takes to hang on to the bottle becomes much greater than the pain it takes to let go. Similarly, we cannot receive what the crucified Rabbi has to give unless we admit our plight and stretch out our hands until our arms ache.

If we search for one word to describe the mission and ministry of Jesus Christ, reconciliation would not be a bad choice. “In other words, God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself, not holding men’s faults against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). When Jesus said that if He be lifted up from the earth, He would draw all men and women to Himself, He is referring to His being lifted up on a crossbeam. The body of a helpless Rabbi writhing in agony and bleeding to death is the total and final reversal of our flight from ourselves. Calvary is the unbearable place where all the evil in our shabby selves tries to hold its own against God, “and thus provokes the thunder of resurrection.”

Through His passion and death Jesus carried away the essential sickness of the human heart and broke forever the deadly grip of hypocrisy on our souls. He has robbed our loneliness of its fatal power by traveling Himself to the far reaches of loneliness (“My God, my God, why have You deserted Me?”). He has understood our ignorance, weakness, and foolishness and granted pardon to us all (“Forgive them, Father, they do not know what they are doing”). He has made His pierced heart a safe place for every defeated cynic, hopeless sinner, and self-loathing derelict across the bands of time. God reconciled all things, everything in heaven and everything on earth, when He made peace by His death on the cross (Colossians 1:20).

The Cross reveals that Jesus has conquered sin and death and that nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us from the love of Christ. Neither the impostor nor the pharisee, neither the lack of awareness nor the lack of passion, neither the negative judgments of others nor the debased perception of ourselves, neither our scandalous past nor our uncertain future, neither the power struggles in the church nor the tensions in our marriage, nor fear, guilt, shame, self-hatred, nor even death can tear us away from the love of God, made visible in Jesus the Lord.

Listening to the faint heartbeat of the dying Rabbi is a powerful stimulus to the recovery of passion. It is a sound like no other.

The Crucified says, “Confess your sin so that l may reveal Myself to you as lover, teacher, and friend, that fear may depart and your heart can stir once again with passion.” His word is addressed both to those filled with a sense of self-importance and to those crushed with a sense of self-worthlessness. Both are preoccupied with themselves. Both claim a godlike status, because their full attention is riveted either on their prominence or their insignificance. They are isolated and alienated in their self-absorption.

The release from chronic egocentricity starts with letting Christ love them where they are. Consider John Cobb’s words:

The spiritual man can love only ... when he knows himself already loved in his self-preoccupation. Only if man finds that he is already accepted in his sin and sickness, can he accept his own self-preoccupation as it is; and only then can his psychic economy be opened toward others, to accept them as they are -not in order to save himself, but because he doesn’t need to save himself. We love only because we are first loved? (The Structure of Christian Existence, Westminster Press, 1968)