Here’s a zinger on the scandal of grace from Robert Farrar Capon’s Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace (pgs 161-163) – a book full of such zingers. Dr. Capon is commenting on the parable of the self-righteous Pharisee and the repentant Tax Collector from Luke 18:9-14. It’s a familiar parable and upon first glance, most of us would agree that self-justifying religious behavior is ugly, and that the humility of the tax-man is a virtue. But what if a swindling IRS worker came back into your church a month after a seemingly legit show of repentance with no personal reform to show for it? I don’t know about you, but I think I’d probably be hacked and my guess is, you would be too. Self-justification is intuitive and it runs deep. A repeat offending tax-man should get a stern talking to while the religiously faithful should get an honorary plaque under some stained glass. Of course, grace is a little more counter-intuive and unfair than that.
…while we sometimes catch a glimpse of it, our love of justification by works is so profound that, at the first opportunity, we run from the strange light of grace straight back to the familiar darkness of the law.
You don’t believe me? I’ll prove it to you: The publican goes “down to his house justified rather than the other.” Well and good, you say. Yes indeed. But let me follow him now in your mind’s eye as he goes through the ensuing week and comes once again to the temple to pray. What is it you want to see him doing in those intervening days? What does your moral sense tell you he ought at least to try to accomplish? Aren’t you itching, as his spiritual adviser, to urge him into another line of work—something maybe a little more upright than putting the arm on his fellow countrymen for fun and profit? In short, don’ t you feel compelled to insist upon at least a little reform?
To help you be as clear as you can about your feelings, let me set you two exercises. For the first, take him back to the temple one week later. And have him go back there with nothing in his life reformed: walk him in this week as he walked in last—after seven full days of skimming, wenching, and high-priced Scotch. Put him through the same routine: eyes down, breast smitten, God be merciful, and all that. Now, then. I trust you see that on the basis of the parable as told, God will not mend his divine ways any more than the publican did his wicked ones. God will do this week exactly what he did last because the publican is the same this week as he was last: he’s still dead, and he simply admits it. God, in short, will send him down to his house justified. The question in this first exercise is, do you like that? And the answer, of course is that you don’t. You gag on the unfairness of it. The rat is getting off free.
For the second exercise, therefore, take him back to the temple with at least some reform under his belt: no wenching this week, perhaps, or drinking cheaper Scotch and giving the difference to the Heart Fund. What do you think now? What is it that you want God to do with him? Question him about the extent to which he has mended his ways? Why? If God didn’t count the Pharisee’s impressive list, why should he bother with this two-bit one? Or do you want God to look on his heart, not on his list, and commend him for good intentions at least? Why? The point of the parable was that the publican confessed that he was dead, not that his heart was in the right place. Why are you so bent on destroying the story by sending the publican back with the Pharisee’s speech in his pocket?
The honest answer is that while you understand the thrust of the parable with your mind, your heart has a desperate need to believe its exact opposite. And so does mine. We all long to establish our identity by seeing ourselves as approved in other people’s eyes. We spend our days preening ourselves before the mirror of their opinion so we will not have to think about the nightmare of appearing before them naked and uncombed. And we hate this parable because it says plainly that it’s the nightmare which is the truth of our condition. We fear the publican’s acceptance because we know precisely what it means. It means that we’ll never be free until we are dead to the whole business of justifying ourselves. But since that business is our life, that means not until we are dead.
It is, admittedly, a terrifying step. You will cry and kick and scream before you take it, because it means putting yourself out of the only game you know. For your comfort though, I can tell you three things. First, it’s only a single step. Second, it’s not a step out of reality into nothing but a step from fiction into fact. And third, it will make you laugh out loud at how short the trip home was. It wasn’t a trip at all: you were already there.
[youtube=www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJmJX55iht4&w=600]
COMMENTS
10 responses to “Re-Offending Taxmen and the Outrage of Grace”
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Hmm… I think I’d expect to see some evidence of a “new creation” in this tax man guy, not as payment or restitution for sin, but as confirmation that God is at work in his life. If God’s not at work in his life then I would question the sincerity of his request that God have mercy on him.
Or am I off base, or in left field (or if you’re more liberal, in right field) or out to lunch?
How much evidence would you like to see exactly?
I would expect to see lots of evidence. When we are saved by grace we become new creations so that we can walk in good works. Those works don’t justify us, nor do we do them as some sort of self-justification, they just happen because God has begun a good work in us.
I would like to see the same, especially in myself; however, I have come to realize that the evidence of the Lord’s work in us is not always visible. Some fruit is very slow growing, and may only be discovered on the other side of the river.
Gregg, if you get some free time, you might listen to Aaron Zimmerman’s first talk from this year’s NYC conf (the Zoolander one), and also DZ talk “Glad and Sorry”. In my opinion, they offer a quintessential Mockingbird-type answer to your question: https://mbird.mystagingwebsite.com/2012/04/2012-nyc-conference-recordings-honesty-humility-and-the-grace-of-god/
Thanks John for taking the time to answer and give me the link. I listened to the two talks and I guess I still don’t “get it.” I’ve been trying to walk with Jesus for 41 years and encourage others to do the same. I mess up, I know I’m not a good guy, but I also know that if I love Jesus I will obey what he commands and that’s what I work at, not because I “have to” but because I love Jesus. Like Robin wrote above (thanks Robin), the fruit is slow growing, but I have seen fruit.
Listening to the talks and looking at this site I feel like I should feel guilty for seeing fruit – kind of like I’m not being honest about how messed up I really am. But that’s not how the New Testament reads. In the NT I see how messed up I am, I confess my sin, I’m cleansed of all unrighteousness, I do some work, sometimes it encourages somebody. Then me and the somebody are happy we’ve seen some growth and progress in our lives and later the roles reverse and I’m being helped. It’s what I understand from the NT that the church is supposed to be. But this site makes me feel like any help, growth or progress is a sham, we’re all deceiving ourselves and we’re all just messed up.
I admit I haven’t read a lot of Mockingbird yet, life keeps coming on a little too fast, but I think that I still don’t “get it.”
Thanks Gregg for checking both of those talks out. I think they’re A+. Granted, this is a fairly different bent. I think for many of us, the notion that Christians still struggle in the same ways that they did before they became believers comes as a huge insight, a kind of A-ha moment. A lot of people feel discouraged when they look to their own progress to find comfort. Luther, for example, pointed out that, turning the Christian’s hope inward is actually damning. He tried harder than most of us ever will at becoming a super-Christian, monk-extraordinaire. The more he progressed, the more he found he hated God and doubted himself. What about all the sins he couldn’t remember to confess?! I don’t think any of us would deny that being a Christian changes a person’s life, or that good trees bear good fruit. But I think a lot of that fruit is a right-hand-not-seeing-what-the-left-hand-is-doing kind of affair. There was a guy in AA who one an award for being “the most humble”. They gave him a pin to commemorate the achievement. The next day he showed up at an AA meeting wearing his new pin on his lapel, and the group took it away from him. That’s how we view the problem of emphasizing sanctification, the moment you do it, you end up de-emphasizing justification. It’s like focusing on the crater after a meteor has hit the ground. The explosion was caused by a momentous event, but crater-study when compared with a meteoric paroxysm is sort of chump change. Also, this train of thought opens the door to thinking of God’s charismatic work in the life of a Christian as having more to do with deconstruction than construction, with penitence, as Luther put it, “characterizing the entire Christian life” (thesis 1 of the 95 theses). We see the world and ourselves in a completely new light, not that we are ontologically reoriented, but that happens completely in death, and has happened in Christ in such totality that we can basically walk in freedom, having died to sin (i.e., it’s judgment) and risen to new life (i.e., having been forgiven through atonement). Thus, the work of the spirit in the life of the believer is spontaneous, uncontrived, even (at best) unconscious, for it is not ours. So I don’t for a second think that nothing changes in the heart and life of a new believer. It’s just that the categorical shift is so huge, and so totally far away from any kind of Cosmopolitan Magazine 8-Steps-to-a-better-me kind of thing that we are quick to distance ourselves from putting things in those kinds of terms. What we have found in Christ primarily, is perfect righteousness, and complete forgiveness. Everything else is gravy.
As our favorite theologian, Forde, remarked in his brilliant essay “On Sanctification”: “Sanctification is just getting used to justification.” It’s a quote that makes sense of much of the Mockingbird approach. I hope this kind of an explanation helps and is at least a little bit engaging. That you took the time to listen to those to talks was a much appreciated gesture. If you want more on this train of thought, man have we got tons of stuff to share! 🙂 Cheers, JZ+
Wanted to add too that there’s a brilliant book about this kind of material by Karl Holl called “The Reconstruction of Morality”. It was, for me, a life-changing read, connecting so many of these weird (spiritual) dots one to the other. It’s a little bit hard to come by, but there a plenty of used copies to be found on Johnny Interweb.
Lastly, to summarize what I said in a (even) more opaque way, here’s Lynsey De Paul doing a lot of the heavy lifting: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WC-EiK6n-M&w=420&h=315%5D
Again, thank you for taking the time for all you’ve written.
One of my favorite movies is 16 Blocks and my favorite part of the movie is when Bruce Willis says to Mos Def, “I’m not a good guy Eddie, I’m not a good guy.” And Mos replies, “Yeah, me neither.”
I’m not a good guy John. My default is to dwell on that, but I’d rather dwell on what God has done in my life. I’d rather read stuff that will contribute to “my progress and joy in the faith.” Or as Luther’s third thesis states, “inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortification of the flesh.” I don’t want to just think about how worthless I am, I want to be more like Jesus.
So I guess I’m still pretty dense as to what you’re all talking about. God has done spontaneous things in my life for which I’m thankful. But on the other hand, Paul, Hebrews and Peter still tell us that we need to “make every effort” (other versions “be diligent”) to live in peace with all men, to be holy, to add to our faith goodness, to be found at peace with God, etc. So I’m going to keep working at it. And when I discover that I no longer want to swear at the guy that just cut me off, I think I’m going to realize it was God who had convicted me about it and his spirit who enabled the change.
Oh, and I couldn’t figure out what Lynsey De Paul was trying to tell us in her song. Sorry! Guess it went right over my head. But I enjoyed it and as one good link deserves another I found a live version of a Rich Mullins song that describes where I am (hope the HTML comes out right):
We Are Not As Strong As We Think We Are
Blessings on all of you and on what you’re trying to do.
It seems the tendency is to think because we may have ceased to “do” a certain thing that is sinful to think in terms of “progress.” I’ve said in the past that because I may not struggle with what all 17 year old adolescent boys struggle with I can’t make any claims to progress because I see how I fail to “Love my neighbor as myself”… which incidentally is a “greater” problem to have to deal with. I remember Rod Rosenbladt saying once that dealing with sin in ones life is like keeping beach balls submerged in the water… you can only deal with them one at a time and it’s no guarantee that it never resurfaces. We are all drowning in the sea of our sinfulness… how close to shore one can swim to “salvation” is beside the point I think. God has promised each of us that saving ourselves is beyond our reach… we must be rescued and He did just that. It may not look like it for now but as I have read before in another post – (Paraphrased) God will use your physical death as a tool to pull off in reality what He did in the death and resurrection of His Son.