A Mercy Hidden in Judgment

I had been living in Saint Louis for four or five years — long enough to have grown used to the near-constant panhandling at intersections and interstate on-ramps throughout the city and its suburbs. The panhandlers themselves were almost all men, with a strong majority apparently in their 30s or 40s.

At first, I handed out cash on a fairly regular basis. But I eventually had second thoughts on the wisdom of doing so, and instead I bought some grocery store gift cards, which I imagined that someone (if not the original recipient himself, then perhaps a bartering partner down the road) would eventually use.

But I found that when I gave, I was often met with insistent demands for more.  I grew cynical. I started noticing the same faces at different locations. It occurred to me that most of these guys were professionals, and that theirs was not an industry I wished to support any further. So I didn’t. I came to largely ignore these men as I went about my business.

On one ordinary night as I drove home from work, I stopped at a busy intersection about a mile from my apartment. Predictably enough, there was a man standing at the corner, dressed in an old jacket and a beanie, holding up a cardboard sign bearing some haphazard sharpie scribblings.

I noticed this man, however, because he looked unwell. Perhaps physically ill, perhaps just exhausted, perhaps something else entirely. For the first time in a while I felt a twinge of responsibility, but in the end I just looked away.

That is, I looked away until I sensed another figure walking up to him. This second man, too, appeared to be homeless. He was dressed like the first man, had a gruff, unshaven face, and was built like the kind of man who would do well for himself in a bar fight. He strode with purpose up to the first man, who immediately leaned on him for support. As the newcomer helped the unwell man walk away, he suddenly turned and locked eyes with me. Whereupon he flipped me the bird.

Throughout my life, there have only been a handful of occasions in which I’ve felt very strongly that God was speaking to me directly, but this is one of them. Not that the middle finger in question was divine, but rather because God was using it as an effective medium to send me a message. I recognized this immediately, and that conviction has not since faded.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, West Coast phenom Kendrick Lamar had already described a similar encounter in his 2015 track “How Much a Dollar Cost?” named by noted cultural critic Barack Obama as his favorite song of the year. “Dollar” records how Lamar (or his narrator — Lamar frequently speaks through different characters in his music) encountered a homeless man at a South African gas station. The destitute man specifically asks for a ten rand note, at the time roughly equivalent to the titular one US dollar.

The narrator refuses. The beggar is clearly just another junkie, and the narrator has no interest in “contributin’ money just for his pipe.”

But he finds that he cannot simply drive away. The homeless man continues to stare at him, which infuriates the narrator. “Like I was supposed to save him,” he fumes, “Like I’m the reason he’s homeless and askin’ me for a favor.”

The homeless man then inquires if the narrator has ever read Exodus 14, the story of a famously humble man leading his people across the Red Sea to salvation. The narrator bristles, arguing that it’s precisely his policy of “looking after number one” that’s responsible for his driving luxury cars. And he has no intention of dispensing with this policy to help someone who reeks of “moonshine and gin.”

Satisfied with having landed his rhetorical blows, the narrator finally prepares to leave. Only then does the homeless man reveal himself to be “the Messiah, the Son of Jehovah,” Christ himself, who then informs the narrator exactly how much a dollar costs — his spot in heaven.

“Dollar” is easily interpreted as a kind of midrash on Jesus’ parable of the sheep and goats (Mt 25:31–46). The goats discover to their horror that they are damned to eternal punishment for their refusal to care for Jesus when he was sick, hungry, poor, and imprisoned. When they can’t recall a time they had encountered Jesus in such dire straits, he reveals that, insofar as they had ignored “the least of these” suffering in their midst, they had ignored him.

But while judgment in Jesus’ parable is final and irreversible, the ultimate outcome is more ambiguous in “Dollar.” When Christ reveals himself at the end of Lamar’s narrative, he does so with his promise from John 8:32: “The truth will set you free.” While Lamar’s narrator has lost heaven, Christ’s closing exhortation to “embrace your loss” hints at the possibility of the narrator finding redemption by recognizing the truth about himself.

***

In his mercy, God shows us ourselves well before the final judgement. When I got that revelatory middle finger at that traffic stop, I could no longer ignore the reality that I had closed my heart to my fellow man. Which is to say that I had closed my heart to Christ.

And so I received a gift in the form of an obscene gesture: the slightest hint of divine rejection that cut through my cynicism and self-justification and that exposed the state of my heart. I learned (or relearned) what I think Lamar had also sensed, that to taste the worst possible ultimate fate in the here and now is a profound mercy. The “goats” in the parable had unwittingly ignored Christ, but Christ will not be so easily ignored.

God’s judgment is not a doctrine that is easy to celebrate. But when we neglect it altogether, we lose a precious treasure: the recognition that God’s wrath is not only an eschatological reality — but also the very means by which he shows us his greatest mercy. The “love that will not let me go” is at its strongest when it’s concealed as rejection.