God has a plan, and that plan is enacted (Eph 3:10-11). It is accomplished (Jn 19:30). And make no mistake, you figure into it, but it is not about you.
What is God’s plan? To defeat the powers which seek our enslavement, degradation, and destruction, and to reassert his benevolent lordship over his creatures. To release them from the crushing burden of securing a future for themselves. To non-coercively restore them to fellowship with him and, derivatively, to the wholeness they were created to enjoy.
That is the content of apostolic proclamation and a broad benchmark for gauging the Christian character of contemporary teaching and reasoning. But what about us and our lives? What does it all mean for us in the here and now? We Americans love our quests for identity and meaning, particularly given how self-absorbed and individualist we tend to think. We love to broadcast ourselves to the virtual world and demand that reality itself — and God by extension — conform to our expectations.
And so a solution is developed, albeit one which tends to normalize the egocentric priorities we are trained to assume. “God has a wonderful plan for your life” is meant to answer the implicit question, “But what about me?” So the joys of the gospel are tailored to address the modern person with an evangelistic strategy calculated to meet and satisfy the minds of consumeristic subjects. If we are to have a savior, it must be our own, personal savior.
Asking “What about me?” isn’t a bad thing in itself. After all, it’s so easy for us to feel lost within the flood of options and the compulsions presented to us as routes to freedom and authenticity; lost within the whirlwind of competing narratives of what is true and good and fulfilling. We frequently feel like little more than molecular cogs in some vast impersonal machine, keeping it chugging along towards its goals while we remain lost within its processes, undifferentiated from its other components and ignored.
But so often the big picture is lost, or ignored. Consequently the good news fails to inflame our hearts because we want to know how we become a focal point within it, how we can win for ourselves the centrality we are so sure we deserve. Reducing the entirety of Christian proclamation to this odd brand of personalism tends to leave us in the bonds of our self-centered pretensions. God isn’t a life coach or a co-pilot to our fantasies.
But the thing is, God does give a damn about us and our lives — just not in the way we might want or choose. The God of the Gospel has elected not to be God without us (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, 274). You are important, but not according to the criteria we routinely presume, and certainly not on the terms set by the culture industry or the paradigms of competition and commodification which contaminate even our best thinking. This God performs mercy on us by besieging these assumptions with his doubt.
A parable of this very thing is offered in the penultimate season of the show Lost, in a moment that still absolutely knocks the wind out of me. It comes when a character who has confusingly posed himself as bad guy, then good guy, then back and forth all over again, asks his mysterious superior, Jacob, this very question with regard to the plan at work: “What about me?” To which Jacob replies, “What about you?”
He isn’t demeaning or enacting some arbitrary submission structure with this response: his question clears away the fog of equivocation and hones in on what is actually being asked. Mercy, in this instance, is a battering ram breaking open a locked door to allow the truth entrance. The three words he speaks compresses a litany of questions within itself:
What about ‘you’? You want to talk about you? Let’s talk about why you’re here: you’re ready to displace and maybe even kill me. Let’s talk about your constant scheming, your pathological need to assert or to win back your dominance. Let’s talk about how you’ve thrown in your lot with questionable accomplices time and time again and yet continually portray yourself as the victim. Let’s talk about all the things you did that brought us to this moment. What about ‘you’? These things are ‘you.’ Do you really want to talk about worthiness if this is what you have to offer?
We all, at some point, need to hear a rendition of this question directed back to us, modulated according to the crooked paths we have made for ourselves. Otherwise, we remain imprisoned within the illusion of our primacy. But this question isn’t the neo-Calvinist sneer which effectively asserts, “You aren’t important. Why should anyone care about you or what you need?” Such belittlements are really a misanthropy cloaked in a bogus piety that forgets that God isn’t an insecure egomaniac whose only consolation is in hearing how much better he is than everyone else.
But if that isn’t the case, then why does God seem to overwhelm Job with rhetorical questions regarding the scope of his power? John Piper’s answer is that God is reminding Job of the raw, naked power God wields over inconsequential scum such as us, power which he can use in any way he feels like it because, well, perk of being God.
But Job leaves his interview with God content. How can that possibly follow after a torrent of disparagement and boasting? How could a verbal trouncing of cosmic scope restore Job’s peace? I can’t think of anyone who has gotten back on their feet, rejuvenated, thanks to a severe enough tongue-lashing. Resentment, anger, and depression are typical consequences, not the contentment Job demonstrates. This indicates that something else is going on at the climax of this book, that no, God isn’t rubbing Job’s nose in his miniscule feebleness.
Job demands that God answer him (Job 31:35) and he gets exactly what he asks for. But God’s arrival isn’t to humiliate the hurting Job— his protocol impels him to answer Job. The language of the Old Testament identifies those who seek “answers” from God as innocent, and as the narrative makes clear, Job is innocent of the insolence of which his friends accuse him. Moreover, this One who speaks out of a whirlwind lowers himself to Job’s stature and invites Job to regather his dignity and stand with him face-to-face (“Brace yourself like a man,” 38:3).
But the phrasing used by Hebrew has little to do with harsh rebuking: these are modern importations which don’t bear out in the original.1 In fact, what they reveal is a compassionate encounter between the Creator and the suffering Job, an encounter in which Job’s brash assertions—for instance, Job’s speech-act calling for day to be turned into darkness in 3:4-5–are met by the One who made all things and can restore all things.
That is the rhetorical questioning we need to disabuse us of our pretensions; not to belittle us into shutting up, and certainly not browbeating from one more self-obsessed than even we are. But a genuine encounter in which our presumptions are exposed: “Who was it that made you to be the arbiter of everything? Who made you the one that all questions must be posed to? That everything has to have a satisfying answer for? Who made your tastes and preferences the judge of what is good? Who made it law that your ambitions must be served first and foremost in whatever happens?”
As with Job, the point isn’t to force a self-loathing groveling at the feet of one more powerful than us. It’s to illuminate that our presumptions about what importance is are impossibly far above our pay grade. That the basis for our self-importance is almost entirely wrong. That we are smaller, more fragile, than our egos would care to let on. That we don’t know best what we need. But above all else, that there is One who does, and is not only able, but willing, to bring us to it.
All of us want to know, “What about me?” It is a witness to our need as creatures that we do not automatically grasp our place within the world or how we matter within it. God will answer this question — and does — but he will also unshackle our pretensions that corrupt our desires. Short of this, the goodness of the Gospel will sound to us like another self-help seminar. We cannot receive anything when our hands are filled with the badges of our empty accomplishments, nor can we enjoy God’s love when we are constantly wondering what’s in it for us. We must be freed from the fetters of our self-preoccupation to truly see how much we really matter to the God who binds himself to us, the God who bled and died to save the lost — even the helplessly self-absorbed.
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