Readings (Track 1)

In the middle of Jesus’ argument with the scribes he tells this short parable: “But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.” Plunder: that’s an intriguing image for what Jesus is about. For what God’s about, for that matter. The Exodus: plunder on a national scale. The mob stirred up by Paul and Silas’ presence in Thessalonica didn’t get it entirely wrong: “These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also” (Acts 17:6). No wonder Paul’s regularly in trouble—as we heard in our second reading.

But it’s not plunder for the sake of plunder (“My pile of loot’s bigger than yours!”), but, whether at the Exodus or in Galilee, for human freedom, restoring it so that it can be used well. Pulling back the camera to take in all of Mark’s Gospel, whether in the exorcisms, the healings, the conversations or the proclamation, that plundering is about restoring human freedom and encouraging us humans to use it well. The first thing out of Jesus’ mouth in that Gospel: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (1:15).

The kingdom/reign of God, with two divine desires in play: that we be free, that we choose well. Either one of these would be easy to fulfill; both—that quickly gets complicated. Consider our first reading from Samuel’s time, a few centuries after the Exodus. The people have repeatedly used their freedom badly, and now they want a human king. A king: they’d celebrated the Lord as their king back at the Exodus (Exodus 15:18). But now, no, a human king “so that we also may be like other nations.” If God’s desire were simply that the people choose well, well, so much for freedom: no human king. But God desires both that they be free and that they choose well. So God tells Samuel to give the people what they want; we’ll do it the hard way.

That’s a pretty good illustration of God’s love. God loves us too much either to compromise our freedom or to stop caring about our choices. Love—as any parent knows—complicates things. God can bring good out of our bad choices (the king is the template for the Messiah), but the price is high (“King of the Jews” was the sign on Jesus’ cross).

Does God always get what God wants? Since what God wants is that we be free and that we choose well, the answer is pretty clearly no. (That’s one of the main reasons why the Bible is a lengthy book!) And one of the recurrent challenges in worshipping this God is to respect both of these divine desires. If we think the people are choosing badly is their freedom really all that important?

Bad choices bring death. Adam and Eve choose badly in Genesis chapter 3; only one of their sons (Cain and Abel) is alive by the end of chapter 4. Death ends the story; death ends all stories. In the psalms one of the most frequent arguments the psalmists make for deliverance: rescue me, because in Hades no one praises you; that’s the lose-lose option. Shakespeare nails it in MacBeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

So if there were ever a game-changer, it’s Jesus’ resurrection (the motor for Paul’s reflections in our second reading). Death isn’t the end. Jesus’ transformed body grounds our hope for a similarly transformed body, “an eternal weight of glory,” as Paul put it.

How to tie this together? At least three ways come to mind. “God desires our freedom and that we use it well.” That, of course, is only one of many ways we might summarize what God’s up to. But play with it; wonder how it might serve to guide our outreach budget and activities.

Second. God desires our freedom and that we use it well. Because neither desire is negotiable God’s history with us is as messy as it is (recall, again, Holy Week) and Mick Jagger’s “You can’t always get what you want” turns out to apply to God as well. So we don’t know how all this will play out in the end. Will all be saved? We do know that it comes down to a fairly simple question: is my character such that I’d enjoy spending eternity with this God who keeps making hard choices and who loves my enemies as much as me?

In this respect heaven and hell reflect who we are. Recall that old analogy: a large banquet hall, the tables loaded. The complication is that our arms no longer bend at the elbows. At some tables, despair: despite increasingly acrobatic strategies no one can feed themselves. At other tables, delight: everyone feeding their neighbor.

A third way of tying this together: C. S. Lewis’ luminous sermon “The Weight of Glory” that draws on our second reading. After imagining what this weight of glory might mean, he pivots:

…it may be asked what practical use there is in the speculations which I have been indulging. I can think of at least one such use. It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour.… It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.…There are no ordinary people.

God, in love, desires our freedom and that we use it well, for our choices really matter. That doesn’t make it easy for God or for us. Easy, apparently, is not the point.