There are many theological issues at play here, but I think much of what is at stake can be stated this way: How does justification relate to sanctification? Let’s decode the Christianese. Justification: how Jesus’ act on the cross has legally put you in right standing (justified) you before God. Sanctification: your subsequent transformation as you begin to act more and more like Jesus (love your neighbor, lay down your own interests in humility, etc.). The Bible teaches that these two things always go hand-in-hand. As James says, “faith apart from works is dead” (ESV). True saving faith (justification) will always be accompanied not by moral perfection, but by an increasing obedience to the law of Christ (sanctification).

Without getting bogged down in the complexities of that interplay, I want to simply insist this: Assurance without love is highly dangerous. 1 John 4:7-8 reads, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (ESV). Stated differently, increasing love and care for others must make up a central part what it means for you to be a Christian.

Recently, I ran across a quote in Anna Karenina that illustrates the danger of Christian assurance without love. The character described has just had a dramatic religious experience that inspired him to completely forgive his adulterous wife. Tolstoy writes:

“He saw nothing impossible or incongruous in the notion that death which exists for the unbeliever did not exist for him, and that as he possessed complete faith – of the measure of which he himself was the judge – there was no longer any sin in his soul, and he already experienced complete salvation here on earth…[I]t was absolutely necessary for him in his humiliation [as a cuckold] to possess at least this imaginary exaltation, from the height of which he, the despised of all, was able to despise others, that he clung to his mock salvation as if it were the real thing.”

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. George Gibian. New York: Norton, 1995: 465.

As it leaped from my hands,

I saw the imprint of Another.

Left to the whims of an old master,

I call out to the Potter for my soul!

oh my soul oh my soul oh my soul

“It is better to be free and a harlot,

“Than controlled by a Lover.”

Left to destruction, I cry to Another,

“What can I do for my soul?”

oh my soul oh my soul oh my soul

Silence fills my heart and I know,

I am at the mercy of its master.

Oh, that its master were Mercy!

And would hold unceasing to my soul.

oh my soul oh my soul oh my soul

The thought strikes hope in my breast,

what a familiar caress.

“I never left – never left –

“Oh my soul, you are mine.”

“oh My soul oh My soul oh My soul”

The whisper of a forsaken Lover,

scripture delivers quenching waters.

And my fears, my freedom, my faith are

baptized in the love of a Savior.

Oh my soul, Christ has saved!

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. (John 14:27)

I want to tell you about a woman. Growing up, she watched her father, her mother, and her brother – all of her immediate family- suffer through cancer. All of them passed away. She recently found out that her only son, who is 25 years old, has cancer. Her son is also autistic. She has temporarily moved away from home to care for her son as he undergoes chemotherapy. I can’t image. I can’t image the pain of watching someone you love battle the very villain that took everything else away from you; the pain of watching one so helpless and so dependent rendered even more vulnerable. She constantly cares for him. He does not understand what is happening. When he throws up from the treatment, he has no sense of what is happening – and every time, she cleans everything up. Not once has she complained. Not once has she moped around, feeling sorry for herself, begging the world for attention. Patience. Humility. Strength

Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Usain Bolt, Michelle Kwan, Rafael Nadalm, Tom Brady, the list goes on and on. Strength, right? These were all results that popped up in my Google strength for some of the strongest people. Fan clubs, an abundance of praise, ads, magazine spreads, billboards, all define these cultural icons. But, do we even have to go this far – we just have to look at our own response to those around us. We admire those who lift the most weight, those who run the fastest, those who are most agile. We truly are a culture bred to fawn the six-pack. Physical strength is often the center of our praise and adoration. That is not to say that this recognition is unmerited, because the strength of athletes illuminates dedication, passion, and will power. However, it is ironic that we, as a culture so adore physical strength, yet so neglect the strength that is forged in suffering.

It is a funny thing that this woman’s suffering has gone largely unnoticed.  Most of her friends have pretty much forgotten about her. No calls, no emails, no messages – nothing. It is a sad telling of our selfishness. Yet in this selfishness, there is something that glitters under the weight of her suffering. It is a strength and hope that remains, rooted not in the tenuous promises of the world, but rather in the very peace of God.

In a world of pain, weariness, trauma, suffering, trials, and loneliness, how easy would it be to give in to despair? To experience the depths of suffering and to feel like the world has abandoned you, yet choosing to persevere; indeed, this is true strength. It is a strength manifested in our weakness, it is a strength forged in our pain; it is a strength only possible in our brokenness. We should not be surprised though: Jesus drew numerous crowds when he performed miracles in the gospel; yet, when he died on the cross, he was alone- deserted even by his closest disciples. However, it is not in his miracles that we recognize his strength. Rather, it is in his suffering, in his death and resurrection that we understand that his strength was tied to the horror of the cross. Look to Jesus and realize that, in your suffering, you are in good company.

We strive for physical strength, perhaps because it garners praise and acknowledgement from others. But what is the value of the strength that is not seen? What is the value of the strength that is forgotten, unacknowledged, and born out of terrible pain? The apostle Paul, beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, hated, mocked, scorned, and despised did not lose hope. Why?

“So we do not lose heart… For this light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor 4:16-17)

Following Christ in the depths of despair requires a strength that is foreign to the world. It is a strength that recognizes that all of the anguish in the world is preparing us for something much weightier, something more eternal, and something that the world cannot fathom. It is a strength that warrants not the fleeting praise of man, rather the promise of glory: God’s glory. Trust in what Christ has done, and trust in what Christ has promised to do. Do not focus on the weight of the affliction; focus on the glory to come. Know that the weight you bear is none other than the crushing weight of God’s infinite glory.

Romans 8 rightly occupies a beloved place in the affections of many weary Christians.  It contains some of the most profound meditations on God’s redemptive work in Christ on behalf of sinners in the entire New Testament, as well as the sweetest promises that could ever be imagined.  In a world of evil and death, all things nonetheless are working for our good.  Resurrection is coming–not only for Christians, but for the entire cosmos.  Every good thing we will ever need is personally guaranteed by God, since that feat is quite easy in comparison to the really hard thing which God has already accomplished for us (not sparing His own Son, but handing him over to death for us–the echoes of Genesis 22 are obvious).  In the face of our ongoing guilt, Jesus our righteous high priest intercedes for us before the throne of God.  And in the face of the often overwhelming sufferings of this present life, we are more than conquerors through the crucified and risen Jesus.  Therefore, nothing could ever separate us from the love of God.

Yet within this soul-stirring chapter, 8:26-27 are two verses that stick out like a sore thumb.  Self-evidently they are meant by Paul to be received as further positive reinforcement.  But what in the world do they mean?  And how do they lead into the astounding promise of 8:28, to which they are clearly connected?  The overall context is fairly clear.  In the face of our ongoing weakness as Christians–namely, that in spite of the redemption we have already received in Christ, we often find ourselves unsure of where we are going and what God’s will is–the Spirit intercedes for us to ensure that we reach our final destination.  Whatever else Romans 8:26-27 is saying, the overall thrust is that Christians can be assured of God’s protective guidance in spite of often being unaware of where they should be going.

In this Paul manifestly alludes to the “new Exodus” motif that the Old Testament prophets (especially Isaiah and Jeremiah) promise.  Just as God once liberated Israel from bondage to slavery in Egypt, led them through the barren wilderness, and eventually brought them to the promised land, so also a greater, more decisive Exodus will one day be accomplished for the people of God (Jeremiah 16:14-16, Hosea 11:1, 8-11, Luke 9:31).  As the narrative logic of Isaiah 40-66 progressively unveils, a day is coming when the “way of the Lord” through the “wilderness” will be prepared, and the Lord Himself will return to Israel to lead them back into the promised land from the four corners of the earth to which they have been scattered through exile.  Central to this new Exodus is the strange vocation of the Servant, who will suffer and be exalted in the pursuit of Israel’s restoration.

In Romans 6-8, Paul indicates in a number of ways that this new Exodus has now taken place through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  Though formerly slaves to sin, Christians have been freed from their captivity (Romans 6).  However, they have not yet reached the promised land (Romans 8:18ff).  Instead, they find themselves “groaning” just as Israel once did, longing for the full liberation that God has promised (Exodus 2:23-24, Romans 8:22-23).  So we too find ourselves in the “wilderness”, being tempted to turn back to the slavery we have been rescued from (8:15), all the while being exhorted to look ahead to the “inheritance” to come (8:17).  And just as God once led His people through the wilderness, when they often found themselves not knowing where they were going, through the pillar of cloud and fire, so today the Spirit leads God’s children (8:14).

So this is the essential meaning of Romans 8:26-27.  Having experienced the new Exodus in being liberated from sin and death through the Messiah, God’s people can take comfort that the Spirit will infallibly guide them through the wilderness until they reach the promised land–even though, like Israel of old, they often do not know the way they are going.

Yet the details are still obscure.  How exactly does this guidance work itself our in our lives?  Three questions can be put to Romans 8:26-27 that help to clarify the meaning.  First, who is searching hearts? Second, what does he know?  Third, why do all things work for our good? Let’s take these one at a time.

First, who does Paul have in mind at the beginning of 8:27 when he states that “he” is searching hearts?  Most commentators and ordinary readers automatically assume that “he” refers here to God the Father.  This interpetation is possessed of an a priori plausibility because of what “he” is said to know–the mind of the Spirit.  If “he” knows the mind of the Spirit, it would seem that “he” cannot be the Spirit.

Nonetheless, I think this intuition is mistaken.  First, the identity of “he” is not stated clearly in the Greek, and just as in the English language, in Greek a pronominal reference usually points back to the last explicitly named entity.  In 8:26, the only “he” mentioned is the Spirit.  So our initial assumption should be that “he” in 8:27 picks up this reference.  Otherwise an unstated switch of reference to the Father would be abrupt and without any prior indication.  Second, the word ”searches” (eraunao) is only used one other time by Paul in his letters, in 1 Corinthians 2:10.  And there the one who is “searching” is the Spirit, not the Father.  Finally, what “he” knows–the “mind of the Spirit”–is not nearly the defeater for identifying the Spirit with “he who searches hearts” as is ordinarily thought.

This leads to the second question.  What does “he” (the Spirit) know in Romans 8:27?  As a result of searching hearts, “he” knows “the mind of the Spirit.”  What could this mean?  Though the English translation virtually demands the reader to take the phrase as a reference to the cognitive mental thoughts of the Spirit, this is not the most likely meaning.  The phrase Paul uses here (to phronema tou pneumatos) is used another time in Paul–and it appears only a few verses earlier in this same chapter!

In Romans 8:5-6 Paul writes that “those who live according to the flesh set their minds on (phroneo) the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on (phroneo) the things of the Spirit.  For the mindset (phronema) of the flesh is death, but the mindset of the Spirit (to phronema tou pneumatos) is life and peace.”  The word in 8:27 that is rendered as “mind” in most English translations actually refers in 8:6 to the subjective attitude or moral disposition of Christians who walk according to the Spirit, and not to the objective cognitive data within the Spirit’s own “mind”!

Thus, Romans 8:27 should be understood to be saying something like this: “The Spirit who searches hearts knows (recognizes) those whose attitudes are bent in faith toward dependence upon the Spirit, not to the selfish desires of the flesh.”  This also makes sense of what is (on the traditional interpretation of this passage) the apparently arbitrary reference to “searching hearts”, which throughout the Scripture always indicates a divine examination of human dispositions.  This phrase has no relevance for the idea that the Father knows the mental thoughts of the Spirit–and such a meaning would be nonsensical in the logical flow of the passage.

So, a quick summary of where we are so far.  Though Christians often do not know where they are going–they are still weak on this side of the resurrection!–the Spirit is interceding for them before God the Father with groans that we do not hear (literally, “without speech”).  How does this behind-the-scenes dynamic work?  8:27 provides the answer.  Though we do not where we are going or what we should pray for–that is, our weakness here is epistemological or cognitive–the Spirit is searching our hearts to discern if we are devoted to the Lord in righteousness, or to ourselves in sin.  If the Spirit discovers, in His searching ministry, that we are among those who walk according to the Spirit and not the flesh (8:4-12), then He proceeds to interecede for us before the Father “according to the will of God.”  That is, God honors those who honor Him.  He pours out grace on faith.  And this is a great comfort to wandering Christians, for though we cannot know the way home, we can walk according to the Spirit of God in our wilderness journeying.

And this provides the answer to our third question: why do all things work for the good of those who love God and who are called according to His purpose (8:28)?  This promise is almost always disconnected entirely from the immediate context and made to stand alone.  Yet Paul does not arrive at this conclusion willy nilly–for him the reason all things work for the good of Christians is obvious.  It is because of 8:26-27!  The result of the Spirit’s intercession in leading the weak, wandering people of God is that we will never be severed from God’s guiding hand.  Note that this is not a promise that our “weakness” in 8:26 is ever removed.  Paul does not says that.  We still find ourselves, and always will on this side of the new creation to come, not knowing what to pray for or where we are going.  But the promise of Romans 8:26-28 is that if we follow Jesus wholeheartedly and walk according to the Spirit, we will never be lost or abandoned.

Notice the intentional play on words in the passage.  We do not “know” where we are going (8:26).  But the Spirit “knows” if our hearts are inclined toward God in the midst of this ongoing weakness (8:27).  And therefore, the one thing we do “know” is that all things are working for our good (8:28), for the Father unfailingly responds to the Spirit’s intercession when it is according to the will of God.  We will reach the promised land if we follow the crucified and risen Jesus through the wilderness, no matter how forsaken or alone we may feel we are along the way.  On the basis of perceiving that we are following Jesus in faith, the Spirit intercedes with groanings before the Father, who is prompted to powerfully turn our confusing paths toward Him for our everlasting good.

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo embarked upon the perilous mission to destroy the ring, “even though I do not know the way.”  But as Tolkien says at another point in the story, “not all who wander are lost.”  As one Old Testament writer proclaimed, nicely summarizing Paul’s meaning in Romans 8:26-28: “the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward Him” (2 Chronicles 16:9).

These are amazing promises to cherish as God’s people.  Yet one particular implication stands out to me that seems worth highlighting.  Many Christians today are obsessed with “knowing God’s will,” in the sense of discerning exactly what God wants them to do in each and every important decision in their lives.  In itself, this is not a bad emphasis–though on any reading it can become dangerously lopsided.  The desperation to know God’s will can easily lead to the subtle conviction that God’s will in the lives of individual Christians is ultimately dependent on Christians discerning and grasping that plan.  This is manifestly foolish.  So even while acknowledging the goodness of the desire to know God’s will, I am persuaded that passages like Romans 8:26-28 remind us that something else is far more important in life than knowing God’s will–namely, a heart that loves and longs to do God’s will.  And God’s will is, above all else, that we follow Jesus in faith by taking up our cross and denying ourselves, putting the interests of his kingdom and our neighbor above our own.  And insofar as we do this, we will never find ourselves outside of God’s gracious will for our lives.

Consider two hypothetical scenarios.  In the first, a young man is relentlessly focused over the years on finding God’s specific will for his life–what he should major in, what career he should choose, who he should marry, what house and neighborhood he should live in, etc.  All of these are worthy things to desire to know and to pursue knowledge of, to be sure.  But imagine that this focus is so overwhelmingly prevalent in the man’s life that, along the way, he increasingly loses sight of God’s moral requirements in all situations.  Imitating Jesus falls rapidly on his list of values.  People and relationships are moved to the periphery.  Unselfishness, humility and suffering love are marginalized as priorities in favor of discovering various techniques and prayers devoted to discerning God’s will for his next decision.  In the long run this Christian, though perceiving himself to be spiritual and godly, strikes many people as shallow, self-obssessed, and generally unavailable to others in the nitty gritty business of real life.  Knowing God’s will has become a functional excuse for not following Jesus in everyday life, and the pursuit of the “right decision” has often functioned as a means of hiding various idols and sinful desires that have never been dealt with.  But his confidence is high that he stands fully assured in God’s will in all his decisions.

Now imagine a woman who regularly finds herself unsure of God’s leading in most of the “big” decisions in her life.  She rarely feels confident that she hears or understands the voice of God along the way.  This is a source of grief and consternation to her, yet she consistently devotes herself to the Lord, seeking to please Him in all things, and finds a thousand practical ways to take up her cross and live by faith in the many relationships and situations she finds herself in (and finds herself in without any strong assurance that this is where God is leading her!).  Though years later she still finds herself unsure as to God’s specific will for her future, when she looks back upon her past she sees (by God’s grace) a long history of gospel fruitfulness, of friends whose lives have been changed and drawn closer to Christ through her humble service and love, and a steadfast joy in Christ that has slowly begun to overshadow all other desires.  She doesn’t know where she is going, but she looks a lot like Jesus.

Truly I say to you–this woman was in God’s will through it all, though she often did not know how to pray.  For the Spirit, perceiving that her heart was fully devoted to the Lord, sovereignly intercedes for her according to the will of God.  And for this woman, all things have mysteriously worked together for good.  And not just for her good.  For the good of the world.  Simply because she loved God.

The message of Romans 8:26-27 is that if we follow Jesus, we have nothing to ultimately fear as we navigate our way blindly through this howling wilderness, through this present evil age.  He will bring us safely home.  And thus we sing:

How firm a foundation ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in his excellent word;
What more can he say than to you he hath said?
You, who unto Jesus, for refuge have fled.

In ev’ry condition – in sickness in health,
In poverty’s vale, or abounding in wealth,
At home and abroad, on the land, on the sea,
As thy days may demand, so thy succor shall be.

Fear not, I am with thee; O be not dismayed!
For I am thy God, and will still give thee aid;
I’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,
Upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.

When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of sorrow shall not thee o’erflow;
For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.

When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace all-sufficient shall be thy supply;
The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design,
Thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.

E’en down to old age, all my people shall prove
My sov’reign eternal, unchangeable love;
And then, when grey hairs shall their temples adorn,
Like lambs they shall still in my bosom be borne.

The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose,
I will not, I cannot, desert to his foes:
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake

Guilt is my assailant.

Fiend takes form of friend

And lures me from the fold

To save me from my

Guilt is my assailant,

Burns confessions in my name

To warm the lies of the deceiver.

He said to save me from

“Follow me, lost lambs.

“Drink and eat from self.

“And do this in my name.”

This he said to save me

Lost lambs hear his voice,

Smooth as silk it soothes.

“The mars of sin burn less with use.”

All this he said to save

“See how youthful – Dorian’s skin,

“Sin painted over with care.

“Forget the wounds beneath veneer.”

And all this he said to

Warmed by debris of prayers,

Guilt took strength within.

“Autonomy is your only hope.”

He said this.

Image created by Zirconicusso

Lewis came to recognize that human suffering was a necessary means–if one receives and encounters the experience from the posture of faith, looking to God desperately time and again in our darkness and pain and confusion–to having our eyes opened to what God is really like.  No more childish games of fantasy, so disconnnected from reality, are possible.  Or desirable.  And we also begin to have the blindfold removed as to what we are essentially like.  There is no other path to true sight, with respect to both God and self.  Consider the progression of thought and insight in the following exerpts from A Grief Observed, as suffering opens Lewis’ eyes to his distorted views of his deceased wife Joy, of God, and of himself.  God, in turns out, is in the business of smashing down false images and replacing them with concrete reality, no matter how much it hurts to get us there:

“Meanwhile, where is God?  This is one of the most disquieting symptoms.  When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be–or so it feels–welcomed with open arms.  But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find?  A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.  After that, silence.  You may as well turn away.  The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.  There are no lights in windows.  It might be an empty house.  Was it ever inhabited?  It seemed so once.  And that seeming was as strong as this.  What can this mean?  Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?…

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God.  The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.  The conclusion I dread is not, ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but, ‘So this is what God’s really like.  Deceive yourself no longer.’

…Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the [Joy] I think of into a more and more imaginary woman.  Founded on fact, no doubt.  I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan’t).  But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own?  The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real [Joy] so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.  The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant–in a word, real.  Is all that work to be undone?  Is what I shall still call [Joy] to sink back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor pipe-dreams?  Oh my dear, my dear, come back for one moment and drive that miserable phantom away…The image has the added disadvantage that it will do whatever you want.  It will smile or frown, be tender, gay, ribald, or argumentative just as your mood demands.  It is a puppet of which you hold the strings.  Not yet of course.  The reality is still too fresh; genuine and wholly involuntary memories can still, thank God, at any moment rush in and tear the strings out of my hands.  But the fatal obedience of the image, its insipid dependence on me, is bound to increase…

If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine…Come, what do we gain by evasions?  We are under the harrow and can’t escape.  Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.  And how or why did such a reality blossom (or fester) here and there into the terrible phenomenon called consciousness?  Why did it produce things like us who can see it and, seeing it, recoil in loathing?  Who (stranger still) want to see it and take pains to find it out, even when no need compels them and even though the sight of it makes an incurable ulcer in their hearts?…[But] my real fear is not materialism.  If it were true, we–or what we mistake for ‘we’–could get out, get from under the harrow.  An overdose of sleeping pills would do it.  I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap.  Or, worst still, rats in a laboratory.  Someone said, I believe, ‘God always geometrizes.’  Supposing the truth were ‘God always vivisects’?…

Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language.  What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’?  Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite?  What have we to set against it?

We set Christ against it.  But how if He were mistaken?  Almost His last words may have a perfectly clear meaning.  He had found that the Being He called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had supposed.  The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited, was at last sprung, on the cross.  The vile practical joke had succeeded…

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game, ‘or else people won’t take it seriously.’  Apparently it’s like that.  Your bid–for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity–will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it.  And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.  Nothing less will shake a man–or at any rate a man like me–out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs.  He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses.  Only torture will bring out the truth.  Only under torture does he discover it himself.  And I must surely admit that, if my house was a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked down the better.  And only suffering could do it.  But then the Cosmic Sadist and Eternal Vivisector becomes an unnecessary hypothesis…

[My subjective] mood is no evidence [of God's intentions for my suffering].  Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him is she can.  But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector…

The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable than a Cosmic Sadist.  The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness.  A cruel man might be bribed–might grow tired of his vile sport–might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety.  But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good.  The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting.  If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless.  But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us?  Well, take your choice.  The tortures occur.  If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one.  If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary.  For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t.

Either way, we’re for it.

What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good?’  Have they never even been to a dentist?…

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality.  He knew it already.  It was I who didn’t.  In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once.  He always knew that my temple was a house of cards.  His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down…

Two widely different convictions press more and more on my mind [as I reflect on my process of suffering and grief].  One is that the Eternal Vet is even more inexorable and the possible operations even more painful than our severest imaginings can forbode.  But the other, that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’…

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.  I want [Joy], not something that is like her.  A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle.

Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular.  (It makes little difference whether they are pictures and statues outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it).  To me, however, their danger is more obvious.  Images of the Holy easily become holy images–sacrosanct.  My idea of God is not a divine idea.  It has to be shattered time after time.  He shatters it Himself.  He is the great iconoclast.  Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?  The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.  And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not not.  But the same thing happens in our private prayers.

All reality is iconoclastic.

The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her.  And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness.  That is, in her foursquare and independent reality.  And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.

But ‘this’ is not now imaginable.  In that respect [Joy] and all the dead are like God.  In that respect loving her has become, in its measure, like loving Him.  In both cases I must stretch out the arms and hands of love–its eyes cannot here be used–to the reality, through–across–all the changeful phantasmagoria of my thoughts, passions, and imaginings.  I musn’t sit down content with the phantasmagoria itself and worship that for Him, or love that for her.  Not my idea of God, but God.  Not my idea of [Joy], but [Joy].  Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbor, but my neighbor…

He will knock down [my house of cards] as often as proves necessary.  Unless I have to be finally given up as hopeless, and left building pasteboard palaces in Hell forever.” (C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, pp. 4-5, 19-20, 23-24, 31-34, 43-44, 46, 49-51, 61, 75-78)

Our culture has largely domesticated the cross. We have been conditioned to approach Jesus in quite a curious manner. We view his death with praise and thanksgiving, pointing to his incredible love that manifested itself in humility. We, however, never take a second to recognize humility for what it truly is.

In the cross, we see power, we see strength, we see the greatness of a King who provided the perfect sacrifice, and we see the conquering of sin. The cross, in antiquity, was an instrument of Rome’s brutalizing power to humiliate. It has been well established that “humility” was not a virtue in Greco-Roman ethics. Rather the word (humilitas in Latin, or tapeinos in Greek) meant something closer to “debased” or “crushed.” It was a term reserved for failure and shame. The ancient Greeks considered the 146 maxims of the Delphic Cannon from the 6^th century BC to be the substance of the ethical life; there is no mention of the word, let alone the theme, of “humility.” Rather, it praised philotimia, “the love of honour.” It would seem that building one’s honor and reputation would prove to be far more advantageous than completely debasing oneself.

I am currently taking a class that focuses on Pauline letters in the context of the prevailing Roman Imperial influence. Probably, one of the best known expression of love-of-honor is the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (The Achievements of the Divine Augustus), written by the emperor himself and inscribed by his order onto bronze tablets set up in front of his monument. Copies of this were distributed throughout the empire, and it provided a catalogue of the emperor’s activities. However, more importantly, it provides a glimpse of a world-view so different than our own where a sense of boastfulness was accepted and associated with power.

So where does humility enter the picture?

If we glance through Jesus’ teachings, we find:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. ”

“Love your enemies. ”

“If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

Jesus seemed to be subverting the ancient notions of greatness and servitude, but it was not his teaching that was responsible for the prevailing notion of humility; rather,  it was his death. Crucifixion was the ultimate punishment in antiquity, reserved for political rebels and slaves. Among the three official method of capital punishment, crucifixion, decapitation, and burning alive, crucifixion was seen as the most brutal and most shameful. Victims were scourged with a leather strap embedded with meta and pottery, stripped naked, led to a public place and nailed to a large wooden beam, where they could spend sometimes days of excruciating pain, often dying from asphyxiation. This is the death that our King faced. The most perfect man was brought to the lowest place the Roman world could construct.

Yet, in his debasement, we find glory. We also find the motivation behind our own humility.

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Phil 2:3-8)

It is hard and quite counter-intuitive to accept the beauty of such ethics as humility when one refuses to accept the one who was responsible for their beauty.

John Dickinson so aptly puts it, “That is the influence of a story whose impact can be felt regardless of whether its details are believed – a story about greatness that willingly went to a cross. Our culture remains cruciform long after it stopped being Christian.”

Nor should it be much of a surprise for me to confess that, as a busy Harvard student, I often allow my anxiety and stress to invade my spiritual life. I know I need to worry less, to more fully experience God’s peace in all situations, but I find that anxiety is a slippery thing to overcome. When I am feeling anxious, I often return to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 6 reads:

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?…Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” (ESV)

Anxiety is such a slippery issue because it is so natural. Being busy is not a bad thing. In fact, it is a good thing to accomplish, to use the gifts God has given us. We are called to invest in the world around us. Investment brings legitimate concerns; concerns bring worry. As a Christian, I constantly feel the tension between being diligent in my studies, engaging in the world around me and not allowing that to lead to what Matthew 6 calls anxiety. Now, there is a bunch going on in the passage, so I will just touch on one thing. Notice that it begins with a “therefore.” The preceding verse (6:24) reads:

“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” (ESV)

Allow me to suggest that for the Christian avoiding anxiety is not an act of resignation as much as of submission. It is an acknowledgment that we are God’s servants. Having once been sold as slaves to sin, we have already been bought by Christ’s blood and made alive through his resurrection. The gospel allows us to renounce worldly neediness. It’s not that God guarantees you will score higher than a B on your next paper (scary, I know), nor is it even that your grade on that paper is unimportant. But we no longer need to beg those grades to give us purpose. Our ultimate purpose is rooted in Christ’s work, and nothing can touch that. The challenge is to be humble enough to acknowledge that our striving had nothing to do with that work and to constantly remind ourselves that God has won.

An open question: How to strive wholeheartedly without submitting again to the yoke of slavery.

“Jesus’ most socially radical statements concern slaves, children, and the poor.  He made a sharp contrast between the oppressive regime of the Gentiles (he did not have to instance Rome in particular) and the way things should happen in God’s kingdom.  In the latter, he said ‘whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all’ (Mark 10:42-45).  Jesus endorsed this statement with his own, shocking example, when he insisted, against their protests, on washing his disciples’ feet.  Washing feet, an everyday menial task, was, more exclusively than any other task, the role of the slave.  It was what every free person regarded as unthinkably beneath their dignity.  Jesus enjoined his disciples to follow his example by washing one another’s feet, and he was proposing, not a mere symbol of humility, but an actual concrete instance, the most telling possible, of how the disciples should relate to each other.  The ordinary everyday requirement of washing feet they are to do for each other.  If this is not beneath their dignity, nothing is.

Jesus thus took the unparalled step of abolishing social status, not by giving all the disciples the status of master (then there would always be others, outside the community, to set themselves above), but by reducing all to the lowest social status: that of slave.  In a society of slaves, no one many think him–or herself more important than others.

Also strikingly original is Jesus’ choice of small children to illustrate what God’s rule requires.  Only by becoming like a child is it possible to enter the kingdom.  The point is probably not so much the unquestioning trust that children display, but the fact that they had no social status.  To become like a child is to renounce any claim to status above others.  Just as Jesus said that the one who wants to be foremost must be the slave of all, so he also says that ‘whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom’, where ‘humble’ is an attitude relating to social status.  At first sight, it looks as though Jesus was creating a new form of hierarchy, a sort of inverted one, in which the most slave-like or the most childlike is top, but really these sayings serve to subvert all notions of status or rank.  The same is true of his aphorism: ‘Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’  The kingdom is a topsy-turvy world that inverts all claims to personal importance in order to do away with all self-importance.

The kingdom belongs to the likes of children, just as it also belongs to the likes of the poor.  This is the essence of what it means that Jesus preaches ‘good news to the poor’: he tells them that the kingdom of God belongs to them.  These poor, as we have noticed, are not the ordinary people, but the destitute, the people at the bottom of the social and economic heap.  Jesus does not suppose that the kingdom belongs exclusively to them, but that they are the model citizens to which everyone else must conform.  The least radical implication is the advice Jesus gives to ordinarily prosperous people, when they give dinner parties, not to invite their relatives, friends, and neighbors, but ‘the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind’.  This is more than generous charity, which was a well-recognized duty.  It means treating the destitute as one’s social equals.  On these terms, but only on these terms, Jesus did not confine the kingdom to the destitute, any more than he confined it to the children.  He did very seriously privilege the destitute and the children, in order to deprive all others of privilege.

The poor require a little more attention.  We have the series of ‘beatitudes’, with which Jesus characterized the model citizens of the kingdom, in two versions.  In Luke’s version, the first beatitude is ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’.  In Matthew’s version, it is ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’.  Matthew’s expansion of ‘the poor’ to ‘the poor in spirit’ does not imply that he removes the socio-economic meaning, transforming poverty into simply an attitude.  Rather, in the background, is the Jewish tradition of linking poverty with the right attitude to God, just as wealth was linked with the wrong attitude to God.  The poor, having nowhere else to turn, are aware of their utter dependence on God, whereas the rich, feeling self-sufficient, epitomize arrogant independence of God.  These are, of course, stereotypes, but, at least in a society that took a religious worldview for granted, not without correspondence to reality.  Matthew’s phrase ‘poor in spirit’ merely makes explicit the link between material circumstances and religious attitude that is implicit in Luke’s simple ‘poor’.

Thus the poor model citizenship in God’s kingdom not only in their lack of socio-economic status and resources but also in the kind of relationship with God that typified that status.  Jesus, we are reminded again, never thinks of relationships between humans without reference to God.  What transforms society in Jesus’ ideal is knowing God as the utterly reliable and endlessly generous provider of all good, on whom all creatures are completely dependent.  Trusting this God is what enables the generous sharing among people that makes God’s generosity credible.  The kind of trust in God’s provision that Jesus envisaged is enshrined in one petition of the Lord’s prayer: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’.  Adequate provision for material needs, not luxury, and day-by-day provision, not wealth stored up, are all that is asked.  It puts every disciple of Jesus in the position of the beggars, who depend day-by-day on charity, or the day laborers, those agricultural workers who had least security, employed only a day at a time, never earning more than the next day’s meal requires.  Jesus requires of all disciples the radical trust that for the destitute is the only sort available.” (Richard Bauckham, Jesus: A Very Short Introduction, pp. 76-79)

stood a scope of heavenly gold.

Peering inside, a prayer I whispered

to see beyond my shore.

But what did I see —

Oh my God, what did I see?

Beyond the shore was a great abyss –

Cries that did shake the stand,

Blood that did alter gold,

Tears that did disillusion.

“Never again,” I wished to see.

Peering again, a prayer I whispered

to see self and no more.

But what did I see –

Oh my God, what did I see?

Beyond the flesh was a great abyss –

In horror, I saw on my shore

an image so hideous – distorted;

a bloody, knotted soul.

“Never again,” I wished to see.

Peering again, a prayer I whispered

to see.

But what did I see —

Good God, what did I see?

Taking on flesh, He stepped into the abyss –

A Hand that wiped the tears

and ran with blood of gold.

An Image so bent with mercy,

it undid my twisted soul.

But what did I see?

My God I did see.