Jesus’ death on the cross was God’s gift of his own life for us.  It was a gift so reckless and given with such abandonment of self as to exceed the limits of human credibility.  But it happened.  History attests to it and both our faith and life experiences affirm it.  From the standpoint of the one giving it, it was a gift of unsurpassed worth, costing Life itself.

What if all had rejected God’s gift of Love? Would there have been resurrection?  For all his riches, God had nothing greater to give.  Having given his Love, was there anything left that could have been as effective in wooing us to him?  If Love had not worked, nothing else would have.  Perhaps all, all, would have been lost—which leads us to the second question.

Is there a catch to God’s gift of Love?  Is it a gift with strings attached?  After all, what is it that Love wants to effect?  What is the goal of Divine Love?  Love has been defined, as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” 3  Love may also be defined as the pull towards unity of that which should never have been separated, as the urge towards the healing of relationships that are broken, thus a move to wholeness.  Yes, if spiritual growth, unity, restoration and wholeness constitute a “catch,” then there is definitely a catch to agape Love.  God is out to kill us with Love.  He is out to kill that man or woman who is living the illusion of separateness, transforming us into that image of himself in which he first created us.  He is out to kill the illusion and confront us with our essential unity with each other, with our shared identity, and with our birthright of oneness with himself.

The pull towards unity, towards oneness, is the pull on the created towards the Creator.  The Hebrew prophet spoke for God, “You shall seek me and find me, when you shall search for me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).  In loving us, it is God’s purpose to bring us back to himself, to reestablish the union which once was and, in so doing, to restore us to our true selves.  Yes, there is a “catch” indeed.  In responding to God’s gift of his Love we are freed from the bondage of our illusion of separateness and we come into the glorious freedom of the sons and daughters of God.  In responding to his gift, we reestablish our “luminous and noble” place in God’s family.

There is imagery in Francis Thompson’s poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” where God is portrayed as the relentless pursuer, we the pursued.  God pursues us until, at last, there is no escape.  But we try to flee, even though we should know that the quest for independence is futile.  “This is eternal life,” Jesus prayed, “that they should know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (John 17:3)  God so loves that he gives—even to the point of pursuing us to do it.

Love is a gift of God.  It is the free and sacrificial gift of Jesus Christ.  It is a gift of union, of wholeness and of life—and that eternal.  It is also a gift which, when openly received, transforms us and infuses us with the same capacity and compulsion to be channels of agape for others.  It is only natural that when we come into union with the giver of Divine Love, into a real oneness, we will participate in the giving.  In receiving Love, we become Love.  Love becomes our nature.  And in so becoming Love we learn first hand a little of what it cost God.  We, too, experience the pain and trauma of being misunderstood and rejected.  But worse still, we see those we love still trapped in their illusion, still trying to go it alone when all the freedom of life in God, life in its unimaginable fullness, is theirs for the asking.  We learn what God has always known—that we must love and accept all persons just as they are and love them for who, in God, they can become.

When we give the Love that God has given us, we allow ourselves to be drawn closer to those we are given to love.  “…this aspect of love says, ‘I love you as you can be, beyond who and what you are now, in your boundless possibilities.  I dream of you, for you, and with you toward a limitless future of love’.  In Gabriel Marcel’s phrase…’I hope in you for us.’”^[7]

The gift of God’s Love is given to others through us.  We, too, are Divine Lovers.  The gift we have been given is ours to give.  “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required.”  (Luke 12:48)

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Article #2 

ON THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH

            Was this a real conversation or were Pilate and Jesus just talking past each other?  Or was it the writer of the Gospel who was obsessed with getting across the idea some 70 years after the death of Jesus that somehow truth and Jesus were to be equated.  He ascribes the word “truth” (Greek, άληθεια or alēthěia) to Jesus 26 times in his writing, compared with one time recorded by the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, 3 times by the writer of the Gospel of Mark and twice recorded by the writer of the Gospel of Luke. It is the author of John who has Jesus saying, this time in response to a question put to him by his disciple, Thomas, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No man comes to the Father except by me.”

            It is quite possible of course that John got it right, and that Matthew, Mark and Luke, perhaps because they attached less importance to matters of truth, did not see Jesus’ assertions about truth important enough to include in their accounts.  The fact that particularly Matthew and Luke had little compunction about bending the “Jesus story” to their own purposes only lends credibility to the suspicion that they did not highly regard “truth.”

But in the Gospel of John, truth is a prominent concept, and my inclination is therefore not to ask Pilate’s question, but rather to ask “why is truth important?”  This is, after all, at the root of much of the biblical scholarship of the last 100 years and especially that of the last two decades.  There has been a prodigious effort to nail down the “truth” in Scripture simply because it was deemed important to do so.

            However, it has not been an easy task to separate the truth about Jesus from the mythology that developed around him following his martyrdom.  One only has to look at all the books written as part of this quest over the past 20 years, to realize that the separation of truth from fiction in the Gospel accounts has become a monumental industry.  It has also been a perilous journey, because through the centuries there has been an enormous effort on the part of some to protect their investment in the fictions about Jesus.  Many of these people, unskilled and uninterested in the ways of scholarly research, are inclined to believe tradition, taking that to be the final and authoritative word of truth.  There are others, who do have the requisite skills, who nevertheless decline to break with the dogmas that quite literally have become their bread and butter.  When it comes to religion, with its volatile mix of emotion, devotion and unquestioning obedience to the proclaimed “truth,” any deviation is easily written off as an attack on the religion, as out and out heresy, or worse, apostasy.  It is a dangerous waters upon which responsible scholars sail, and not a few have been destroyed in their sailing of them.

            But there is strength in numbers and in recent years the number of capable, earnest, Christian scholars, who have gone public in their search for the truth about Jesus, has grown impressively.  Their searchings have been meticulous and widespread, including the disciplines of not only biblical theology, but also history, archeology, linguistics, and science.  Together these scholars, most of them deeply committed Christians, have made significant strides in uncovering truth.  Sometimes, that which they uncover destroys coveted doctrines and concepts that have been cherished as foundational to the religious structures that have been erected over two millennia.  When this happens, those who are not able to adjust to the newly revealed truth find themselves floundering in a sea of confusion and often striking out at those who try to pull them to safety on firmer ground.  In the process it is sometimes the rescuers who are drowned.

            So why does it matter?  Why is the truth so important?  Why do people risk their livelihoods, their reputations and life-long associations to pursue it?  I would suggest that they do it because they are people of integrity who cannot tolerate the thought of basing their lives on error.  Error is, after all, the alternative to truth, and where there is credible evidence that error has been parading as truth, the choice is to base their lives on a lie or to base their lives on the best evidence they have of the truth.  A person of integrity chooses the latter.

            Given the propensity of many of us to wear blinders, preferring not to know things that may dislodge us from our uninformed comfort, it is not surprising that we resist ideas that are not normally in our field of vision.  That is why we need capable investigators in many arenas to alert us to new perceptions of truth.  It is no secret that the Christian Church through the centuries has been wrong on many occasions and in many ways—the crusades, the inquisition, indulgences, the earth as the center of the universe, the world as flat, papal infallibility (including our present Pope’s suppression of Nag Hammadi scrolls for 40 years), and in later years slavery, shunning, segregation, participation in wars and genocide, and character assassination, consumerism, and neglect of the poor – to name a few.  Injustice has been our credo, and greed our perversion.  Is it any wonder that we shrink from the truth – the truth about ourselves, about Jesus, and about God?

            Jesus also said, “the truth will make you free.”  I know very few genuinely free Christians.  We are enslaved by our mixed allegiance to the fearsome God of the Old Testament and the God revealed by Jesus in the New.  We are enslaved by our dogmas.  We fear real freedom and we are terrified by love, so we opt to put constraints around both.  But when we do we are not even following the Jesus that we do know, much less the Jesus that modern scholarship is revealing.

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 Book Reviews:

Some Reflections on Reflectivity

            The reflective Christian in a world of secular doubt:  Will his or her reflection lead to passivity or to commitment, to paralysis or to action?  Daniel Taylor, writing as a reflective Christian from his base as an English professor at Bethel College in Minnesota is writing reflectively for reflectives.  He is one who has clearly opted for commitment and action.  By putting his reflections down in black and white, he has frozen them as it were at a point in their evolution.  It was a very non-reflective thing to do, and Taylor has become an illustration of his own thesis.

            “The Reflective person,” Taylor says, “is first and foremost a question asker…To be reflective is to be sensitive to and fascinated by the complexity of things.”  And of people.  And of God.  “Reflectiveness,” he continues, “is a character trait deeply rooted in what one essentially is. 

            Taylor sees the end of reflectiveness in an “either/or” sense:  “Being a reflective is both a blessing and a curse, a potential for strength and for weakness.  It can lead equally well toward truth or error.”

            But there is yet another way open to the reflective that Taylor does not discuss.  That is to accept certain conclusions while retaining doubt as to how such conclusions can be reached.  For example, it is possible to have faith in God—perhaps just a gut-feeling faith—and yet to admit to several different ways of reaching God, and for that matter, to question them all.  So is it also possible for a Christian reflective to accept that a Hindu, like Gandhi, was no less a servant of God than Mother Theresa, a Christian?

The Road to Daybreak:  A Spiritual Journey by Henri Nouwen  (New York: Doubleday, 1988)