"The Christian narrative is not necessarily a dangerous hegemonic master narrative; it may be a narrative that frees people from such narratives." -Diogenes Allen, Philosophy for Understanding Theology, 2nd ed., (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 249.
Texts:
Texts:
What is it to have a God that blesses cheaters? Jacob is not exactly the best example of an upright citizen. He knows what it is to "play the game," and he's really good at it. So often, we think of the people that God decides to bless as being somehow morally upright, as worthy of the blessing. Or at least we must. Whereas we might confess that the Bible is a narrative full of people who continually messed up, continually turned away from God, whom God continually forgave and continually turned toward, there is something that keeps us from believing that we have anything in common with these people. There is a chasm that keeps us from living into - really living into - this narrative.
We have a pesky propensity to want to make the Bible into a Hollywood movie, in which we receive the predicted result, with good prevailing over evil, with the protagonist winning the day, integrity intact, rather than a story in which the cheater wins. This narrative, however, tells a truth deeper than a simple good = reward/bad = punishment. The relationship is much more complicated than that.
This is a relationship that looks at people who are born cheaters, programmed to understand from our youth that our survival occurs at the expense of another's. This narrative breaks into the narratives that we tell ourselves: that if we can just be good enough or beautiful enough or smart enough, we will be worthy of love. It frustrates our narratives in order to give way to the ironic narrative of Jacob (who cheated and won), of Joseph (whose brothers sold him into slavery only for him to eventually wind up being second in command in Egypt and the vehicle by which his brothers were saved from famine) of Tamar (who was rejected by Judah's family only to bear Judah's heir), of Moses (who couldn't speak yet ended up preaching throughout the whole book of Deuteronomy), of Ruth (who had - according to her society - no resources for survival but bound herself to her mother-in-law, showing us trust in the face of impossibility), of David (who killed a man so he could marry his wife, whom he'd already impregnated, and ended up being the line from which Jesus was born)... all the way to Peter (who denied Christ only to find himself reinstated) and Paul (who persecuted Christians as his career and then ended up writing the foundation of our faith)... to you and me, who want to find comfort in this God who is inherently disquieting, who tells us we are not loved beacuse we are good, beautiful, or smart but that we are good, beautiful, and smart because we are loved (this thought is entirely borrowed from Martin Luther's Heidelburg Disputations!).
The free gift comes, subverting the cheater's game. The thing about being cheaters is that we're always worried that what we have received isn't real and that the bottom will drop out and we will be left empty, alone, and desloate. Thinking we have fooled God into loving us, we read this narrative, which shows a God who has loved cheaters from the start. It is here we realize God has thrown God's cards on the table, and yelled "I win!" before we even had a chance to look at our cards.
No comments:
Post a Comment