DEAR CHARITY

Part 8

Dear Charity,

I’m really glad to hear that you’re on the mend physically.  I hope and will keep praying that your health is completely restored as quickly as possible.  I know it totally feels like a huge setback in terms of all the other things you’re working on, and I feel your discouragement.  But I’m also incredibly thankful for your sense of determination to keep going and see everything through, including our journey in Mark.  You inspire me and give me hope, my friend.

And speaking of Mark, boy howdie, didn’t we hit a few chapters that are full of, well, let’s just say they’re not the most popularly preached and taught chapters in the Gospels, not in their entirety, anyway.  Particularly the way Mark writes about it all.  I know I’ve said it before, but the Jesus Mark gives us is so different than the other Gospels.  I guess when it comes down to it, all of them present quite different perspectives on Him.  Matthew’s Jesus is an intellectual, a teacher and educator.  Luke’s Jesus is sensitive, full of compassion and pity and sorrow.  John’s Jesus is a philosopher, a thinker, introspective.  And I think all those perspectives probably have a whole lot to do with the personalities of the men who wrote them as much as they reflect the actual personality of Jesus Himself.

Mark’s Jesus is one who can’t sit still, always in motion, always driven forward, often frustrated and impatient.  Mark strings events together at an almost dizzying pace, and if it’s true that what Mark wrote are Peter’s recollections, a lot of that makes sense.  Peter may well have felt like his life with Jesus was just one incident after another, constantly tumbling them towards Jerusalem.  And he may have remembered Jesus’ frustration and impatience first and foremost because it was so often directed at him.  Jesus is almost brusque as He deals with people, and that might have been what stood out to Peter because it mirrored his own personality.

I know I’ve always looked at the Twelve, Peter especially, as being sort of rebels with a cause, guys who were drawn to Jesus and what He was saying because He was constantly challenging the way things had been taught for so long.  Not sure why I thought that, I guess it just always made sense to me.  I mean, if you think about it, most of Mark is really about Jesus acting in ways and saying things that went against popular opinion and teaching of the time and got some people pretty stinking enraged.  Kinda makes sense that a guy like Peter would be down with that.

The word “subversive” gets thrown around a lot today when people talk about the messages of movies, TV, and even games, and what’s usually meant is that some in arts and entertainment are supposedly bucking the system and calling out the establishment.  Problem is, those people have, in a very real way, actually become the establishment.  It’s not subversive, anymore, to talk openly about certain topics.  You wanna know what true subversion is today?  The same thing it was in Jesus’ day.  TRUTH.  That is and always will be truly subversive because the world doesn’t want to hear or know that there is an absolute, uncompromising truth.  But Jesus always taught that God’s truth was the only way and He refused to back down.

That’s what I find a whole lot in the chapters of Mark we’re in right now.  Tradition and even religious doctrine taught that there were some who could be treated as less than, and they even tried to justify that way of thinking with God’s words, which didn’t sit too well with Jesus.  He let people know who was truly important to Him and God — those who couldn’t help themselves, like children and those who had what some thought of as physical handicaps.  He showed a measure of compassion on the children brought to Him and the blind man that upended how most people felt.  To so many of His day (and ours as well, I might add), children were to be ignored in favor of the more important (meaning the adult men, usually), and pariahs of society were to be silenced.  The rich were to be given special treatment and women could be disposed of as easily as old clothes.

Jesus was having none of it.  Children were to be blessed and hugged.  I adore the detail Mark adds in chapter 9 where Jesus hugs the child when He tells the Twelve that if anyone welcomes a child, they welcome Him and God Himself.  When it came to the infirm and handicapped, they were to be taken care of and healed, if possible.  Women were to be treated with just as much respect as men because they were equally important in the eyes of God.  Not better, mind you — EQUAL.  All of those groups of people deserved to be seen and listened to.  And the rich?  They needed to figure out what was truly important, and it wasn’t just heartless and mindless obedience to a set of rules and commandments.

A whole lot of people want to paint Jesus with broad strokes, like we’ve talked about countless times before, making Him out to be more like an untouchable icon rather than the revolutionary He actually was.  I think of Mark 11 as standing out in terms of giving us a picture of Jesus that really doesn’t blend well with icon Jesus.  Mark writes Him as fierce, uncooperative, sharp, and you know, the whole incident with the fig tree is really quite staggering.  It wasn’t even the season for figs and yet He was not happy and cursed the tree anyway.  Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of sermons on the symbolism of what He did, but let’s not forget, Jesus was hungry.  And no, I do not in any way think that God made Jesus hungry at that exact moment just so He could give us an object lesson about Israel’s sinful state.  Jesus was a hungry human being and this was His reaction to His hunger and the tree not providing what He needed.  It’s not exactly the picture I’m entirely comfortable with when it comes to thinking about Jesus, but to superimpose something else on top of it just to make myself comfortable would be...not cool.

Another thing I’m not super comfortable with is what Jesus says about forgiveness in Mark 11.  It troubles me, I’ll admit, because there’s no qualifying statements.  Forgive.  Period.  Or else.  In light of all I’ve been through, those are words that, on the surface, do not sit well with me.  Not in the way they’re stated in Mark, anyway.

Come to think of it, pretty much any of the things Jesus says about forgiveness have always been a source of fairly intense agony for me.  I have a feeling you’ll resonate with this — one teaching about forgiveness that has just messed me right the snot up is the idea that what I’ve done to God is worse than anything anyone has ever done to me.  That’s the truth of the unforgiving servant, right?  I’ve been forgiven the equivalent of the national debt so when I turn around and can’t forgive those who abused me, whose offenses rack up to about a buck fifty as some people would have it, I deserve to be tossed to the torturers until I’ve paid my debt.  Thanks, God!  That’s an awesome life lesson.  Good to know there’s a reason my life has been a living hell.  It’s all my fault!  Yay!

That’s how I thought about it for the longest time.  But then I read a book which by no means was written from a biblical perspective, yet it spoke to the heart of the forgiveness issue for me.  The author said that when you make a cognitive choice to forgive before grieving the offense committed against you, forgiveness is a pointless mental exercise.  That was a revelation of gargantuan importance to me.  And while I still struggle over why Jesus said what He did as bluntly as He did in Mark, I know that God realizes how He made us and He knows that our hearts and brains don’t operate with an on and off switch.  He knows that forgiveness is not a simple matter...at least not for everyone.

As I’m typing this out, I’m realizing that what God commanded Israel concerning the Torah is no different than what He wants us to do with everything written in the rest of the Bible, including the New Testament.  Maybe even especially the New Testament mainly because people read it and think a surface reading yields all its truths.

God told Israel to impress upon their hearts and the hearts of their children the Torah, the great Teaching of God.  But why?  So they would ponder and meditate and begin to understand.  It was never about obeying with little or no understanding of why they were doing what God commanded.  They were meant to have His Teaching in their hearts all the time so that the more deeply they thought about what He said, the more they would grasp this truth:  that every word of the Torah had to do with desiring, breathing after, and delighting in God and those He created in His own image.  That’s what everything has always been about.  That is true LIFE.  Finding creative ways to express and demonstrate our desire and delight in God and in each other, His image-bearers.

But the Great Rebellion twisted and perverted everything.  Life turned into nothing more than existing and surviving.  Love turned into nothing more than how other people make me feel.  All that was meant to flow out was turned inward.  Which is precisely why God had to give Israel the Torah, so they would know what it looked like to be true human beings, to truly LIVE.

And just like Israel was supposed to impress the Torah on their hearts and minds, we need to impress the entirety of God’s words to us on our hearts, you know?  We can’t just read through the New Testament every year and call it good.  We have to be chewing on it, swallowing it, maybe even regurgitating it at times so we can chew on it again.  When I get to things like what Jesus said about forgiveness, I can’t just push it around on my plate and hope God doesn’t notice I’m not eating it.  Pungent or bitter or sour though it may be, I have to chew it up until I’m able to swallow it (even though it may come up again and again and again...).

Gotta say, I think it’s the same with things that people think they know all about, too.  We talk so much about the love of God and sometimes it almost seems as if the words “God loves you” or “Jesus loves you” have become virtually meaningless to some simply because they have no idea what those who call themselves Christians actually mean by it.  And it’s sad to say but I think there are more believers than we’d like to admit who don’t really know the true depth of those words, either, because they’ve never recognized or accepted the truth that unless you come to terms with events in your past, you will forever remain in chains that will cause you to see God in a completely twisted, distorted way.

And as you know from agonizing, excruciating experience, by “coming to terms” I mean so very much more than just praying and asking God to heal you and remove the pain of what happened.  That’s more along the lines of taking a pill to make it all go away.  Like I mentioned a couple emails ago, we are complex beings created in the image of a Complex Being, and we cannot, cannot, cannot think that focusing only on what a lot of people think of as the “spiritual” part of us is going to make us whole.

What does all that have to do with loving God and loving others?  Well, I’ve become convinced of this truth — whatever experiences you’ve had in your life completely color how you read the Bible and how you see God, just like how I saw Him and forgiveness.  I mean, that might sound like a “duh-doi” statement, but I don’t think a lot of people fully realize just how much their past affects their present, especially in terms of how they relate to and understand (or don’t understand) God.

Case in point, I have had a pretty good handle on why I’ve struggled all my life to see God as loving.  It’s not rocket science.  But it took a few genuinely terrifying breakdowns for me to start doing a deep dive into what was really going on with me, and that’s when I discovered that I’d had absolutely no idea just how gravely and thoroughly I’d been wrecked by what my dad did to me.  Most shocking of all to me was that my view of God was so utterly messed up and bent that I’m not sure I ever even actually knew Him.

I guess the best way I can describe it is like if you hurt your leg and you were all, “I seem to have hurt my leg,” so you do some investigating and research and you look into the symptoms of a broken leg.  You finally come to the conclusion, “Yes, it’s definitely broken.”  But instead of doing what would be necessary to mend your leg in the right way, you go, “I recognize that and now that I’ve recognized it, my leg can begin healing.”  That’s what it feels like I did even though in truth, I had no idea that’s what I was doing.

I’ve shared with you some of the work I did after I realized how precarious my mental and emotional health was, and I know you relate painfully well.  I think it would be fair in my case to say that as I didn’t really know God, I didn’t really know what it meant when people said, “God loves you,” and for the most part, no one could explain it to me in any way that made sense and resonated with truth.  Mostly it was the same old phrases repeated over and over.

It finally occurred to me that the way I was taught to think about the Bible was to see its teachings about God and His love as quite abstract and conceptual.  Rarely was there a “boots on the ground” approach, and when there was, it was usually a practical application that had very little to do with what the Bible was actually saying.  Based on what I know of the Hebrew mindset, though, I don’t think the writers of the Bible ever intended for us to see God as an abstract concept that each of us had to figure out based on nothing but our own experiences.  From the beginning, we were meant to tell stories and learn from those stories about how God acted and interacted with His image-bearers, and how His image-bearers acted and interacted with each other on His behalf.

So when David wrote, “A Father of the fatherless, and a Defender of widows, is God in His holy habitation.  God sets the lonely in families...” I don’t think he meant God magically plops people into families or miraculously stops bad things from happening to widows (although He could do either, of course, if He chose; I’m not arguing that point...).  A Hebrew understanding would be that David was saying, “This is what God is like and as His image-bearers, we must be exactly like Him and do the things He would do.”  Which, now that I think of it, pretty much sums up a whole lot of what Jesus said in John’s Gospel.  “I do what I see My Father doing.”

David also wrote, “Blessed be the LORD who daily bears our burdens, even the God who is our salvation.”  I’ve always been taught that verses like that meant that God just sort of “zapped” you (although the way it was phrased was “blessed you”) with this intangible inner sense of calm and solace that had nothing to do with other people because we were never intended to rely on people, only God.

But guess what?  That’s not what the Bible is saying because that’s not biblical, God love.  Love is worth absolutely ZERO if it’s not expressed and displayed through words and action, exactly like faith.  God is not an abstract concept.  He always intended that the most grand and glorious expression of Himself would be not an animal, not a beautiful landscape, not an intangible feeling — it would be a man, a flesh and blood man. JESUS.   Because it is in and through His image-bearers, including and especially Jesus, that He achieves His desire for us and His entire creation.  And what is His desire for us?  That we be happy, healthy, and whole, reigning over His creation in His name.  Any and every word and deed must be measured by that goal.

The problem, of course, lies in the fact that too many people act in ways that will ultimately damage others and they call it love.  They do and say things that are in reality about keeping themselves from pain and they delude themselves into believing they are acting in love.  Loving with truth and integrity requires an astounding amount of courage because there will be times when true love will come at great personal cost.  But if you’re not willing to go there, then you’re not really defining love the way God does.

Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God with everything that makes you who you are —  will, intellect, emotion, physicality.  And we are supposed to love each other in the same manner.  In other words, we’re supposed to love like He loves.  And that’s not some intangible, abstract concept.  It’s meant to be played out every day in every word and every action.  We are to be the ones who are fathers and mothers to those without parents (and yeah, I mean that in the way that we’ve discussed before; you can be parentless even if your parents are still alive).  We are to be the ones who provide or find families for those who have none.  We are to carry each other’s burdens because it’s through us that God does what David wrote.

I know you and I haven’t had the most stellar of examples when it comes to all that, but I want to propose a commitment that we can make to ourselves and each other.  Let’s be the example.  Let’s keep working on figuring out what it means that GOD is love — not God is LOVE, which, as you know, is a whole other thing.  Let’s keep moving forward in healing.  And let’s invite anyone and everyone we can to join us on the journey.

Believing in love,

Beth