Often, I am confronted with the certainty with which some of my conservative siblings in Faith interpret and then prescribe Scripture. They seem so sure about who is in and who is out, drawing lines according to their own judgment and calling those lines love, even as people are forgotten because of mental health, gender, sexuality, life’s experience, illness and many other things.
My conundrum, is that I have learned to expect something different.
When I use love as the interpretative key for scripture and life, I don’t always have the answers. Love awakens joy, like treasure unexpectedly discovered in moments I didn’t expect to find it. Love works quietly within, not loudly and boastfully, not yelling or arguing, but like yeast, hidden in dough. Love makes room for life, all life, like branches sheltering birds. Love reorders what I value, like the pearl, and gathers every kind, like the net.
Love and understanding, the Kingdom and God’s way, is a constant revelation, and nothing that I have yet grasped a hold of, but trust that it has grabbed onto me. Love is the way that I have learned to recognise the Kingdom’s presence. This didn’t begin with my own strength. It’s not something I have learnt or mastered, and as I said it’s not something I fully understand.
I trust that the Spirit, as Paul tells us in Romans, is already interceding before us, even before we understand ourselves. God is already searching our hearts. I know something of this because I get to often ask people, How do you pray? A very straight forward question with a different response every time. And always a wondering, “am I doing it right?”, “I don’t often know where to start”, if they are especially honest, “ I think I have forgotten how.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t be asking whether or not we have prayed correctly, or believed perfectly, or understood everything. The better question, the deeper place of wondering, might be: What is God doing in our weakness, our strength, our questions and our wondering?
God’s love is not a reward for successful faith or complete understanding. When faith becomes wordless, and our minds can’t meet our hearts to tell God what is happening within us. The best place our prayers might take us is to that quiet work of the yeast, God’s love already changing us, loving us, and working within us.
How has the love of God changed us?
The passage says the famous, and often used phrase “all things work together for good”. Carelessly handled, this has been made to mean that everything happens for some secret divine God. It often carries the suggestion that the person suffering simply lacks the space or wisdom to understand God’s ways, which is said with “God’s ways are higher than our ways”.
If only bearers of this sour phrase were occasionally moved to wordless faith.
Blah, blah, blah…. truth be told, sometimes shit just happens!
Paul certainly doesn’t leave us with a neat phrase. He names affliction, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril and the sword. Paul neither silences nor denies their horror. He certainly doesn’t say that all things are good. This passage was not written as permission to make ourselves feel better by offering it as some self preserving explanation for the another persons loss, suffering, grief, or illness. Theirs or our pain is not part of some neat plan.
Instead, we, the witnesses to the suffering are called to look for the stubborn, present, quiet, resilient work of God within that which if broken! Not offer some cheap platitude to move on from the moment!
We mustn’t call cruelty providence!
We must not call injustice a divine lesson.
Where did you learn that tripe!?
It’s not from the Scriptures which provide us justice rolling down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. Not from the valleys being lifted and the mountains made low for the way of the Lord. Not from the God who says, “I have heard my people cry.”
We wait. We watch. We look. And then we do the ordinary, everyday work of joining the God who sustains, accompanies, resists, heals and brings life, even when death appears to be claiming the final word.
We pick up the ploughshare and get to work.
It makes me so grumpy that I have to say that at all.
At the heart of what I am saying is; love doesn’t make itself feel better by explaining away another’s pain. Love sit’s along side it, even in the discomfort, unfamiliar, and even when we don’t have the answers.
When someone looks back at their suffering and remembers, they may not remember our explanations… but they will remember the one who walked alongside.
Love changes the meaning of judgment.
What is true in hardship it is true when we speak of sin, our task is not to determine who is beyond grace.
Period.
Full stop!
The parable of the net can be unsettling, because there is gathering, separation, fire, weeping and gnashing of teeth. (I want to joke about the time between my eyes opening and the first cup of coffee… but it’s cheap). We shouldn’t simply pass over the severity of this, or cheapen it with my morning mood. The Kingdom confronts that which destroys life! Love is not indifferent to evil.
Love hears the cries of the people, love sees the dry bones in the valley, love notices the quiet of a woman rushing up to touch his robe, and the little tired places around our own hearts.
Roman’s prevents us from turning judgment into permission to condemn others by saying “who is to condemn?
We the church, and indeed humanity must be more careful than we have been.
We have often fallen into the temptation to seize the net, inspect the catch, and begin sorting everything ourselves. Yet in Jesus’ parable, the net gathers fish of every kind. That’s not to say that good and evil are indistinguishable. It means that people cannot be reduced into the categories by which we sort them. Wheat and weeds grow within every human life. Let’s leave the judgement where it belongs, because it’s only God who searches hearts. I often don’t know my own intentions, let alone someone else’s, so I have to assume love!
The great song says “they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love.”.
Love gives discernment its purpose.
Solomon asks for an understanding mind, or, more literally, a listening heart. He wants to discern between good and evil because he has been entrusted with people. His discernment isn’t meant to establish his superiority; it is meant to help him govern others faithfully.
Where communities have used discernment to dignify suspicion, exclusion or delay, or simply to determine who’s right or wrong, we have missed something of the biblical discernment revealed to us.
Biblical discernment is not merely the ability to identify in or out, wrong or right. It is the wisdom that asks, what serves life, protects the vulnerable, restores relationship and reflects the character of God.
A heart willing to listen my ask:
- what is happening to this person?
- Which voices are not being heard?
- What might produce life here?
- What fear is shaping my, or our judgment?
- What response most closely resembles the love revealed in Christ?
Perhaps these questions are the ones that should be outlined in the charters that guide our commissions, councils, working groups and all the other fancy names we give to the places where we project our decision making.
Love rearranges value.
The treasure and the pearl are valuable enough to reorder an entire life. The people in these parable sell everything, not because they have been commanded to suffer, but because they have encountered something that fills them with joy! Joy. This gift that changes us from the inside, out! Not another religious obligation added to an already crowded life. But joy, a foundational shift in our understanding of “precious”.
Once we have been shared in the immeasurable love of God; success, status, respectability, control and even certainty lose their hold. We become capable of relinquishing that which once seemed indispensable because we have discovered deeper treasure: communion with God and with one another.
The question posed in a room full of people, why do you still do this. Each Christian looking around each other, and then a certain, quiet voice says; Because Christ is still my joy! I will never forget this moment which broke the rooms silence and moved the rhetorical to the simple.
When love rearranges our value: love, joy, peace and hope become the reasons for more than the season, they become part of the reason we continue to breath this stuff, this wonder, this life and this GOd.
Love holds together the old and the new
Jesus concludes with the householder who brings out the treasures, old and new.
Without love, the old can become rigid tradition. Preserved even when it wounds people. Without love, the new can become a novelty, embraced without wisdom or memory. Love asks how our inherited treasure might serve life now, and what might need to be reinterpreted, relinquished or rediscovered so that the Gospel may actually be heard as good news.
Love is not opposed to truth. Love is what allows truth to be told and recognised as good news.This is not the instruction to “tell them the truth in love”, as so often used in some fundamentalist and conservative practice as a way of permission to wound someone whilst proclaiming righteous intention. This is something much deeper.
Love is the rock, which is the house is built on, not the screw holding up the pretty picture.
The truth that I have come to witness, but not always understand, that which the Gospel reveals is that; love is already at work: growing quietly, hidden in ordinary things, making room for life, gathering every kind and holding us when we no longer have words. This is God’s mystery, not mine to hold, only to behold.
And this love, God’s stubborn, searching, inseparable love, will indeed work all things together for good.
This post is from Rev James Baker’s Substack here.
