Our own personal wisdom tells us to protect ourselves at all
costs. It says that increasing the chances of our success, survival and joy at
the cost of another person’s success, survival and joy is perfectly justified
as long as we aren’t directly hurting the other person. It says that my
personal happiness is of greater import than sacrificing for another whose bad
decisions probably got them in their current situation anyway.
In Luke 10, Jesus tells a pretty famous parable. In fact,
all the good stories are famous. All the stories that tell us to go above and
beyond, to love without limits, are right there on the nightstand of our
culture, collecting dust. They’re there so we can point to them occasionally;
so others might notice them, that it might seem that they inform our lives.
But we all know,
when
reality strikes
we can’t be so coy about how to
live.
Love is a good ideal
to reach toward,
but we don’t see it as practical.
If you see a bloodied, beaten victim on the side of the
road, you pull your kids close and tell yourself it’s not your job to get
involved. You need to be at that other place to do that other thing, and he
might be dangerous, and, even if he’s not, what if the robbers who attacked him
are lying in wait for you?
We’ve rationalized away our call to love and wrapped it up
in a nice little common sense bow. Then Jesus comes along and messes everything
up with this love your neighbor
thing.
Love doesn’t make sense. It calls us out of our comfortable
excuses and compels us to act in the face of what might well be rational fears.
It actually calls us to put ourselves at risk at times for the other.
1) In short, love isn’t primarily concerned with our well-being.
That’s dumb.
What kind of love takes chances like that? We know this guy
in Jesus’ parable got beaten up by robbers, but what if it was a drug deal gone
bad, a drunken bare-knuckle brawl, or maybe this guy was sleeping with
someone’s wife and got delivered the package of punches he paid for? God gave
me a glob of gray matter and I’m supposed to use it, and that brain is telling
me to cross the road and look straight ahead. To tell myself that it’s not
selfish, it’s smart. It’s not unloving, it’s reasonable. Yeah, love begs the
question, ‘What if that was me?’ but, bub, that ain’t me. .
..But what if it was?
No, Jesus is just not logical. I know we like to look to him as
the sensible voice of the Godhead. We don’t like to say so out loud, but we
sort of see him as the go-between for an overbearing Father. But Jesus is God, and he takes away our blessed
right to strike evil when it strikes us, replacing it not with when someone
strikes you on the right cheek: run the
other way, or pray for those lousy suckers,
but he tells us to present the other cheek to them. “Perhaps you’ll find this cheek
more to your liking, sir.”
2) Being the good guy, being like Jesus, means not resisting evil, but overcoming it with love.
That’s dumb.
There’s
a reason goodness is presented as a
fruit of the Spirit. It’s unnatural to our experience. We can stomach goodness
if it’s primarily to those we deem deserving, or those we can think of as more
needy than ourselves, as if we are stooping low to help. But not the enemy. The
guy who lazed around all day and showed up an hour before quitting time doesn’t
deserve the same pay as the guy who
worked all day in the blazing sun. But that’s exactly what God gives.
3) God’s goodness means everyone gets the same amount and kind of love and acceptance.
That’s dumb.
…But that’s the very way of thinking that saved us. The
undeserving. Made worthy, not by our goodness (we have none perfect enough to
be worthy of perfect acceptance) but God’s perfect goodness given us as a gift.
This dumb goodness
overcame the world. It delivered hope to the utterly hopeless. It presented
love to the wholly unlovely. The foolishness of God lovingly lays waste to the
wisdom of men.
-Chad West
-Chad West
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