Be the Stubborn Alternative: Who are you in this Evil world?
It is easy to be 'overcome by evil' but when we focus our gaze there, we lose the high calling of 'being the alternative' to and 'accepting our gladness' in a hostile world.
I attended a lecture last week that rocked me out of my slumber. Marilynne Robinson is a novelist, essayist, wordsmith and theologian who carries in her brain nearly 9 decades of masterful thinking, vocabulary and writing from Greek philosophy to the world of the Scripture to modern fiction. I didn’t want to go, I was tired. I had been writing and researching, traveling and worrying about to-do lists. But, as often happens when I listen to my dear wife, God had something for all of us that night. Marilynne, with a deeply honest and incisive response to a question that sounded like lament from the audience, reminded us of who we are, even in an evil world, and illuminated us with hope.
She had lectured on the life of John Calvin, his living in Geneva as a refugee, with refugees, surrounded by an army, seemingly lacking hope in a world filled with war and chaos. Now, I’m not a huge Calvin buff, but we are in West Michigan and I did study at a Dutch University. One can pick up some Calvin by osmosis.
We often hear these days about the perhaps negative sides of Calvin… of strict authoritarian religious enforcement, implications of predestination, Geneva’s handling of theological misfits, and moral codes. But, she said, Calvin was also entranced by the expansive nature of the beauty of God’s way. Instead of just ‘do not murder’, he encouraged his followers to think of how to so love their fellow man as to prevent even their injury and ensure their flourishing. He wrote some beautiful things consistent with Jesus’ intensification and moral deepening of the essence of God’s law.
And, then there were questions. One beleaguered pastor asked her to respond to the great dissonance he felt between the ‘real world’ of arrests, killing, wars and evil and the ideals of Jesus’ ‘city on a hill’ and Calvin’s Geneva, and Jesus’ shalom he promised and the way we write about theology and think about literature within the bubble of a conference.
The pastor shared he was losing hope amidst the maltreatment of human beings who are beaten, killed, spoken of as sub-human many times utilizing religiously Christian-y cover. How can we be at peace in a world filled with such overt evil and sinister baptizing of that evil using the name of Jesus? How can we sit still at a conference and listen to lofty words, dead theologians and philosophical ruminations when just down the street a clergyman was shot by men in uniform, and a seemingly interminable war in the Middle East has claimed 67,000 lives in just 735 days.
I’m reminded of Jan van Eyck’s diptych from the 1400’s which is representative of many altarpieces and other works from the dark ages and renaissance period that told the story arc of the Bible. There are dark and foreboding, even sinister panels in these paintings (and the corresponding stories). But they are only a part, and are usually relegated to the bottom quadrant.
And then Marilynne spoke. Her exact words elude me, but this is what I remember:
If we look too long at evil, it will consume us, enamor us and woo us into thinking it has more power than it does. We will forget that we, as Christians, are the alternative. We must be the alternative.
And that was why I was supposed to be there that night... to be reminded that there is an alternative. Living in the way of Jesus, participating in the community of faith is the alternative in a hostile, broken, warring world. To be honest, I had forgotten. I suppose we all forget from time to time. Of course I could say I ‘knew’ in my head, but that knowledge had not made it incarnate into my flesh and bones as I anxiously read news, stewed about conflicts thousands of miles away and simmered about things I could not control.
We want to combat evil, push back the darkness, do something proactive, win against evil. But Jesus invites us to simply abide. To be priests on behalf of a hurting world, to share in his very nature and his character traits and his posture towards the marginalized and hurting. To be an alternative, to whisper, and proclaim through our lives that there is another way.
Paul said in Romans 12:
Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves… Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another… Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil… If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
In other words, be a striking alternative to the ways of the world that have normalized evil, revenge, corruption, insult and smear, depression, anxiousness, cursing, blame, complaining and arrogance. Do not retaliate when it is expected, be willing to yield in order to live at peace, and don’t stare too intently at evil, it is not the realest reality, for God’s good, his alternative, is far more powerful. For you are a city on a hill…
Leslie Newbigin wrote on this:
The chief contribution of the Church to the renewing of social order is to be itself a new social order.
The pure verbal preaching of the story of Jesus crucified and risen would lose its power if those who heard it could not trace it back to some kind of community in which the message was being validated in a common way of life which is recognizable as embodying at least a hint and a foretaste of the blessedness for which all men long and which the Gospel promises. . . . It is in the life of a new kind of community that the saving power of the Gospel is known and tasted, and such a community—in however embryonic form—will always be the locus of that miracle by which the paradigm shift which we call conversion takes place.
The Open Secret, p. 304
And also in the Gospel in a Pluralist Society:
The Church, therefore, as the bearer of the gospel, inhabits a plausibility structure which is at variance with, and which calls in question, those that govern all human cultures without exception.
If a congregation is to function effectively as a community of truth, its manner of speaking the truth must not be aligned to the techniques of modern propaganda, but must have the modesty, the sobriety, and the realism which are proper to a disciple of Jesus.
And… it will be a community that does not live for itself but is deeply involved in the concerns of its neighborhood. It will be the church for the specific place where it lives, not the church for those who wish to be members of it — or, rather, it will be for them insofar as they are willing to be for the wider community.
… it is only as we are truly “indwelling” the gospel story, only as we are so deeply involved in the life of the community which is shaped by this story that it becomes our real “plausibility structure,” that we are able steadily and confidently to live in this attitude of eager hope. Almost everything in the “plausibility structure” which is the habitation of our society seems to contradict this Christian hope. Everything suggests that it is absurd to believe that the true authority over all things is represented in a crucified man. No amount of brilliant argument can make it sound reasonable to the inhabitants of the reigning plausibility structure.
This will only happen as and when local congregations renounce an introverted concern for their own life, and recognize that they exist for the sake of those who are not members, as sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s redeeming grace for the whole life of society.
That is why I am suggesting that the only possible hermeneutic of the gospel is a congregation which believes it.
Do we believe the alternative story? Do we see that, as in Van Eyck’s art, hell and evil, while present, are not the whole story, not even the most compelling part of the story?
Do we see the crucified Jesus and the forgiven robber. Do we see the risen king exalted to the right hand of the Father in heaven, the communion of saints, the judgement of evil and the community of faith gathered around the throne singing Holy, Holy Holy? Do we see the hope, the alternative to fixation on evil and all that is wrong in the world?
I’m thankful to Mindy Belz for this reminder from Jack Gilbert in the lead in to her reports on conflicts around the world in Globe Trot:
“We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”— “A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert
God give us the grace to fix the measure of our attention on the greater story of a coming Kingdom that will not be shaken, to be stubborn alternatives to the hostile status quo and give our allegiance to a King of peace that is already sitting on his throne.