"Whatsoever you have done for the least of these..."

One of the amazing things about the scriptures is the degree to which they speak with any kind of unified voice about anything. I mean, just think about it for a minute: even if we take the most conservative view of biblical authorship, we're still looking at sixty-six different books, composed by at least forty different authors -- perhaps quite a bit more, depending on how many different voices we think are behind the Psalms and Proverbs -- from very different regions of the Middle East, Asia Minor, and even Europe, over a period of thirteen hundred years.

Yet, each piece of scripture fits within the larger whole, like wildly unique instruments joining together in a symphony -- here a kettle drum, there a flute -- resonating within the musical architecture of the piece, becoming somehow greater than the sum of each individual part.

Without any perceptible, individual prompting, these authors (some of them writing during the same period of time and, thus, without any reference to each other's work) all speak in a harmony that defies explanation.

One piece of that music, one part of the harmony of the scriptures as a whole, is the way those authors speak to those the world values and those it does not.

If you pay attention to the rhythm of the Old Testament, it's easy to see this music emerge. It's there in the life of Abram, a man from Ur, who had moved with his family to another prosperous city in the sprawling Babylonian empire and, apparently, struck it rich. He was living the dream -- wealth, influence, a home in the city where he was assured of food and protection, while those outside the walls were left to fend for themselves -- and, in the midst of it all, he hears this call, this lingering, unavoidable call, to leave.

Not to some other city, mind you.

No, Abram gets the inescapable sense that he is to move from the center of his known world out to Canaan, the most rural, most backwoods place you could find. Just listen to how a Canaanite was described by the Babylonian city-folk:

A tent dweller buffeted by wind and rain, 

he knows not prayers,

With the weapon he makes the mountain his habitation,

Contentious to the excess, he turns against the land, 

knows not to bend the knee,

Eats uncooked meat,

Has no house in his lifetime,

Is not brought to burial when he dies.

Basically, they were considered to be little more than animals.

Yet, it was there -- out in the wilderness, out where there was none of the wealth or influence he had come to know, out where the rest of the civilized world was completely unaware of his existence -- it was there that Abram met God.

Or think about Moses, a prince of Egypt, at the height of its power -- the most dominant empire in the world at the time. Yet, in a lapse of control, he murders a man and is driven out of one of the most illustrious palaces the world has ever known into the desert. He takes refuge among a poor, nomadic tribe out in the middle of a vast and expansive nothingness. Laying down the staff of his royal authority, he takes up the staff of a shepherd, sleeping out in the open with his flocks, no roof over his head. He hides -- as far away from the horrors of his past as he can possibly get.

Then, one day, he wanders even further.

The Bible describes Mt. Sinai as being out beyond the wilderness, as if Moses arrived at the very end of the world and somehow managed to keep walking -- beyond the edge of the map, out where no foot had ever trod.

The location of Mt. Sinai is so far out of the way, so alien to the domain of men, that -- even though it was there that Israel actually became the people of God -- beyond one solitary trip from Elijah, it disappears from the lives of the Israelites, completely. 

Yet, it was there, in a place so remote we've actually forgotten how to get there, that Moses, the vagabond Egyptian outcast turned homeless fugitive, was found by God.

We might also think of Saul, the first Israelite king. It might sound shocking to say this, but he was actually a pretty great king, by contemporary standards. When the Israelites were more focused on their tribal, rather than their national identity, when the people of God threatened to dissolve into their own in-fighting as the armies of their enemies threatened to devour them, it was Saul who unified them. It was Saul who led his army, out numbered and terrified, against the mighty Philistines and emerged victorious. It was Saul who shrewdly captured the Amalekite king, knowing he'd be of more use alive -- for treaties or ransom -- than dead.

Yet, it was not a Saul that God ultimately wanted for his people, but a David.

We take for granted what an unlikely choice this David was. However, take a moment and let it sink in that, when faced with the prospect that a member of his own house might become king, with all the elevation of wealth and status that would bring -- even after all his other sons had failed the test -- Jesse found the idea that David could be king to be such a joke that he chose to lie and pretend David didn't even exist rather than present him to Samuel for consideration.

Yet, it was this weak and helpless boy -- who knew nothing of leadership or what it meant to be a king, whose own family hid him away in the fields -- it was this boy who captured God's heart.

Over and over and over, throughout the scriptures, God shows how deeply he identifies with what the rest of the world considers to be "the least of these." To us, on this side of history, they are men of great stature, heroes of the faith, but we really need to remember how ridiculous it was, for example, that the Sovereign Lord of all Creation would choose, as the Patriarch of the people who would represent him to all people, some dusty nomad in a small corner of the world, who (for the overwhelming majority of humanity) may as well have never even existed.

We need to remember how absurd it is that the God who intended to declare his glory to the nations would bypass the wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world -- in favor of its slaves.

And let's not forget: Abraham was a liar who traded his wife away to protect his own skin; Moses was a murderer and a coward; and David stole a man's wife and had him murdered on the battlefield.  The same Israelites who watched Pharaoh's men held at bay by a pillar of fire, who watched the waters part for them and swallow the entire Egyptian army, those very same Israelites yearned to return to their slavery before they ever reached the foot of Sinai.

When we fail to be shocked by the sheer worthlessness of the people God continually calls to fulfill his purposes, we cease to be able to understand passages, like the one in Matthew 25, where Jesus identifies so deeply with the "least of these" that he regards anything done for them as done equally for him.

In fact, we cease to be able to identify "the least of these" at all.

Instead, we trade the needy for the deserving. We exchange the dependent for the worthy.  In place of Jesus' plea that all who are burdened should come to him we hold that God helps those who help themselves. 
 
We excuse ourselves from our call to care -- for the hungry, the alienated, the naked, the homeless, the sick, the imprisoned -- by questioning how they arrived in their state of need (by their own poor choices?) or whether they'd even really benefit from the care we might provide.

We only fight for justice for those who we think are just. We only feed those who we think could eventually feed themselves. We only care for the sick (especially those who suffer from mental illness) who might eventually be healed. 

Of course, the question we have to ask ourselves is, "What if God treated us like that?" What if he only loved the lovely?



 

 What if he only saved those who were worth saving?

Finding God in Aronofsky's Noah

There is an image in the movie Noah that I can't seem to get out of my head. As Noah stands on the scorched earth, facing down the watchers, a stream - presumably a sign of God's blessing or presence - bubbles up and spreads across the land, bringing new life wherever it goes.

The tension between that scene and the impending chaos, between the water that gives life and the water that destroys it, is breathtaking. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems that it is explicitly that tension that stands at the center of the whole movie.

Only, the focus of the tension isn't really the water, but God.

In his interpretation of this ancient tale, Aronofsky gets at a question we have been asking ourselves for centuries:

Can God be trusted?

---

Can we be honest for a moment? The flood narrative is a horrifying story.

How we ever decided that the story of God wiping out all that life -- of Noah closing the door to the ark as family after family after family - men, women, and children - faced the surging waters and their inevitable, suffocating deaths -- how we decided that was a kid's story, worthy of wallpaper and bed-sheets, is beyond me.

We have largely numbed ourselves to this terror, but think about what you felt the last time you heard about some poor, unhinged mother drowning her children in the bathtub. Everything in our nature groans under such an atrocity because the idea that a mother, who should love and nourish and protect her child, would instead commit such violence, against her own flesh and blood, defiles our deepest sensibilities.


To pretend we don't shudder to think of God in the same light is to lie, at the very least, to ourselves, if not to others as well. 


So, how will we stand in the face of such a God?

---

One of the (many) beautiful things about Noah is that it allows us to explore the possibility of the other.

For example, Og, one of the watchers, explains that they came to Earth because they saw how Adam and Eve had been cast out of the garden and they pitied them. Isn't that the emotion we'd expect from God? Isn't that pity, that compassion, what we would expect to override His frustration or His anger?

Shouldn't pity have held the waters at bay?

Or, think about Tubal-Cain. What has he done, if not provide for those under his charge? When the cities' mines run dry and the people are starving, he leads the charge - note that: he doesn't sit back and command others forth, but he, himself, leads his men into battle - to secure for them the provisions they feel they need, even to the point of challenging the Watchers in order to gain a place for his people on the ark.

Isn't that loyalty and provision what we would expect from God?

It is uncomfortable to think in those ways. We want to dismiss the Watchers as rebels and Tubal-Cain as a barbarian, but Aronofsky just won't let us. Instead, he paints each with generous and compassionate strokes. We respect the Watchers, giving up everything to help someone else; we empathize with Tubal-Cain as he rails against Noah for closing his ark to the world and threatening the lives of his daughter-in-law and the children she carries in her womb.

---

Of course, some will say the answer to the horror of the flood is justice, the great rallying cry of our hero, Noah.

After all, while the Watchers had intended to show pity and to help man, what, exactly, had been the result of their aid? The wickedness of humanity was not chastened by our expulsion from the garden. Rather, through the help of Samyaza and his kin, that wickedness was able to grow and spread, finding fuller and more potent expression, until the darkness we embraced in the garden soon covered the whole of the Earth.

Or consider that, while Tubal-Cain intends to provide for his own, he accomplishes that end only through the destruction and exploitation of others and the world in which they live. More than that, the substance of what he provides, and manner in which he provides it, actually tear down the humanity of his own people, the very humanity he is seeking to preserve.

As Noah stands on the blood-soaked soil of the human encampment, watching men hand over their daughters to lustful soldiers in exchange for food, it's easy to see that the Watchers and Tubal-Cain were not the saviors we may have originally thought they were.

Perhaps those people really were beyond saving. Perhaps violence and hatred and greed are stains that just won't wash out.

However, the true crowning glory of Noah is that, even here, we find no solace. 

See, one of the ways we numb ourselves to this story is to imagine some great chasm of time and temperament between ourselves and those ravaged by the flood.

Like Noah's wife, we are well aware of the deplorable nature of those out there, but we know ourselves to be good. While they were envious and spiteful and proud, we are loyal and strong and loving. We know enough to realize we are not perfect, but surely the good in us out-weighs the bad.

Aronofsky's Noah robs us of that conceit.

The great realization that Noah makes, as he stands in the camp of the descendants of Cain, is not just how bad they are. The realization he makes is that whatever wickedness he sees in them dwells also in him.

 ---

There are many people who struggle with the dark turn that Noah takes as it becomes clear that Ila, Shem's wife, is pregnant.

For those who grew up with the story of Noah building his "arkie," it seems so drastically out of character for this supposedly righteous man to transform so suddenly into a murderous, raving lunatic.

However, if justice really is the answer we want it to be, can we really say that Noah's determination to cut down his grand-daughters is all that inconsistent?

If the pervasive wickedness of humanity is beyond saving and if that wickedness is universal - meaning, no one escapes its presence, regardless of the degree to which they act on it - by what right should any of Noah's family survive, much less grand-daughters who, as mothers some day, could perpetuate the evil the flood was meant to wipe out?

Can we really argue with Noah when he claims that that would mean the destruction of all that life would have been for nothing?

The fact that we recoil at the image of this knife-wielding Noah, shows that justice is no more an escape from a flood-sending God than anything the Watchers or Tubal-Cain had to offer.

---

It turns out, then, that in the course of his film Aronofsky has offered us three possible replacements for God:

To those who believe God should have been more merciful, that His pity should have stayed his hand, he offers us the Watchers.

To those who believe that God should have done more to provide for His people, that their wickedness is due to some lack in this regard, he offers us Tubal-Cain and his subjects.

To those who believe the flood narrative is an example of justice, that the only right course of action was for God to wipe out all those wicked people, he offers us Noah holding a knife over his grand-daughters (and, consequently, ourselves).

Which brings me back to that image I brought up at the beginning of this post -- the water. 

The "replacement gods" were all capable of producing horrors of their own, but only God, like the water, is capable of producing beauty in the midst of all the horror. Only God is capable of bringing life out of so much death.

Just as a drop of water from the sky was the first sign of the death of all things, it was a drop of water from the sky that restored the flower picked by Ham, bringing new life.

By the end of Noah, we may not find the horrors of this ancient tale any easier to bear. The fact that, upon finding dry land, Noah immediately drinks himself into a stupor, bears witness to that fact.

After it all, we remain at the mercy of the flood-sending God.

However, given that He, and He alone, is capable of turning terror into beauty, of bringing life out of death, perhaps at His mercy was the best place for us all along.

Doubt

They come without warning, these twinges of doubt, these moments where the possibility that I am a fool, in the company of fools, flickers to the surface of my consciousness and steals my breath away.

The last one came last Sunday, sitting in church, as our pastor spoke of the immensity of the universe.

300 billion stars in our galaxy alone...

The largest galaxy we're aware of is more than 1 billion light years across...

As he spoke, I found myself wondering, "The 'Creator' squeezed himself into a tiny speck on some other random tiny speck in the midst of all that?"

Are we kidding ourselves...?

In the past, those waves of doubt would crest into self-condemnation and guilt, followed either by arguing myself into silence or summoning up all kinds of things to do in order to (a) atone for the doubt itself or (b) try to insulate myself against its recurrence. 

This time, however, as I sat there, twirling that little plastic cup of juice in my hands, my mind was suddenly flooded with instance after instance where the people whose stories fill our scriptures must have felt themselves trapped in this same... absurdity... and it occurred to me: 

What if that's the point?

~-@-~

It must have seemed so ridiculous, as she stood in front of that tree -- a tree -- and turned God's words over in her mind. It didn't look any different than any other tree in the garden, it's fruit the same as their fruit, and yet, out of all the others, this one had been singled out as the one to avoid. 

Didn't God make that tree? Wasn't it good like everything else he'd made? If it was so dangerous, why put it here? Are we not good enough?  Is there something he's keeping from us?

Am I being played for a fool?

Isn't that the essence of the serpent's temptation? We give Eve a hard time, but don't we resonate with that fear?

Or what about Abraham, father Abraham, tying one strap and then another, binding his son to a pile of wood?

Do we really believe, through it all -- as his son asked where they'll find a lamb for the sacrifice, as he felt the weight of the dagger beating against his hip while they hiked the mountain, as he uttered the terrible command for Isaac, his Isaac, to lie down -- is it even possible he never had a moment where he asked himself, "What the hell am I doing?"

~-@-~

"No, daddy, I can't!" my son shouted at me from the edge of the pool last summer, as I pleaded with him to jump to me. Teeth clenched, visibly shaking from a mixture of cold and fear, he stomped his resolve on the concrete.

In that moment, as a dad, I knew I couldn't give in, but not because it was of life and death importance that he should be able to jump into a pool, not even because of some belief that he should obey. 

Rather, it was important that he jump because it was an opportunity for my son to learn to trust. 

We have moments like this all the time. The other day, I asked him to put down a toy, in close proximity to his sister, so he could come and take some medicine and the protest came fast and furious, "But, but, but, if I put it down, she'll take it!"

Trust me, son. I will make sure she doesn't.

He's learning to swim now, and a couple of weeks ago I asked him to swim from me to a set of stairs almost the full width of the pool away. Terrified, he wrapped himself around me and begged to move closer. As I reasoned with him, I remember pulling him away from my neck, far enough to make eye-contact, and asking:

"Have I ever done anything to hurt you, buddy? Do you think I would ever let anything happen to you?"

Growing up, the only way I knew how to define the word faith was "believing in God." As a father, I have learned that faith -- real faith -- means believing that he's good, that he has my best in mind, even when he asks things of me that are uncomfortable or impossible to understand.

The thing is, the only way to know that goodness is to experience it, to put it to the test, to stand open and vulnerable upon the promise of goodness and then find out whether things are, in fact, as advertised. 

The only way my son can know, truly know, that I will catch him is to leap -- to leap out into water that would surely mean his death without me -- and find out. 

In the same way, the only way for me to know -- truly know -- that God is good, is to stand in the midst of this absurdity and lean in to that promise, to taste and see, as it were. 

And let's be clear here: the danger is just as real for me as it is for my son.

The depth of the demand that Christ puts upon my life (namely, all of it) will not allow for Pascal's famous wager (that is, that it is better to believe and find there is no god, than to refuse and find that he exists). Rather, we must, with Paul, admit that, if we've missed our guess -- if god either is not good, or simply doesn't exist -- then we of all people "are to be most pitied" (1 Cor 15).

~-@-~

As I sat in church last Sunday, caught up in the absurdity that an infinite God would care even one tiny bit about a miniscule speck awash in this vast and incalculable expanse we call the universe, I suddenly realized I was simply rehearsing the struggle that echoes through all of scripture:

 You want me to leave my home and successful life in a vibrant city and move to Canaan, the most backwoods area of this region?

Trust me, I am good.

 

You want me to try to break down these vast and impenetrable walls... by playing music?

Trust me, I am good.

You want me to go, by myself, to proclaim your judgement on a nation known throughout the world for its brutality and ruthlessness?

Trust me, I am good.

You want us to live in rubble so we can haphazardly rebuild a wall while all our enemies are threatening to destroy us? 

Trust me, I am good.

You want me to be pregnant but not with the child of the man who will be my husband?

Trust me, I am good.

 

In my own doubts, in those moments where I feel myself at the edge of the water, so to speak, afraid and unsure, the story of my own life resonates with those who have gone before me, and I am given the same terrifying but ultimately glorious opportunity as they:

Trust me, I am good.

Without the doubt, without the absurdity, would that even be possible?