Transformed by and for Love

Not by works but by faith has been a dividing line among Christians since the Reformation. And very often this divide is understood - at least by Protestants - as a choice between impossible demands no one could ever live up to versus a free gift that is merely accepted. Protestants are heirs of Martin Luther on this, and he got it from his understanding of the Apostle Paul. 

Luther read Paul out of his own sense of guilt. While still Catholic, Luther used to drive his confessor crazy by continually returning to confess every little fault or misstep he had recalled. And he was terrified that he had failed to confess something. Luther apparently assumed that Paul's discussion of works and the Law had a similar experience behind them. Paul must have despaired at never being able to keep the Law fully, but then he had found freedom from the Law through Jesus. What a relief that the impossible was no longer required.

Scholarship into Judaism in Jesus' and Paul's day began to undermine such thinking some time ago, and it seems likely that Paul had not thought the Law an impossible burden prior to his "Damascus road experience." But you needn't be up on the latest biblical scholarship to share such views. Simply listen to what Paul himself says in today's reading from Philippians.

Paul is rattling off a bit of personal history as he argues against being circumcised, that is, against becoming Jewish first in order to become a Christian. "If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless..."

Notice that last phrase; "as to righteousness under the law, blameless." That does not sound like someone who was terrified that he couldn't keep the law well enough. Quite the opposite.

Clearly Paul's problem with the Law is not that one cannot keep it. (Likely Paul understood keeping the Law to mean doing your best to abide by it at all times, but being forgiven when you repented of your failings to keep it.) Rather the problem lies in where one places his or her trust. Paul seems to think that the Law has become the object of Israel's hope and trust, rather than God Godself. But in Jesus, Paul has encountered God's love and grace directly, and he now trusts that over the Law, no matter how good that Law may be.

As Paul considers his former faith in the Law and Israel's religious traditions he writes, "Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish." ("Rubbish" is probably too tame a translation. The word more often refers to "excrement.")

It strikes me that Paul's language here is the language of love. It sounds like the sort of talk you hear from those who have fallen in love, who suddenly find everything else meaningless by comparison. Having come to "know" Jesus, having experienced God's love dwelling in him, things that once had supreme meaning now seem like nothing, like crap to Paul. And just like a lover who would do anything for the sake of his beloved, Paul will gladly deal with sufferings and punishments and hardships to be part of that love.

This is why Paul can go on and on, trash talking the Law, and then turn right around and demand the highest ethical standards for Christians. Paul cannot imagine living in ways contrary to God. What lover would want to do that. Lovers want only to please their beloved.

Unfortunately, institutions don't do love or passion terribly well, and as the church became more and more institutionalized, it became more and more a set of rules and beliefs one needed to abide by in order to be on God's good side. From time to time in history, the Church manages to recover some of that passion. Martin Luther's movement, even if he did misunderstand Paul somewhat, was largely a movement back toward passion. And I think much of the activity around Emergent Church in our day is a move toward passion, toward love.

My own faith tradition has its fears about emotional, experiential faith. Some of these fears are well founded. Just think of the dumb things people sometimes do when they are head-over-heels in love. But all too often, this fear has led Presbyterians (and other Mainline folks) to be too focused on institution and doctrine. I suspect that much of the Mainline's decline is rooted in its lack of passion for anything besides "how we've always done it" or our tastes in music and worship styles.

What if instead of being raised an Israelite, a Hebrew, and a Pharisee, Paul had been raised a Christian, a Presbyterian, and a pastor or elder? And what if he then encountered Jesus in the manner Paul speaks of in today's reading? In his passion for "knowing Christ Jesus," what institutional pieces of the church might he come to regard as rubbish, as crap?

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