The Trapped and the Self-Sufficient
This essay is based on a talk given in 2007 at a 'Return to Basics' series of talks.
Maybe over a lonely coffee or the moment just before communing of the Body, the questions come. Why did Jesus die? Why do I need to be saved?
The Diagnosis
Two types of people grapple with these questions. The first is the one whom is fully self-sufficient in all things. The self-sufficient doesn't need God. They believe intellectually; they can fool you by their precise and eloquent definition of the faith. They heard it for so long and they've had enough time to work on their deception. They could also be the unchurched, resorting to a loose, private definition of faith which they work out to some undefined extent in their daily lives. The main question the original question whether Christ had to die is ... Did we ask him to?
This is the question of the self-sufficient and the one answered by CS Lewis when he called the death of Christ on the Cross as 'the Great Insult'. In a 2005 article in the UK newspaper The Guardian, Polly Toynbee wrote: "Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in passion to save our souls."1 The corollary is: "Why did you die, Christ, when it's me who makes it count?" Thinking they are good by their actions, the self-sufficient is born out of a mentality that is alien to the witness of the Gospel. Somehow, comfortable materialism has distorted their understanding of the faith, creating this strange hybrid of a faith.
The other type is the trapped. They've been trapped in long-term doubt or glut of some kind. It could be an incurable pain, a chronic sin or some suffering that plagues them without mercy in their Christian life. The trapped needs God but cannot see or reach him. They want to believe and see, but they're mired in sin. That sin breeds despair, which then breeds complete despair. Scripture says of the self-sufficient: "For the message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing..." (1 Cor. 1:10) But to the trapped, the Cross is the last and only resort. The trapped have heard the Gospel read, the words from Bible studies, the Sunday sermons, but all those words no longer speak to their predicament. The saving work of Christ becomes a burden and an unachievable, distant goal. There is no renewal, the waters are stagnant. Sin and habit and the glut have turned our sins, soft droplets of filth which the waters of Christ remove and cleanse, into hardened bird crap on a car windshield. When they think about that first question, they could come up with their own corollary, Why did you die if your death has done nothing and does nothing to my life?
I hear them mutter in the corner over their latté, there's no point in you dying if it does nothing about my death.
The trapped have no joy, no renewal, and no hearing to the roar of the Good News. The self-sufficient thinks the Good News is dumb news.
Truth about Death
The death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ brings about the reconciliation of all creation, not just humanity, to God. Man specifically is restored back to the fullest potential of pre-Fall health and wholeness. The door opens to man posessing the unrestricted opportunity to become God-like. Let's expand this further; what does this really mean?
If God is all-patient, unending in his mercy, forgiving beyond known limits, able to transform poverty into riches, suffering into strength, sickness into wholeness, man becomes that too by the life-long process of faith, coupled with actions. So, the grace of God works, with the person's active participation, like the gentle measured touched of a sculptor until all our learned and natural instincts, tendencies, minds, and hearts become unequivocally predisposed to create in goodness, bring about love and reconciliation, and forging communities of broken people into churches of glory. And that is a mere start.
To achieve by active participation in the grace of God to be what he is as he is, that is the very essence of who we are to become. That is the mystery of our essence moving in a continuous and eternal process towards becoming his essence.
The self-sufficient does not God in any way. For to need God, you have to accept and realize that I'm created and finite, I'm not alone, and that I belong somehow to this God who has revealed himself to us in trinity and unity simultaneously. The self-sufficient doesn't really care about any of these propositions because it is of no practical or intellectual significant concern to them.
The trapped knows and accepts all these propositions, but is stuck between a rock and their immobility made of concrete on what to do next. To impose on the self-sufficient that you must need God makes them resentful and even more rejecting of the death of Christ. To impose on the trappped is to make them more burdened.
Christ's death is no the end to suffering. It's not an anti-depressant or emotional quickfix. What if I used it to decrease my developed sense of guilt? Could the self-sufficient twist the death of Christ to maintain their facade?
Both types have one question proceeding from their mouths for Christ, What are you saving me from?
What do I need saving from?
The self-sufficient's contentment and trapped's anxiety over the permanence of their situation points us to another unsettling thought. Why do we need to be saved when what we have is good enough?
There's something about the death of Christ that leaves us having to give up something. Christ voluntarily gav up his life, allowing his flesh to taste the suffering and death. He broke his body and poured his blood into the chalice; he walked to the Cross carrying all sin on himself. Waking up in the tomb, to rise and later return to his home of comfort in heaven, he shows us, This is why my death happened – to give you this life of glory.
You sure? All I want is healing. And all I want is to be left alone.
Maybe people, embodied in these two types, don't see the point of the death of Christ because they're deeply resentful of a sacrifice implying one in return. The self-sufficient resents God, requiring him to surrender his wealth and pride to bring about humility. The trapped resents God requiring continual suffering as the only accepted currency to acquire salvation.
The two types see it as an aggressive takeover; the Cappadochian fathers saw it as "an exchanging of gifts". Now, God asks, when will we accept that we have is, in fact, from him? The trapped shudders at this. I knew it. That vindictive bully willed this pain onto me. I hate you.
That's not what Scripture means by what we have is his. For the trapped, what they have is a product of humanity gone wrong. God created that humanity, which fell and then shown again its true form through the death of Christ. That true humanity is far higher, far greater, and more whole than our conception of humanity. The trapped has hope; it's not their fault for the humanity they posess except the sins they commit. And for the self-sufficient, what they have is God's in that it's by God's direct or invisible blessing, whether as a reward of faith, a free gift, or to fulfill justice by allowing success to come by their own hands, whether achieved in his his name or not. It cannot be escaped; it is still his. Gregory of Nazanzius taught that what has not been assumed has not been healed. Christ assumed all of our humanity, given to us on lease in creation, and so thus all has been healed. So, anything achieved or done through this humanity finds its ultimate ownership in him.
The answer to the question over the point of the death of Christ lies in the choice to accept his gift and not feel compelled by force or guilt. And once we accept it, we exchange the rather modest gift of humanity for the gift of him himself.
There have been many questions in this essay. I think of little Anna, from the book Mister God, this is Anna, when she prayed with fervour: "God, teach me to ask the right questions." The questions are complete with answers and littered with quiet reminders to welcome, not resent, his death.
- The article is based on The Lion, the Witch, and the Great Insult from www.boundless.org, 2005.[back]
