God Is Not Fair, Thank God!

Biblical Paradox in the Life and Worship of the Parish

Thompson

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781630871444
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Life is not fair. What does this reality imply about the nature of God and the destiny of human beings? In this engaging book, Thompson asserts that fairness is not an expectation of the faithful within the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. Biblical narrative discloses the mystery of a paradoxical deity that indwells with the suffering of creation and thereby provides a mercy that exceeds the evasive goal of fairness. The process of healing and redemption of this cracked creation occurs through the tears and suffering of the biblical God whose authentic power is revealed within divine vulnerability and weakness. The Jesus of history truly manifested the fullness of this paradoxical God, for he disclosed the richness of the divine Being by emptying himself and taking the form of a redemptive servant. When the church grasps for power and control, avoids compassionate and costly ministries among the poor and powerless, and renders primary focus upon gaining heavenly rewards, it rejects its Christ-centered mission, relinquishes its paradoxical purpose, and ceases to strive toward becoming an extension of the incarnation. Thompson explores various paradoxical facets of each person of the Trinity and richly illustrates with stories from his vast experience as a parish theologian.

Part I

Paradox and the Doctrine of God

1

God Is Not Fair, Thank God!

Life is not fair. The sooner we can accept this reality, the better we are able to cope with what life brings to us. The genius of the biblical story is the paradoxical tension between the obvious unfairness that God allows within the human saga and the subtle threads of mercy that hold together the fabric of history’s tapestry. When we ignore this paradoxical theme and become obsessed with justifying the many abominations that God allows, we paint ourselves into a theological corner of disturbing contradictions. “Fairness” is a post-Enlightenment expectation that was not a central concern in the biblical narrative. Jeffersonian ideals are noble aspirations indeed, but they are not the core of Mosaic covenant theology. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were not the words spoken from Mount Sinai. Scripture tells the story of a cracked creation in which slavery, oppression, misery, and suffering of the righteous are an abundant reality. A restored Eden, the Kingdom of God, or other biblical metaphors and expressions of hope are the result of divine initiative in which mercy, not necessarily fairness, is enthroned. In the biblical narrative, happiness is not the achievement of some economic utopia of shared material abundance and wealth for all. Happiness is the serendipitous gift of a merciful God whose presence and love is sufficient reward. The initial biblical account of creation concludes with the grand assertion that “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”1 But the two great Hebrew legends of creation also remind us that this pristine order was fractured by human disobedience. Adam and Eve—the mythological archetypes of all humanity—rebelled against the authority of God, causing an inevitable influx of debilitating consequences.

But the biblical narrative does not imply a theological dualism with a Creator God whose absolute power is threatened by the guiles of a competing sinister demigod. The Bible reveals the consistent and abiding presence of an all-powerful God who does not cause evil but clearly allows it to happen. Thus, God’s ways are not fair. Moreover, the comprehensive spectrum of the biblical saga is really not about the fairness of God. The central theme is the mercy of God. The most frequent Hebrew word for mercy is hesed, which suggests that among the attributes of divine being are loving kindness, loyalty, and faithfulness. Hesed is never used in Hebrew Scripture apart from the context of covenant. It is because of God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah and their spiritual descendents that God continues to provide mercy, despite the disobedience of God’s chosen ones. The word hesed—as it is defined progressively through the narrative surrounding patriarchs, matriarchs, and prophets—becomes synonymous with the concept of grace. In one biblical account after another, disobedience results in punishment, suffering, and periods of abandonment. But despite the unfairness of children suffering from the sins of their parents or atrocities befalling innocent people, the biblical narrative is written upon the parchment of hesed—unmerited love, irrational kindness, and unfair loyalty. Thus, the righteousness and justice of God do not conform to standard measures of human fairness.

The unfairness of life is experienced within the ebb and flow of daily existence of each parish. The suffering of a child afflicted by an incurable disease, the daily ministries of the church among a city’s homeless, and the constant awareness of radical economic disparity within every community demonstrate life’s unfairness. Those who inhabit the pews of faithful worship on Sunday morning are keenly aware of this reality. When the worshiper lives with a global consciousness, this discrepancy becomes especially acute. Early in my experience as a pastor I was privileged to participate in a study-tour in Mexico. I was submerged in reading that nation’s lamentable history after the Spanish conquest. The group of pastors with whom I traveled spent time with Catholic social workers and priests who ministered among refugee residents of squatter villages from agricultural regions near Cuernavaca and Mexico City. On one occasion, we helped relocate a destitute family that had been living on the roof of a modest adobe home in a space previously reserved for chickens. Two of the children were blind from the effects of severe malnutrition. As we traveled together over rough rural highway, we learned that this family’s plight was shared by many forced to accept wretched poverty and appalling hunger as a way of life.

Every faithful worshiper—through liturgy, intercessory prayers, and an authentic proclamation of biblical theology—enters into the plight of pain within his or her local neighborhood and amidst the lives of fellow Christians. Christ United Methodist Church (UMC) in Greensboro, North Carolina, challenged my apathy through its spiritual fervor and decades-long relationships with parishes in Cochabamba, Bolivia. In response to the biblical mandate to live with grateful sensitivity to the poor, that affluent congregation sustained a resource center for agricultural development in that destitute region. In a similar spirit, the people of Providence UMC in Charlotte, North Carolina, have maintained two medical clinics near Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, for forty years and have recently initiated macroeconomics programs for unemployed women in several villages. They sent waves of volunteers to minister amidst the rubble and carnage following the earthquake of 2010. These meager efforts hardly restore economic fairness within the two poorest countries of the Western Hemisphere—but they provide hope to the hopeless. These congregations have developed loving relationships with “the least of these”2 living far away as well as within their own cities. By fusing worship with service, church members have developed effective missions of mercy. While singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with a Bolivian congregation that stood on the dirt floor of a makeshift sanctuary, our mission team felt the paradox of divine mercy amidst the misery and desolation of abject poverty. These faithful disciples have consistently challenged earth’s abysmal unfairness by embodying the biblical message of hesed.

Through the centuries, faithful congregations have proclaimed that the true nature of God was profoundly revealed through the advent of Jesus of Nazareth. His teachings, the conduct of his life in human history, and the redemptive power of his unjust and cruel death disclosed an authentic glimpse at the essence of God. Jesus’ historical existence defined hesed—the only power of redemption for a fractured creation. When Jesus began teaching his disciples on the tranquil hillsides of Galilee overlooking the village of Capernaum, his audience likely stood in reverent attention. It was the custom in those days for learned rabbis to give instruction while seated. Their pupils, in an act of respect, remained standing throughout the lesson. Jesus’ apostles and the throng of enthralled followers, therefore, stood in courteous concentration as this layman from a tiny nearby village began painting a verbal picture: “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.”3 By the time Jesus had completed his tale about these laborers, however, we can imagine that many within his audience would have begun to sit down upon the grass, collapsing in passive protest. This prophet of justice, through this disturbing little parable, had apparently endorsed an ethic of inequity in which lazy laborers, arriving for work at sunset, received the same compensation as those who had sweltered in the heat of the day. Jesus’ offended listeners must have begun murmuring, “If the kingdom of heaven is like this, I want no part in it. The doctrine of God, proclaimed by this son of Joseph the carpenter, just isn’t fair.”

When Matthew recorded the parable, he suggested that Jesus added this enigmatic summary, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”4 Apparently Matthew editorialized with these words, for they are extraneous to the fabric of Jesus’ original story. But Matthew was instructing catechumens within his congregation in the theology of paradox that was at the core of Jesus’ life and message. We, like those who first read this disturbing parable from the manuscript of the First Gospel, respond with a sense of consternation. Some of us have known from our youth what it means to make our way into the fields before sunrise with the smell of fertile earth in our nostrils. Others of us, with a similar commitment to an honest day’s labor, have consistently cranked up our car’s engine at daybreak and joined with other sleepy-faced motorists, punching in our timecard just as the factory whistle begins to blow. We have had our share of melancholy Mondays, grumbling beneath our breath the protest of Ecclesiastics: “Vanity of vanities . . . All is vanity. What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? . . . All things are wearisome; more than one can express.”5 This is why, after forty-three years of faithful labor, I recently pulled the lever of our United Methodist Church’s pension program, began cashing in upon my obligatory investments in Social Security, and finally (after all those years of arduous work) feel justified in receiving an earned monetary reward for retirement. At least there is a measure of fairness when our sweat equity guarantees a payoff.

But Jesus did not measure justice with any such a mathematical equation for fairness in this paradoxical parable. Quid does not equal quo. His implicit fair labor code ruffles our neatly feathered formula for fairness. In our point of view, this is no way to run a vineyard, a factory, a ship, and certainly not the churc...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction: Pondering a Pastor’s Pilgrimage
• Part I: Paradox and the Doctrine of God
• Part II: Paradox and Christology
• Part III: Paradox and the Holy Spirit as an Extension of the Incarnation
• Bibliography