Having grown up in a more Christian than average environment—socially, religiously, and intellectually—I find that often I know things before I really learn them. Perhaps this is not really a result of the Christian context of my life, but what I mean is that I’ll often encounter an idea, whether in book, Bible, conversation, or sermon, and know it to be true. And yet the truth of it, though met with assent, is not paired with understanding—not even of the necessarily-limited sort that my mind allows.
Maybe this is simply because spiritual truths take a while to settle into the mental language I’m more familiar with, or else due to the difference between learning by observation and learning by experience; I don’t know. There are countless examples of this, however, of lessons known and then seen later at a deeper, more personal level. One in particular has settled deeper into my understanding as of late.
C. S. Lewis makes the point (as have many others) that God demonstrates a certain humility in accepting our obedience to Him. Most, if not all, human egos would be too offended to actually crave the sort of offering we give to God: Lewis notes that we tend to accept God only when we have learned that absolutely nothing else is capable of pleasing or saving. We come to God, more often than not, as a last resort. We turn to Him after we’ve turned to all manner of other things…what human lover (one, it must be remembered, who is completely secure, satisfied, and self-sufficient) would accept a woman after she had turned to every other lover she could find, only to finally surrender, somewhat despondently perhaps, back to the One Who deserves her attention? God views the creatures He alone formed, who not only betrayed Him so momentously once, but who again and again look for other gods, other loves, and who usually turn back to Him only when they realize themselves at the end of their ropes…and He views them with love, as if they chose Him in a respectable way.
Of course, this…oversight…of the insufficiency of our love and faith is only made possible by the all-Sufficiency of the Son of God’s Crucifixion. Still, though, Christ’s mission was initiated by God and for God, so I don’t think it changes at all (or rather, it merely increases) the marvelous quality of God accepting our feeble and frantic surrender to His love with what, in a human lover, would be seemingly imprudent and over-extreme humility. We would tell such a man “you deserve better; don’t lower your standards so far.” Thank God He found a way to keep both His standards and us.
I’ve skipped ahead. I encountered this truth many years ago and knew it as true. But my well-developed ideas about it (inchoate, certainly, compared to Lewis’ own thoughts) come mainly from a recent encounter with two familiar passages of Scripture…for the first time, I think, I saw these two passages as connecting to this idea of the unassuming nature of God’s acceptance of us. (Note that such words as “humility” and “unassuming,” when talking about this side of salvation, are used only because I can find no better. I think they are not correct, in a strict manner; God’s nature demonstrates Glory first and foremost, and using “humble” to describe God’s victorious and heroic claiming of us is a woefully incomplete adjective. But I’m focusing on the idea that He accepts a sort of love we mortals have a hard time understanding or accepting—although, through Christ, we are expected to extend it.)
The two passages I’m talking about are the Parable of the Prodigal Son and Hosea 2. The first is more familiar to most people, almost certainly, and there is nothing new I could say about such a frequently encountered passage—of course, nihil novum sub sole; “saying something new” is, if even possible, not a virtue when talking about the Bible. But it’s really the comparison between the two passages that struck me.
The “prodigal” son deeply insulted his father, left, squandered his wealth and his life on empty, depraved living; when he reached rock-bottom, he came to his senses and said: “How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.” He wanted to be taken back, if only as the lowest of his father’s servants. So he returned…and “while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.” His father was not willing that his son be his servant; he would unconditionally take him back as his son once more. There are, of course, several lessons there.
But the similarity to Hosea 2 is what struck me recently. Hosea, after marrying a prostitute as directed by God and giving her all she could want, experienced the continual betrayal and shame of an unfaithful spouse; this, of course, illustrates God’s relationship with His People. In the second chapter (after a few verses that may serve as a reminder of God’s justice), God shows, I think, the Heart behind the punishments/trails/difficulties His creatures face. God demonstrates that His end-goal is always the redemption of those lost, the forgiveness and reconciliation with those who willfully abuse His Love and Holiness. Right after saying He will punish His unfaithful spouse, in short because she forgot Him and turned to other lovers, He states unequivocally that He won’t leave it at that. He also, as I stated above, at least hints that those punishments are sent in order to turn her away from dependence on other lovers…He wants her to reach rock-bottom (as did the prodigal son) so that she will turn to Him, the “one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold,” her One True Hope (v.8). This is what He says in v.14ff:
“Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards…There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt. "In that day," declares the LORD, "you will call Me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call Me ‘my master.’”
The prodigal son’s father refused to consider his son a servant; the Lord refuses to let His bride see Him as master. God as Lover and God as Father, these identities never supersede God as King, but they go hand in hand…and we far too often ignore these expressions of God’s holy love. But really what strikes me is that difficult-to-describe quality of God’s love for us…what seems like humility at first glance, a crazily unassuming ability to accept a response from us that is one iota short of being forced, but what is, I think, ultimately an expression of the supreme self-confidence and independence of God. He does not love us out of any inherent need; unlike us, His love (though ever for His Glory) is something extended purely, not from a grasping need for wholeness—for He is always Whole—but out of the overflow of His Love for Himself. We unavoidably needy, dependent (we were made that way) and, of course, fallen creatures find it difficult to love when there is no benefit to us, no semblance of worthiness in the object of our love, no real indication from our beloved that they would choose us on their own. God, both as Father and as Husband/Lover/LORD, forgets our sins when we are no longer lost, and His joy overflows into blessings for us, in spite of the fact that He must rescue us from the depraved state of our own rebellion against Him, in spite of the fact we tend to frantically seek an escape when He closes in with His Love, in spite of the fact of what it cost Him.
Incidentally, I think this is where one of the problematic issues of Catholicism comes in; God is not a God of purgatory, Who saves from Hell yet nevertheless punishes after death for sins. He allures us back, He rushes down the road and celebrates our return. Maybe the idea of purgatory was fashioned out of a desire to show that sin is indeed grave, and to dissuade Christians from the idea of cheap grace—that, once saved, our sins are of no real account, for they are already paid for. But the idea of purgatory is in reality an affront to the true costliness of Grace: it is in fact because of the ultimate price our Salvation cost God that our sins are no longer counted against us, tossed as far away as the East is from the West, and we know that it is for freedom we have been set free. Purgatory seeks to make us pay part of the price of sin; nevertheless, Jesus’ Sacrifice was sufficient to pay the entirety of the price.
But that’s a tangent. And I have wandered far afield. It simply astounds me, the perfection of God’s Love. We love because He first loved us, and yet still we can’t quite follow His example; for while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. While we were sinners…prodigal sons, faithless prostitutes, persecutors of God’s people…God showed that, contrary to our expectations and upbringing, He still craved relationship with us. And not the relationship of master and servant, but a relationship founded on Love; and a craving not born out of need, but out of overflowing sufficiency. Our human expectations are that, if God takes us back, it is with conditions…but I think these two passages, one from the OT and one from the NT, show that God’s love overwhelms, that instead of hoops we need to jump through we need just turn to Him, no matter how much we have avoided Him in the past—and He’s actively involved in restoring that relationship all the while. And it should always be remembered—it is only through Christ that this is possible.
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