Divine Plagiarism

"For a moment, she re-discovered the purpose of her life: … to call each thing by its right name.”
- Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak

"How can [the gods] meet us face to face till we have faces?”
- Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis

It seems so much longer than five years ago, but I remember everything nonetheless. Two years of my life are pressed into these streets and carved into these chairs. Yet this is the strangest thing: I remember so many of the things that were said, but I hardly remember the boy who said them. I retrace my own steps, but not as a man reminiscing upon his own memories. I am my own historian, and with the intimacy of studied expertise I survey a long-quiet battlefield where other men fought.

As my mind fills in the gaps, I see these empty chairs filled with agitated students, elbowing into the millisecond gaps between competing monologues, desperately trying to add their own voice to the fray. Though the hum of the air conditioner is the only true sound in this sterile room, echoing in their silence, those arguments still ricochet off the walls. Like the serene green hill of Little Round Top, this room whispers to passersby of battles long ago, fought between men who have long since left this place. Anymore, I am more passerby than combatant.

But fought we had… bravely, valiantly and gloriously. In this vacant classroom, five of us stood against seventy for an entire semester. At this very table, five of us were forced to sit in front of the entire classroom and endure the abuse of student and teacher alike simply for believing in an unborn child’s right to live. A new Thermopylae each Tuesday and Thursday, we faced arsenals of arguments, ad hominem attacks, ridicule, contempt and scorn simply for standing up for our beliefs. We did more than just stand… we held. Of that much I am proud.

From this vantage point, though, I see now that not all the battles were brave. Certainly they were not all necessary. Veering around one of the perennial protests of Harvard Square, it occurs to me that it is not a worthwhile use of my time to argue with a sophomore who knows nothing about the complexities of Kurdistan and yet feels compelled to shout about the war in Iraq. What I have learned and what I know is threatened in no way by his ranting; his doubts about the legitimacy of my service do not diminish its legitimacy in the least. Who I was would have argued, or at least he would have allowed himself to become angry. With hair-trigger arguments in quick-draw holsters, I was more than eager to answer any challenge to the bastions of my identity. But not all challenges need to be answered. My people, I suspect, care little for the opinion of a teenager far removed from the consequences of his choices or any sort of real responsibility. They never needed me to defend them from the likes of him.

What is true of my people is even more true of my God. Like Peter, his sword drawn at Gethsemane, I stood ready with my well-rehearsed apologetics, never picking the fight but all too eager for the fight to pick me. Always be ready to give an answer, the apostle commands us. But love asks the question, and without a question, an answer is nothing. I do not doubt that in that garden Peter loved his Lord. I wonder, though, if the Apostle wasn’t defending his idea of the Messiah, rather than defending Messiah as He truly was. Perhaps if he had understood his Friend and Rabbi, he would have realized that the God of all the Universe was more than capable of defending Himself. And perhaps, had I known more about Him, I would have realized the same.

All at once, a blinding flash of the obvious hits me. I finally understand the feral rage behind my striving; I finally see who I was truly fighting for: myself. Perhaps more precisely, I was fighting for who I thought I was. It never occurred to me that who I thought I was and who I was might be two entirely different things. Rather than asking God to help me understand who I was in Him, I fought to the death defending these cornerstones my meticulously constructed identity. In this moment, I understand the space between who I was and who I am. In the journey of the last half-decade, God has disabused me of quite a few of my comfortable notions of who I thought I was. I had been shouting at the world so loud and so long about who I thought I was that I hadn’t heard Him whispering who I truly was.

It took me five years to run out of breath; five years until my flailing arms had no more strength to fight; five years before I found myself facedown and silent before Him. And in that moment, I could finally hear the things He had been whispering all along. I could at last hear Him telling my true name. In His words, I found the security I had spent so long striving for; with His pronouncement, all my arguments became unnecessary. My idols of identity had always been fragile and brittle, but a heart of flesh, the heart He wanted to give me all along, can be as hard as steel when it needs to be. With God vouchsafing my identity, I no longer feel compelled to defend it; now that I have a face, I don’t need to protect my masks. This is the heart of it all: we are made in the image of God, and the truer we become to ourselves, the closer we will get to Him. Life in Christ is simply the process of becoming real. We are learning to inhabit our true faces. He must teach us who we are.

Here is the space between the Centurion and the Pharisee. The Pharisee wore a hundred pious masks, but he would not face God wearing his true face. He was face to face with God, but he himself had no face. The Centurion put aside every one of his masks, his power and position and everything else he wore, and prostrated himself before a Jewish street preacher for the sake of one of his servants. He faced God in the flesh with his true face, and Jesus saw past the complications of oppression and power and position to find a man willing to face Him honestly. After all, God made both the Centurion and the Pharisee, and He gave both of them their station in life. The trappings of status mean nothing to the One who granted them. He came to this Earth to meet us face to face. We can only meet him when we wear ours.

First, though, He must cast down every false face we try to wear. This is the purpose of the Law. Paul tells us that the law brings death. “With the measure you use, it will be measured unto you.” The law demands consistency of our actions, and consistency is the death of all of our pretense, for we are all entirely inconsistent. Mother Teresa asked once how we could expect peace on our streets when there is violence in the womb. The law applies the same logic to every circumstance. The law draws the trajectory between action and consequence, and inevitably we find ourselves in the cross-fire of a thousand contradictions between our false faces. The holistic integrity of the law reveals our complete lack of consistency. Each of our contradictions flows freely from the first contradiction of fallen man: we are beings made in God’s image and we are trying to live our lives entirely free from Him.

Like an academic deconstructing some hallowed historical event, like a Dadaist describing the insanity of the whole artistic endeavor, the law demonstrates the absolute insanity of this broken world we’ve made. Nothing we make will make any sense, for we ourselves don’t make any sense; we cannot reconcile our actions to each other as long as we are unreconciled with God. The law calls things by their right names. Doing so, it pronounces this world unjust, terrible and cruel, and points out the tragic and terrible contradiction of mankind trying to live without God. The power of the law is paradox: we cannot live in a world where we follow our actions to their logical conclusions.

But we are as inconsistent with the law as we are with ourselves. We celebrate the parts of the law that conform to our dispositions; we discard the parts that prove more challenging. The Pharisees tithed a tenth of their cumin and mint, and neglected the weightier matters of mercy and justice. We are no different. How many times have we claimed desperation’s license in our moment of weakness, yet denied that same license to others when the balance of power shifted? We stand all too ready to wound others in the same exact ways we were wounded; too ready to break promises made in supposed empathy to the powerless during our moments of pain the moment it becomes expedient to do so.

I am no different. Denying the consistency at the heart of the true law, the law of my construction became consistent only through redaction. Cutting fabric from of robes of righteousness, I made a mask through which I strained gnats and swallowed camels. This is the tension: He gives us robes to wear, and we suffocate as we try to wear them as masks. Because He loves us, He must sometimes take them back. After all, He is the same God that both designed and destroyed the Temple, both for the sake of those inside its walls. There is a dignity in causality to be sure, but when we start believing that we can keep ourselves safe simply by doing all the math right, He has a way of keeping the numbers from adding up. And so, at long last I found the errors that kept showing up in my world were less a function of my math and more a function of the mathematician.

Expectations are at the root of much of our issues with relationships. Much of the tension in an immature relationship comes from individuals trying to reconcile their image of the other to the reality of the other person. In order to enter into maturity, you have to leave behind all your notions about the other person and dive into the reality of who they truly are. I believe the same is true in our relationship with God. We resent Him when He doesn’t accede to our demands to keep our world safe. Our world is not tame. Fortunately, neither is He.

When young C.S. Lewis went off to war, he found his already tenuous faith shattered by the reality of the violence in front of him. The god who took his mother from him, the god who took his best friend from him, the god who allowed all of this to happen; surely such a being was not worthy of recognition, much less praise. I wonder what he expected of God, of the universe, and of himself. Perhaps, as the great author would so eloquently refute later in life, he wanted a safe universe where all things lined up and pain was rare. Holding God accountable for the maintenance of such a universe, it is easy to see how young Jack grew disillusioned with his ideas of who he thought God was. It took a decade for him to realize that who he thought God was and who God actually was were two different things entirely. For me, it was less of a moment and more of a process.

I spent a decade looking for something without precisely understanding what I was looking for. There was a part of me that wanted to walk to right up to the ragged edge of where the clean lines of civilized society met the raw reality of the natural world and gaze out into the abyss, looking for God knows what. Maybe I was looking for something real, something more honest than all the things we have made. I can’t say for sure what I was looking for, and I can’t say for sure what I found. But I found something nonetheless. Where reason and logic fail, there are still pictures and memories. Here is one of those.

Volunteering for a few days in a trauma hospital in Iraq, I would bring linens and saline to incoming critical care patients. One night, a MEDEVAC chopper brought in a half-dozen or so victim of an IED blast. They were mostly Iraqi civilians, amongst them a man with his teenage daughter, and a critically injured two year old girl. The man’s injuries were relatively minor, but his daughter’s were not. She died within an hour. I cannot forget the sound of this man’s wailing as the translator told him that his daughter was gone. The two year old girl had a shrapnel wound through the head. The doctors were able to stabilize her, but they said she only would hold on for a day or two. They were right. And standing over this child, utterly helpless to do anything to make things right, the only thing that made any sense in the world was that Jesus loved this girl, and He was going to take her home. He was going to take her away from this world that had been so unbelievably cruel to this precious child; He was going to take her away from this place so undeserving of such beauty and such innocence. And I prayed over her without any words that made any sense at all, but I knew that He loved her, and that was enough. That one thing made all the sense in the world, and it was the only thing in that moment that could make sense of the world. And here, at the ragged edge of civilization, where the clean lines of the law meet the wreckage of this world we’ve made, one thing becomes perfectly clear: If you know it’s wrong, then it must have been right once. And it will be again. This is the Law and the Gospel all in one moment: this world is utterly and completely broken, and Jesus saves.

With the benefit of distance and reflection, a few more things come into focus. The power of the law is paradox: man cannot live without God and remain man. It demonstrates the insanity of this world of our creation, for we cannot live in the world we’ve made. But if the power of law is paradox, then Jesus Christ is its greatest paradox. If we as fallen men cannot live in a world of our own creation, then the perfectly holy God certainly cannot live in that world. And yet He did. He is the summation of the Law, and it is completed in Him. The contradictions of humanity have never been clearer than in our reception of Jesus Christ. We claim to love God, yet when He comes into our world, we utterly reject Him. If ever a man deserved to be treated as a king, it was this Man, but we treat Him with absolute contempt as we cheer the petty rulers that put Him to death. We put the one innocent Man in all of human history to death as a criminal in a murderer’s stead. The most beautiful person to ever walk this Earth, and Jew and Gentile alike, we hang Him from a tree in the cruelest death we can devise. This is the law, and it calls us by our right name: guilty. Here is its greatest paradox: the law brings death, and Christ died for us.

Just as the power of the law is paradox, the power of Christ is a greater paradox: God is good, and we are not, but He loves us nonetheless. He is the perfect paradox, and every other paradox breaks upon Him. Nietzsche once said that God is dead, and for three days, he was right. But death was too frail to hold Him. It could not reconcile Nietzsche’s contradiction, and it was itself destroyed. This much remains: love is thicker than death. Jesus Christ has one true face, for His face is the face of I AM, and that face is love. We are made in His image. Our only true face is the face of love, but we cannot find it on our own. Jesus Christ loves who we are, not who we think we are. He paid far too high a price with us to be satisfied with our pretense and masks. The law calls things by their right names. Jesus gives us true names. Lose your life and you will find it... seek after Him and you will find you.

As I leave the desert, I realize that masks become robes once you learn to wear them right. Moses was restored to his position of leadership when he was called back to Egypt, and Paul returned to preaching once God was done with him in the wilderness. Now that I no longer need them to tell me who I am, I find that I’ve achieved more than I ever expected within the identities that I once fought so hard to defend. And one last thing was restored to me… the other night, I felt God speaking to me about the two year old girl that I could not help. He told me that she grew up in His presence, strong and brave and beautiful. He told me that she knows her true name.

//


// The Umpire God //

The clockmaker God, they used to say. He sets the rules, and then He lets things run their course. If we just did the math right, we could figure out those rules and build a safe world. But we weren’t totally honest with ourselves; we only did the math half-way. ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ but maybe we were already corrupt, and power simply gives us means to express it. Whether on New York’s Wall Street, or some small town’s Main Street, power gives us the ability to act upon the desires of our heart (and the ability to insulate ourselves from the consequences of those actions.) We rarely get better when we get more powerful, but we often get better at fooling ourselves. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does the math for us. ‘If you look at a woman with lust, you have already committed adultery with her in your heart… If you look upon your brother with hatred, in your heart you have already murdered him.’ If we were free to act without consequence, we would all be guilty of every deadly sin imaginable. Had we done the math all the way through, we would have seen that without God’s mercy, a perfectly just world has no room for any of us. We didn’t know what we were asking for, because we didn’t know ourselves.

Perhaps a more honest term would have been ‘the umpire God.’ We gave Him our rulebook for the universe, and expected Him to keep the peace and enforce the rules that we had made. When things don’t pan out along the lines of our expectations, we blame Him. ‘How could a loving God allow things like this to happen? Why doesn’t He fix it?’ Unimpressed by who we think we are, He knows who we are far too well to entertain this demand. Consider a child murdered in the course of a gang-land drug war. Imagine that God decides that we will be His avenger; we’ll be Denzel Washington’s character from ‘Man on Fire.’ We’ll go shopping for some AKs and RPGs and bring this thing back on the heads of everyone who participated, everyone who was involved, everyone who profited in any way from it. First, the murderers themselves die. Then their bosses, and their bosses. And then the drug lords with their minions. Next comes the consumers that kept the drug lords in business… which includes not a few upper-class white surgeons and intellectual elites, whose recreational cocaine use keeps the supply lines open for the ghetto drugs which created the drug war which claimed the child’s life. After the users come all the people who turned a blind eye to their rich, successful friends’ bad habit; after them, all those who colluded in the legal double-standard between rich and poor, which created gang-land in the first place. Throw in everyone who participated in our culture of violence by buying a ticket to an action movie, and you start running out of people. If we are true to our original plan, at some point we find ourselves in our own crosshairs. Even if we went back in time to undo the original murder, we would have to kill the original murderer for a crime he had not yet committed, making us the murderer. The center cannot hold… we cannot be consistent to even our own rules. God is too honest and too merciful to accede to our foolish desire for an umpire. He knows us too well, even if we don’t know ourselves.

//Law and Nations//

“With the measure you use, it will be measured unto you.” Merely by establishing a standard of consistency, the law points out our own inconsistencies. Mother Teresa asked once how we could expect peace on our streets when there is violence in the womb. The law applies the same logic to every circumstance. Treat those weaker with you with contempt, and they will treat you with contempt when you become weak. Rob the poor and one day they will take up arms and rob you. Worship your lusts and half of your marriages will end in divorce. Treat your children as a curse and those who treat them as a blessing will outnumber you in a few generations. The law draws the trajectory between action and consequence, and inevitably we find ourselves in the cross-fire of a thousand contradictions between our false faces. The holistic integrity of the law reveals our complete lack of consistency. If we truly listen to the message of the law, we would hear over and over again that the center cannot hold; we are not the people that we think we are.

The law is not a road map to a just society; it is a warning sign screaming ‘Bridge Out!’ From Hammurabi to Marx, Plato to Jefferson and all those in between, we’ve been trying to figure out how to make human governance actually work, as if we did all the math just right, then we’d finally achieve utopia and solve all of our problems. “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” The philosopher is correct-for-data: we were born free, between the Tigris and Euphrates and two other rivers. We built our chains as we left. The equation simply cannot reconcile until we ourselves are reconciled. “If men were angels, we would not need governments.” But men are not angels, and this is the problem.

There is nothing nearly as unimpressive as the history of humanity’s attempts to govern itself. Yet our infinite unwarranted optimism in the endeavor of human governance continues unabated. We seem to have this irrational hope that if we figured out the perfect system of laws and government, then we would somehow escape the nightmare of all the things we’ve done and continue to do to each other. We forget that we had exactly that, and we still couldn’t fix ourselves. Moses came down from the mountain with the Divine Law written on stone tablets, and with them an entire manual of rules for governing a just society. Tort laws, civil laws, criminal procedure; laws for property, for marriage, for work, for accidents, for war, laws for every imaginable circumstance and we still couldn’t make it work. Surely those who live in accordance with His laws will prosper, but the fact remains: we simply didn’t have it within ourselves to be honest to the Law, just as we didn’t have it within ourselves to be honest to ourselves, each other, or God. The Law points out that dishonesty; its purpose is simply to relieve us of our ideas about who we think we are.

Like an academic deconstructing some hallowed historical event, like a Dadaist describing the insanity of the whole artistic endeavor, the law demonstrates the absolute insanity of this broken world we’ve made. Through the miracle of exchange rates, the global free market provides us more riches than our actions merit, yet we are surprised when the very same globalization empowers those who hate us to destroy the towers that were its symbols. Irgun claims the license of desperation in their guerilla campaign against the British, and its inheritors deny that same license to the Intifada when they find themselves in the same position. Yet the Intifada, enraged by the image of European-designed bulldozers razing Palestinian settlements, conveniently forgets the iron axes of their Mycean Greek ancestors (called Philistines long before they were called Palestinians) razing the homes of the Canaanite Gazans before them. An Aztec king is captured and killed by an invading army in the name of power and greed, just as his armies captured and sacrificed chieftain and villager alike to gain Quetzalcoatl’s favor. And how many times have the oppressed thrown off their chains only to become the new oppressors? Guilty and guilty, we are wrapped around each other in this tragic drama of human history. This is the world in our own image, and the law shows us just how utterly ludicrous it truly is. We were designed in the image of God. Until we are restored in that image, nothing we make will ever make any sense.