March 9, 2006
Choice
Lent 2B (Gen 22.1-14; Rms 8.31-39; Mk 8.31-38)
Scott Peck, author of the of mega-bestseller, “The Road Less Traveled,” grew up in an unchurched family. Of his first and only trip to Sunday School in all his childhood, he tells of the class being handed a drawing to color. It was of the scene in the story from Genesis in today’s propers when Abraham was preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac. He never returned.
It is a daring and frightful story, one not easily calculated to confirm the notion that God is love. Nor is the comparable one in Mark’s gospel today with Jesus’ prediction of his impending crucifixion, and his mandate that we, as well, must take up our cross with the paradox in hand that to save one’s life is first to lose it.
Not to worry, says Paul to the Romans in the morning epistle. “It is God who justifies,” he writes, “who is to condemn?… For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
We’ve stepped now through Ash Wednesday’s door into Lent. In his letter to his fellow primates across the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury writes of this time, “Our hearts are still on the way to full conversion, and so the work of the Cross, finished in itself once and for all, is still working itself through the life of every Christian. Lent is our best opportunity to let God move more deeply and permanently into the areas of our lives that still resist his grace.”
We do, indeed, resist God’s grace. Albeit that grace is a central reality of the gospel, we yet hold back as a kind of meritocracy — both in church and state — a idolized system in which the talented are rewarded and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement, and the vast and growing numbers of the poor are merely left aside to fend for themselves.
Lent is a time to turn from this resistance and to open ourselves to grace. In God’s call to Abraham to test his obedience and in God’s driving Jesus into the wilderness of temptation to test his, it is not the sacrifice — as devastating a reality as it is — that should command our attention to emulate. It is the choice which both Abraham and Jesus made. It is thus that our faith, if it would be more than mere assent to a creed, must be a willfully open and vulnerable risk to whatever God would have of us. Only that can open the pathways that grace may abound.
I was discussing these lessons for this Sunday in Lent with a dear friend, wondering with her about choice and moral agency. With her usual devoted skill, she suggested some of these insights that follow. When Jesus asks us to take up our cross and to follow him, she said, one of the things he offers is a glimpse into his life, a model of a healthy moral life, not one that’s all cut and dried, black and white, but one that’s about wrestling with all the moral questions that confront us as they confronted him. He wasn’t against the law and the prophets (nor even about a mild meritocracy, I suspect) but he was firmly against a calloused and conventional faith. He wanted scripture and tradition to be real, to be now, to be alive. And the only way for these to be alive for him then and for us today is by engaging in real moral discernment.
So Jesus was sent into the wilderness to discover his moral purpose, to realize it, to choose whether he’s willing to embrace it. And when he does, he returns a changed man with an unswerving purpose anchored in the cross. Thus choosing, he becomes a singular moral agent commanding the human landscape so that we, as well, can rescind our resistance and surrender ourselves to grace.
The apostle Paul was, himself, a model of one who gave up his life and then received it renewed. Only then could he offer this remarkable paean in his letter to the Romans, an anthem for all who would embrace Lent once again and serve. We can find no better way to greet each of these Lenten days as we live them.
“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”