"That's Not Logical!"

          Recently I was taking a walk in a park nearby our home when two young girls met me, offering a tract and (ostensibly) wanting to talk about the Kingdom.  Actually they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and what they really wanted was to convert me to their sect.  Usually I politely decline and the preacher man keeps walking, but today I took the time to converse.  It was, as I knew it would be, a complete waste of time, since both young ladies had been well and thoroughly indoctrinated.  But she did say something interesting.

            We were talking about the divinity of Christ.  Discussions about the Greek of John 1:1 (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”) went nowhere, since discussing the intricacies of Greek grammar could not dissuade them from accepting their idiomatic and unique translation of it as “…and Word was a god”.  One girl, Joanna by name, pointed out John 20:17, where Christ tells Mary Magdalene, “I ascend to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God”, and stressed that Jesus here calls the Father His God, and therefore Jesus could not be theos or God in the absolute sense that I said John 1:1 asserted He was.  “Christ said that the Father was his God” she kept repeating, “so how could he be God and at the same time have the Father as his God?”  I simply said that, yes, Jesus was God and that the Father was His God, and that this was possible because Jesus was the incarnate God. “So,” she said, admirably restraining her exasperation, “Jesus was God”.  Me:  “Yes.”  Her: “And he had the Father as His God.”  Me:  “Yes.”  Her:  “But that’s not logical!  God is love.  The Bible says that God is love.  It’s not loving to be mysterious.”

            Hearing such an astounding utterance was well worth the time wasted in talking with these two earnest and utterly deceived young ladies.  It certainly qualifies as one for the books, and should find its place in a theological Ripley’s Believe It or Not.  What an astonishing thing to say:  “It’s not loving to be mysterious”, as if mystery and love were mutually exclusive.  Not only are mystery and love not mutually exclusive, love itself is a mystery.   All the life-giving realities are mysteries, including the reality that is human nature.   Love baffles us even as it heals us; it leaves our cognitive faculties behind in the dust even as it transforms us into something better.  And it is not just divine love that does this.  Human love does the same.  If you doubt this, just honestly ask yourself why your spouse loves you. 

            But if my young J.W. friend was not correct in denying that something can be loving and mysterious at the same time, she was absolutely correct in saying that God is not logical.  There is nothing logical about Him.  It is not logical to love the human race which constantly spurns His love and continually labours to fill the earth with waste, sin, and cruelty.   It is not logical to unite human nature to Yourself in the womb of a Jewish teenager and live among men when You know in advance that this will result in Your crucifixion.  It is not logical to tell creatures of dust and ashes, creatures addicted to the pleasures of the senses, that they should become perfect even as God is perfect (Mt. 5:48).  It is not logical for God to become Man hoping that Man might in turn become divine.   None of this is logical, and the Church never said it was logical.  It said it was grace.

            God is beyond logic.  Like the laws of nature that He Himself made, He transcends logic.  God made logic when He made the laws of nature—laws which say that when a man dies, he soon rots, and in four days there is nothing left to do but endure the stench.  But these laws are God’s handiwork, not His prison, and He can transcend them if He pleases.  If it seems good to Him, He can overcome the laws of nature, and stand outside the tomb of a man four days dead and cry, “Lazarus, come forth!”, and the dead man will come forth, leaving the processes of rot and stench and all the other laws of nature behind in the tomb.  “When God so wills, the laws of nature are overcome”, as the Church sings.  Our God is the God who rises above logic and nature, and frustrates laws which mere creation finds inflexible.  He covers Himself with light as with a garment; He stretches out the heaven as if it were a mere tent curtain; He makes the clouds His chariot; He rides on the wings of the wind.  In Christ this God draws near to us and shares our flesh and our creaturehood.  He calls the Father His God, and calls us to be His brothers.  This is our hope; this is our boast.  Our God is not logical at all.   He is the Lord, and has revealed Himself to us.

Let No One Put Asunder

          We live in a culture of divorce.  In North America, fully one half of all marriages end in divorce, and sometimes persons have several divorces, divorcing one spouse after another.  This leaves a hidden trail of broken families and the challenge of creating blended families.  It also places tremendous strain on the children who come from divorced homes, so much so that some children sometimes find themselves vulnerable to gangs, drug use, and other risky behaviours.  It is not politically correct to draw attention to these unfortunate facts, but they remains true even if one may not speak of it when discussing the causes of depression in children.  The point of calling attention to these facts is not to heap blame on divorced persons, or to deny that God can forgive and heal anything when we repent and offer our wounds to Him, but to draw our real attention to the sanity and essentially compassionate nature of our Church’s teaching about marriage and divorce, and to call persons contemplating marriage or who are already married to heroism and perseverance. 

            But first, a little history.  In the eighteenth century, divorce was stigmatized, and was correspondingly hard to get.  It took years, and a pile of money, and you had to prove that your spouse abandoned you for a long time with no financial support.  If you were female, you had to prove that your husband routinely beat you within an inch of your life, or that he was openly and brazenly womanizing.  After you got the divorce, you were persona non grata socially, and not welcome at church events.  I am not, I hasten to add, looking back at this state of affairs as if it were “the good old days”.  But it is important to understand how much we have changed the fabric of our society.  Now divorce is much easier to obtain, and the new concept of “no fault” divorce has been introduced, which allows one partner to unilaterally divorce the other, with no one taking any blame.  No doubt the people introducing the changes and making divorce easier were motivated by compassion, and justified the changes by pointing to heart-rending cases where a woman found herself legally chained to a violent and womanizing brute and who had no way of escape from her terrible plight.  No one at the time could have known that by making things easier for this poor woman they would within a generation begin weakening the glue which held all marriages together and altering society’s very understanding of what it meant to be married.  But good intentions notwithstanding, they did weaken that glue and change society’s understanding all the same. 

            The Church’s teaching anyway is crystal clear:  marriage (defined as the publically recognized union of one man with one woman, consummated by sexual congress) is for keeps.  It fundamentally alters a person:  before marriage one was a single individual; after marriage one is but one half of a new organism.  When people describe their spouse as “my other half”, they are not so much being poetical as Biblical.  It was Christ who said, “The two shall become one flesh.  So they are no longer two, but one flesh.  What therefore God has joined together, let no one put asunder” (Mt. 19:6).  Marriage alters a person, creating a new organism where it did not exist before.

            The Orthodox Church reads Christ’s teaching a bit differently than her Roman Catholic friends read it.  That is, it reads it as counsel and command, but not as law.  Christ is not legislating, giving laws as inflexible as the law of gravity.  Thus Orthodoxy not only believes the permanence of marriage, but also in repentance, and grace, and forgiveness, and healing, and the possibility of remarriage after divorce.  But this grace should not be presumed upon, lest it become “cheap grace”.  And there is no use talking about God’s forgiveness unless we also acknowledge that there is a sin present to forgive.  And the Church always classed divorce and remarriage as a sin, and required those who remarry after divorce to undergo a period of penance, barring them from the Eucharist for a time.  For how long a time?   In such cases canon 87 of the Quinisext Council mandates seven years exclusion from the Chalice (see Meyendorff’s Marriage: an Orthodox Perspective, p. 64).  This is not to assert that this canon should be applied today in the same way as it was in the seventh century when it was promulgated.  But the canon does express the Church’s insistence that marriage is for keeps, and that Christians cannot walk away from it without sin.

            This is the standard which Christ set for His disciples.  St. Paul applied the Lord’s teaching to the different situations in which his converts found themselves in a pagan setting, and he produced a more comprehensive set of counsels—such as what to do if married to an unbeliever.  Thus, St. Paul says, if one were married to an unbeliever (i.e. if one pagan in a pagan marriage converted to Christ while the other partner did not; it was assumed that no Christian would knowingly marry a pagan), then divorce and remarriage were possible.  The Christian should still stay together with the pagan partner if the partner was willing, but if the pagan partner insisted upon divorcing the Christian, the Christian could acquiesce:  “in such a case, the brother or sister is not bound” (1 Cor. 7:15).  But if both partners were Christian, then of course divorce was simply not possible.  Discipleship to Christ implied obedience, and the willingness to lay down one’s life for Him.  It is nonsense to say that one will suffer martyrdom for Jesus, but not suffer in marriage for Him.  Faith in Christ involves always being willing to change and forgive and love.  Such a faith, if shared by two disciples who are married to each other, will always find a way to work out their problems and stay married. 

            Thus married Christians should never ever divorce one another.  If they fall from the obedience of faith and their marriage ends in divorce, repentance and canonical penance still allow for the possibility of forgiveness and remarriage, as we have seen.  But the original standard remains and the original command not to divorce still stands.  And it is the clergy who are the standard bearers.  That is why this economia is allowed for laity, but not for clergy.  Someone has to keep the bar where it is, and that someone is the clergyman.  Some have suggested that one should move the bar and lower the Church’s standards.  Thus Joseph Allen in a book edited by himself (Vested in Grace) and in his article entitled, “Practical Hope for Positive Change”, argues that clergy should be allowed to remarry after being widowed and still remain clergy.  He also asks the question, “Can a second chance for marriage be allowed to clergy in certain cases of divorce?”  He doesn’t answer this second question specifically, but one can guess at his answer:  the present status quo he denounces as “the archaic and crippling conditions of a dead past” (Vested in Grace, p. 266).  Allen is clearly for lowering the bar.

            Despite Allen’s show of scholarship, the question is not one for the scholar’s study, but must be answered on the front line.  As the sky-rocketing divorce rate shows, marriage is under attack from all quarters.  By this I do not mean that there is a chance that people will no longer get married.  I mean something more alarming:  that people in our culture already no longer understand what it means to be married even as they tie the knot.  The Christians alone seem to know what God originally meant by marriage, and if we follow Allen in his suggestions even this will be soon be forgotten. 

Marriage creates a permanent change in a person.  It is not so much a civil or legal reality as an ontological one, so that divorce is less like dissolving a partnership and more like tearing a body in half.  One can survive the sundering, but the wound and the scar will remain forever, even after the sin involved is forgiven.  The trauma and the wound are why Christians must never divorce each.  When married Christians hurt one another, the Church’s prescription is always repentance and forgiveness, not divorce.  And when divorce happens it is a sin and a tragedy:  ask any child.  Come to that, ask the partners themselves while they are still in love.  Love is exclusive and eternal.  When people are in love they bind themselves with chains of eternal constancy, and separation from the other is intolerable and unthinkable.  A person in love knows that marriage is for keeps, both in this age and in the age to come.  That is what “eternal” means.  The clergy must uphold this standard and embody it.  And all Christians must strive for it. 

It’s hard.  Life in this age soon takes the sheen off of everything shiny, including marriage, and our omnipresent culture of divorce says this is all but inevitable.  The hard work of making it work can feel like death and martyrdom.  But Christians are not afraid of death and martyrdom, for we serve one who has triumphed over death, and who has taught us not to fear it.  We are called to defy death, and to defy divorce.  Christians once amazed the world by going to their martyrdoms without fear.  Let us amaze the world once again by staying in our marriages with the same confidence and courage.

David and Goliath: Five Stones and One Shot

          Christians read the Hebrew Scriptures somewhat differently than do their Jewish friends.  Christians read those writings to find Jesus Christ there.  We read the sacred text and learn not only of the historical events themselves, but also their hidden prophetic meaning.   The narratives thus contain not only history, but typology.  That is because the God who manifested Himself through Israel’s sacred history and whose Spirit inspired the Hebrew writers of the Scriptures also manifested Himself through Jesus of Nazareth.  Jesus’ life was the true and hidden goal to which all that Hebrew history was leading, so it is not surprising if God dropped some clues along the way. 

            The story of the contest of David with Goliath contains one such type.  The narrative can be read on several levels.  At its first and most basic level, it is the story of a huge seasoned Philistine soldier coming onto the field of battle to psyche out the opposing Israelite army with what today we could call “trash talk”.  The talk worked, and the Israelite army trembled behind the lines not wanting to rush into battle.  Then came David, a young shepherd boy, fresh from guarding his father’s flock and having no battle experience whatever.  He was filled with holy indignation at how the “uncircumcised Philistine” dared to defy the armies of the living God, and was prepared to do something about it.  The Israelite king Saul thought the contest was ludicrously and suicidally one-sided, but he had nothing better to offer, and so he allowed David to try.  He dressed David up in the best armour, only to find that David was not used to such weaponry and could not move in it properly.  David went out to meet the Philistine in one-to-one combat armed only with his shepherd’s staff and his sling—and with five little stones.

            The giant Philistine Goliath was less than impressed.  “Am I a dog that you come out to meet me with sticks?” he roared.  “Come closer, little boy,” (I paraphrase), “and I will give your body to the birds of the air and to the beasts of the field.”  David was unbowed and unafraid and did the giant one better:  “You come to me decked out with sword and spear and javelin, but I come to you in the Name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.  This day the Lord will deliver you to me and I will cut off your head and give all the bodies of your whole army to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field!”  The fight was on. 

            Every Sunday school child knows the rest.  David took one stone from the five in his shepherd’s bag, put it into his sling and landed the stone squarely in the forehead of his foe.  Goliath fell to the ground, David took the Philistine’s own sword and with it cut off his head.  When the Philistine army saw this, they were the ones who were psyched out.  They fled, and Israel pursued.

            When an ancient Israelite read that story, he read not just about how David proved stronger than Goliath.  He also read about how the army of the little nation of Israel could prove stronger than the many huge and mighty nations surrounding them, if only Israel would trust in the Lord as David did.  Goliath, for the first Israelite readers, was an image of the towering foreign enemy, and David was an image of Israel.

            When we Christians read the story, we find a different and deeper meaning.  The Church is not a nation; it is transnational—and eschatological.  That is, it does not belong to this age with its tribalisms and nations and boundaries.  It belongs to the Kingdom of God and the age to come.  Accordingly we have no national enemies as Christians.  As St. Paul said, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, not against people, but against the demons, the spiritual armies of wickedness in the heavenlies (Ephesians 6:12).  For us, Goliath is not a foreign foe; he is an image of Satan and sin and death.  And David in this narrative is not an image of Israel, but of Jesus, the Messianic Son of David.  Christ slew Satan and sin and death with one blow—one single death on the cross.  After the defeat of our spiritual foe, victory was assured for the People of God.

            And what about those five smooth stones?  Why does the sacred text specify that “David chose five smooth stones from the brook and put them in his shepherd’s bag” (1 Samuel 17:40)?  After all, he only needed and only used one stone.  Reading the text with Hebrew eyes gives us no clue; it seems like a meaningless detail.  But Christian eyes can see why that detail is mentioned.  Look at an icon of Christ on the Cross.  Count the wounds.  How many are there?  They pierced His hands and His feet, and a soldier pieced His side with a spear:  five wounds.  Five small wounds, like five smooth stones.  Christ slew our foe with a single death on the Cross, but that single death contained five wounds.  Christians read the Hebrew Scriptures somewhat differently than do their Jewish friends.  And in those Scriptures, we find the saving victory of Christ our God.

Cake and Compassion in Arizona

          Not so long ago, voices were raised and lawyers were sharpening their swords in America’s latest battle in the ongoing culture war.  The owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado was threatened with a fine and up to a year’s incarceration for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding.   In New Mexico, a photographer was similarly threatened for refusing to photograph a gay wedding.  In Arizona, a bill was put forward which aimed at protecting the rights of those who wanted to opt out of participating in such weddings if such participation would violate their conscience.  The governor of Arizona vetoed the bill.  Owners of businesses now have no legal right to decline to provide their services for gay weddings, however abhorrent the weddings may be to their consciences.   

            As a foreigner who sits quite happily north of the forty-ninth parallel and who participates in fewer discussions about “rights” than do my neighbours to the south, I am aware that many nuances in this culture war escape me, especially the legal ones.  I have never been sure that “rights” has been the most helpful prism through which to view such disagreements.  But even apart from the quintessentially American discussion of the rights of religious persons vs. the rights of gay persons, it seems to me as if much of the present discussion misses the mark.  Instead secular people are giving in to the now perennial temptation to self-righteousness and to use this issue as yet another welcome stick with which to beat the Christians.  They always thought that the Christians were an intolerant, uncompassionate, judgmental, and bigoted bunch, and here is another proof of it.  Such self-righteousness often seems to overcome thoughtful analysis. 

            One writer, for example, suggests that the Christians attempting to refuse their services at gay weddings do so because they think that homosexuality is sinful, and asks rhetorically if these same Christians will be consistent and also refuse service to people who curse, or commit adultery, since these things also are sinful.  The rhetoric makes great reading, but is not helpful, since it compares things not truly comparable.  No one openly promotes cursing, nor is society taking increasingly draconian measures to justify and normalize adultery.  That is, a predilection to cursing or adultery does not constitute an ideology in the way that gay marriage does.  More to the point, a store owner cannot tell if someone who walks into his store is given to cursing, or promotes adultery as morally on par with fidelity.  If the potential customer is given to cursing or promotes adultery, their sin is not immediately apparent to the store owner, and moreover it has little to do with the service he is trying to buy.  But when a gay couple asks for a catered cake or a photo shoot at their gay wedding, their sin (for so the Christian store owner regards it) is immediately apparent.  And let us be clear:  the point is not just that homosexual marriage is sinful; it is that by providing the service the store owner is forcibly involved in promoting an ideology he regards as morally abhorrent.  The store owner’s concern with his own moral purity is not the issue, nor is the necessity of extending compassion to gays.  At issue is the possibility of conscientious objection, and whether or not society’s determination to normalize a certain lifestyle should trump the individual consciences of a minority.  The whole issue of gay marriage is not just one of sinful acts (as in the cases of those who curse or commit adultery), but of ideology, and the attempt to offer a rival view of sin and human nature. 

            Some try to blunt this imposition of tyranny by pointing out that everyone is involved in moral impurity and rival ideologies in some way simply by living in society.  Thus, according to this reasoning, whenever we buy a product whose makers fund a television show with whose message we disagree, we are giving our money to support that message, and since we cannot avoid this by removing ourselves from society, we should cease trying to impose our standards of purity on others.  Thus, it is argued, the sinner cannot be separated from the sin, and Christians should stop being concerned with maintaining their purity, and become more concerned with simply being compassionate.

            Like I said, all this makes great reading, since everyone wants to be thought compassionate, and no one wants to be stigmatized as a judgmental jerk whose only concern is with personal purity.  But perhaps it would be helpful to our moral analysis of the situation if we stepped back from society’s heated preoccupation with gay rights and imagine other scenarios instead.  Then it might become more apparent that the dichotomy between purity and compassion is a false dichotomy.  We need not choose between purity and compassion; the Scriptures would insist upon both.

            Suppose, just for example, a customer walked into a bakery and asked that the Afro-american store owner cater a meeting of his white supremacist group.  Assuming that the Afro-american baker found this event morally abhorrent, may he legally refuse his services?  Or suppose a group of neo-Nazis walked into a Jewish photographer’s studio and asked the photographer to cover their upcoming neo-Nazi rally—something in the spirit of, say, Leni Riefenstahl?  Assuming that the Jewish photographer found the event morally abhorrent, could he justifiably refuse his services?  Note that this is not on par with refusing service to someone who happens to be privately sinful, someone for example who secretly loves to curse or sees nothing wrong with adultery.  The morally abhorrent element is present in the event itself for which the service is sought, not in the secret heart of the buyer.  For the baker or the photographer to participate would be to give inner assent to the morality of the event and its ideology.  Their refusal to participate would not be motivated solely by their desire to keep themselves pure, nor would it necessarily indicate a lack of compassion for individual white supremacists or neo-Nazis.  Compassion is not the issue; conscientious objection to the ideology is.     

 Please note that I am not hereby equating homosexual marriage with either white supremacism or neo-Nazism.  The point of the comparison is that the Christians wanting to decline participation in gay weddings find the event every bit as morally abhorrent as Afro-americans find white supremacism and Jews (or anyone else, come to that) find neo-Nazism.  Like it or not, homosexuality is not a private proclivity like other sins; it is a powerful movement, and one that now demands the surrender of Christian conscience. 

            Some would suggest that the culture wars are over, and that such refusal of service at gay weddings is a form of kamikaze self-destruction, so that Christians refusing such service run the risk of losing all credibility.  I agree that the culture war is over, and that (north of the forty-ninth parallel anyway) we Christians have lost.  But that is no reason to sell out our conscience.  In the early centuries of the Church, we lost the culture war between idolatry and monotheistic purity, for idolatry was everywhere culturally ascendant and the Christians lost credibility for continuing to insist that idolatry was wrong.  Indeed, we lost credibility so much so that we suffered persecution and death for that insistence.  But our insistence on hating the idolatrous sin while we loved the idolatrous sinner did not result in our going into oblivion, as some think our present insistence will.  Rather it resulted in our saving our souls, and eventually, in the providence of God, of saving the Roman empire.  The World will of course remain the World, and with the Flesh and the Devil continue to war against us.  The crucial question is:  will we Christians become like salt which has lost its savour, or will we continue to live differently than does the World?