Life’s Balancing Act
In the 7th and 8th centuries, during the Carolingian’s rise to power in Europe, which peaked with the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman emperor, Christian missionaries were fanning out to territories untouched by the Gospel, especially to the Germanic lands. In order to gain an audience with these fierce peoples of the north, priests had to accommodate the barbaric tribes by portraying Jesus as a warrior who showed no mercy to his enemies. Only by depicting Jesus as a battle-hardened god would the Germanic tribes listen to the missionaries. A god who turned the other cheek or forgave his enemies or passively died on a cross would have been ridiculed as weak and impotent by the Germanic peoples.
Things have not really changed all that much in the past 1200 years or so. People continue to struggle with a Jesus who allows himself to be put to death without a fight or preaches forgiveness to enemies. The gentle Jesus of the Gospels, who showed compassion to all, especially the marginally religious, has been replaced in many congregations by an indignant Jesus, who is known more for his wrath than for his compassion and love.
The biblical weight of Scripture comes down heavily on the side of a Jesus who practiced the way of compassion, forgiveness and love, but the Church for 2,000 years has wrestled with balancing the New Testament’s vision of a non-violent Jesus with the reality of a cruel and unforgiving world. Consequently, the Church has developed a dissociative identity disorder or split personality ever since Jesus preached his Sermon on the Mount.
Sermon on the Mount
How do we balance the harshness of the world, the take no prisoners’ mentality of many within the Christian faith, with the gentleness of Jesus, who seemingly would not so much as break off a bent reed or quench a dimly burning wick (Isa. 42:3)?
If there were simple answers to this perplexing problem, the Church would have figured it out long ago. Nevertheless, if the New Testament is to be our guide, there is meager evidence to support a Jesus who practiced anything but nonviolence. His teachings offer scant space for a more militant discipleship. The cross stands front and center as the ultimate hurdle anyone must get around to interpret Jesus in a more strident form. How does anyone preach a forceful, even aggressive Jesus, given that he willingly sacrificed his life on the cross and bids his followers to pick up their crosses and follow him?
The wonderful Christian writer Frederick Buechner, who passed away recently, tells of the difficulty balancing the reality of a violent world with the virtually pacifistic teachings of Jesus. Buechner was introduced to the harsh world at an early age when his father committed suicide. Before that terrible day Buechner lived in a kind of enchanted world where time, if it moved at all, moved so slowly that it wasn’t noticeable. After his father’s death everything changed. Life, with all of its sharp edges and deep, dark valleys became all too real for the adolescent child.
In life as it is on earth faith in God seemed like a fairy-tale, something that only naïve and childish people took seriously, and yet to let go of faith would mean to lose something essential to what it means to be human. How to balance the real world with the world of faith would be a problem Buechner would struggle with for the rest of his life, as will we all.
He writes in his best-selling book The Sacred Journey: “The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.”
Frederick Buechner, 1926 - 2022
By hardening ourselves to the assaults that life will throw at us, we risk becoming impervious to God’s transformative power that seeks to make us more human, more God-like. We probably all struggle with this balancing act, sometimes building so many defenses against the world that God’s transformative power just bounces right off of us and at other times becoming so porous to God’s love that we end up on a cross.
I wish there were some formula that could solve the balancing dilemma, but I don’t know of one. When we become followers of the Jesus way, we do not become automatons, performing Christian duties without thinking. The life of faith calls for us to make decisions every day. Some days we will overly protect ourselves from the blows inflicted by a savage world, while other days our commitment to the ways of Jesus will leave us vulnerable to life’s cruel realities. It has always been that way.
Once, when the disciples were unable to heal a sick boy, they leaned on Jesus for help. Jesus recognized the problem and told the disciples that sometimes the only answer to a difficult problem is to pray and fast. Prayer and fasting was a reminder that we can’t take faith for granted. Every day is a challenge, and if we are to find balance in the life of faith, then intentionality will be the key--to be consciously aware of the realities of evil but to also be open to the transformative power of God’s love.
Buechner recognizes the challenge of balancing the holy with the human and knows that we will fail more times than not in maintaining that equilibrium. But in the final analysis, according to Buechner, the life of faith rests not on whether we succeed or fail but on our openness to God’s “crazy, holy grace”—the gift of God’s acceptance, regardless of our merits. Grace, God’s unmerited favor is crazy, for we don’t deserve it, but it most assuredly is holy!
