How we Lutherans love this statement today from the letter to the Ephesians: For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God -- not because of works, lest any man should boast. Perhaps, however, we don’t emphasize as much what follows organically and immediately: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. And truth be told, I don’t think we hear much at all anymore about what precedes and provides the background for the wonderful statement about grace: You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Among these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of body and mind, and so we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. Whoa! What a downer! Who wants to hear that?
We could say the same about our other two equally unsettling texts this morning. We have heard our much loved John 3:16, For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. But we have also heard that men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. And what about the murmuring of the children of Israel complaining of hardships on their path to freedom: And the people spoke against God and against Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food." What a strange tension throughout these texts! It’s almost as if there is a battle going on within our texts between the attractive statements about divine self-giving love which saves by unconditional grace providing a source of healing on the one hand, and on the other hand, dark diagnoses of the human condition, loving darkness rather than light, being spiritually dead, by nature children of wrath, ever and again backsliding from the divine call to freedom.
But what we are presented with in our Scriptures today is not just a problem of cognitive dissonance, of mental confusion about apparently contradictory statements. The tension is not merely between contradictory ideas but contradictory realities Which is it? The God loves unconditionally? Or the God who hates with holy hate the evil that hates the light to prefer the darkness as cover for its evil deeds? If we say, as we should, that the truth is both/and and not either/or, we are saying that the problem is not cognitive dissonance about contradictory theological ideas but rather the troubling two-sided truth about us and about God on which we focus throughout the season of Lent.
Let me put it this way, God’s unconditional grace is for the sinner – only the sinner. God’s surpassing love is for the dying – only the dying. God’s liberating and redeeming power is for the prisoner – only the prisoner. That little word “only” drives home the point of all three of our texts today. We receive in reality the unconditional grace, the surpassing love, the liberating power of the God of the gospel only as we truly know ourselves as those in such need. True knowledge of God and true knowledge of self are correlative, they go together hand in glove. Knowing in truth our need and God’s unimagined supply is exactly what we devote ourselves to in this season of Lent.
Actually, just such self-knowledge is what Martin Luther meant by faith when he lifted up the doctrine of justification by faith as the chief doctrine of Christianity. In faith I say something about myself and about God. I say in faith that I am the sinner of God’s forgiving, the sheep of his gathering flock, the prisoner of his liberating, the dying of his eternal embrace. Moreover, I say that just this true knowledge of self and of God in faith is not my own doing of which I might boast, but the astonishing gift of God bringing me out of the darkness of self-deception into the light of God’s penetrating scrutiny from which no one can hide. In this way faith says the truth both about God and about ourselves.
This difficult and double-sided truth matters immensely. If we try to avoid the real tension, not just a mental confusion, but the real tension of this inseparable combination of judgment and grace which justifies only the ungodly and only by faith, our Christianity becomes saccharine, Pollyanna-ish, untrue to real life, a self-serving religious fiction, an ecclesiastical ideology, a bromide marketed in the religion business.
In our real lives in this troubled world we participate in powerful systems of malice and injustice. We take comfort in the propaganda that slanders our enemies and flatters our own self-righteousness. We are pleased when our enemies fail and distressed when our partisans lose. We are complicit and cannot extract ourselves from the cycle of human violence, both verbal and physical. That is our dark human reality. Every time I switch on the lights or turn on the computer, I use the electricity created by the burning of fossil fuels that is cooking the planet. Every time I rejoice in my portfolio rising in value, I take profit from corporate powers that monopolize and exploit. Every time I lift myself from depression by going on a spending spree, I fail to feed the hungry and cloth the naked. Every time I passively abide the bullying, the shaming, the pervasive cruelty of daily life, I submit again and again to the domination of anti-divine powers. Shall I go on? Elsewhere St. Paul asks, why do we desire our own subjugation? We must know this about ourselves. Not superficially, as if I could pass a checklist like the 10 Commandments which to my knowledge I have not transgressed today, or this past week, Gee, for quite a while. But in reality, I have not loved the Lord my God with my whole heart nor my neighbor as myself. I have omitted much good that I could and should have done. In reality, I am in bondage to sin and cannot free myself. Consequently in this self-awareness of profound life-changing repentance, I can never act with fanatical zealotry as if I were some kind of savior. Rather, in a fitting even dignified humility I know that I must be saved in the same way as all the others, including my opponents, need to be saved.
True, and crucially true. For just so our three texts today tell us about the act of power which is the grace of God not limited or restricted or conditioned by this vert truth about ourselves. They tell about the surpassing love of God for the very world in darkness which flees God and prefers to remain in darkness because its deeds are evil. The God who works costly redemption by lifting up his own beloved Son on the imperial gibbet of Rome for our healing gaze. Here in the midst of our human darkness the event of surpassing divine love takes place. Consequently, you he made alive, when God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Yes, you, you he made alive, just you who were dead to God, you whose gaze has been shifted from your complicity in the world sinfulness to the righteousness of another who has lived and died for you in our midst. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up.
In faith knowing that we are the children of Israel smitten with the consequences of our own deep complicity in the darkness of the world, turning back from the hard path to freedom, rebelling against the liberating intention of our maker and Redeemer, we nevertheless in the same faith look upon the saving cross so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. So in our Lenten faith, we received wisdom and power to live in the tension of the Christian life, at the same time sinful and righteous, not superior to any other of our common humanity in whose complicity with evil we inevitably share, but boasting only of the cross of Christ in which we glory, for our salvation but also for the salvation of all those others, however deplorable they may be. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Just so, we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. This is what it means to say that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.