Jesus said to his disciples: "Be
watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come. It is like a man
traveling abroad. He leaves home and places his servants in charge, each with
his own work, and orders the gatekeeper to be on the watch. Watch, therefore; you
do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at
midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning. May he not come suddenly and find
you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to all: 'Watch!'"
Mark
13:33-37
This Sunday is the First Sunday of
Advent, the season of watchful waiting.
But what are we waiting for? In a
very real way, this question goes to the heart of what it means to be Christian.
Is a Christian someone committed to
being a good person? How does that distinguish us from our secular brothers and
sisters? Are we watchful for a moment of
moral judgment, hoping we pass a cosmic final exam?
Is a Christian someone who has values distinct
from secular values? Which ones exactly?
Values around sexuality? A particular economic
system?
Certainly, a Christian is someone committed
to Jesus, but who do we say he is? Is he a moral cheerleader, come to Earth to
increase charitable giving and volunteerism? Did a weary
world rejoice at this birth because we finally had a good example? Was he born
to be savagely killed to satiate an angry god’s bloodlust, inflamed by our poor
behavior?
C.S. Lewis re-framed this theology to
make it a little more palatable in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Aslan the Lion was bound by the terms of Deep
Magic that required the execution of Edmund, who was guilty of treason. Aslan exploits a loophole in the Deep Magic and
allows himself to be executed in Edmund’s place, only to be resurrected later. In Lewis’s imagination, punishment must follow
bad behavior as inevitably as 2 + 2 = 4. Even God is bound by it. Christians have endless ways of hedging the question of judgment: God
forgives but He doesn’t forget; God doesn’t judge us, but we separate ourselves from His love; etc, etc, etc.
The premise of this blog is that we do
not have free will and so God, if He is aware of this and interested in being
fair, could not possibility reward us for good behavior and punish us for bad
behavior. There can be no test. There can be no enraged deity or inevitability
of punishment. There can be no judgment. So, what does it mean to be a Christian? What is the point of the Christmas
story?
I believe the answer to that question is
developed over the entire course of Scripture with clarion call crescendos in
three distinct moments: The Garden of Eden, the delivery of The Ten
Commandments at Mount Sinai, and the Nativity story. (Yes, I’ll admit I think
the Resurrection, although important, is more of an exclamation point than an integral part of the story.) Over the remaining three Sundays of Advent I
will explore each one of these stories in the context of answering what it means
to be Christian. It may seem that
without free will that answer will leave Christmas (and Christianity) cold,
mechanistic, and over-intellectualized.
But I think the opposite is true.
