God Loves Without Reason

MOST OF THE friends I grew up with in church youth group don’t call themselves Christians anymore. They left church behind years ago. Yet here I am, still a very churchy Christian. Why have I stayed in the faith after all these years? Why do we keep doing this Christian thing?

We are tempted to convince ourselves that God will reward our faithfulness with blessings—either in this life or the next. This is a Christian logic as old as the Bible, a theology taken from the lips of Jesus himself: “Your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:4). Prosperity theology isn’t an aberration but a perennial Christian impulse, an urge within all of us as we try to justify to ourselves our faith.

This way of thinking about beliefs, according to Meister Eckhart, turns God into a cow. “People look upon God with the eyes with which they look upon a cow,” he preached in the 14th century. “To love God the way they love a cow, because it gives you milk and cheese. This is how people behave who want to love God because of external wealth or inner comfort ... they love their self-interest.”

This month’s stories from Mark’s gospel invite us into the disciples’ struggle to understand why they’ve chosen to follow Jesus. Discipleship, we’ll discover, is a constant exposure to the selfish motives for our faith as we stumble into God’s truth—that, as Eckhart preached, “God loves us without a why.” God loves us without a reason, without making calculations. God loves us because God loves us.

September 5

Our Borrowed Life

A GENTILE WOMAN needs a miracle, so she comes to Jesus. “She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter” (Mark 7:26). Jesus replies, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” (verse 27). She begs Jesus to heal her child, to liberate her from the oppression of a demon, and in response Jesus calls her a dog. This passage is as bad as it sounds. Jesus tells this woman that she—as a member of an unclean people—is like one of the scavenger animals in the streets.

Nevertheless, she persists, refusing his dismissal. “Lord,” she insists, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (verse 28). Her reasoning convinces Jesus that he has not yet grasped the reach of his ministry. “By reason of this logic [logos in Greek],” Jesus acknowledges her argument, “you should go because the demon has left your daughter” (verse 29, my translation). This encounter recasts Jesus’ vision of who belongs with his people and to whom he belongs.

To borrow language from the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, this episode in Mark’s gospel is “an epiphany of the face,” where a person “looks at me, calls out to me, claims me.” Jesus, face to face with this woman who presses him to recognize her claim on his care, reveals the interruption of another as the inbreaking of God’s will, the gift of leadership opened up through the surprise of the uninvited.

We misrecognize others because we claim lordship over our corners of the world, filtering our experiences through the lens of possession, the disposition of ownership. We make claims on the world instead of opening our posture to receive the claims of others on us. In our arrogance we deny that everything we have, all of who we are, comes from God. To be a human creature, writes Kathryn Tanner in Christ the Key, is “to lead a continually borrowed life.” In other words, we are born beggars.

September 12

Pilgrimage to Humanness

THE NARRATOR IN Mark 8 calls Jesus “the Son of Man” and Jesus refers to himself as “the Son of Man” (see verses 31 and 38). Other translators write “the Human One,” because the whole point of the title is to declare that someone is a child of Adam and Eve, a member of the human family. New Testament scholar Joel Marcus lays out the exegetical rationale for this interpretation. “Jesus as Son of Man,” he explains, “presents a glorified picture of human destiny, showing humanity eschatologically transformed to fulfill the destiny God intended.” In other words, Jesus is a human being like us, and in his life we discover who we’ve been created to be.

The incarnation is a vision of the good life. Jesus teaches his disciples how to be a human being who is filled with God—a human life overflowing with God’s love. Mark begins his gospel with the baptism of Jesus, where a voice from heaven declares that Jesus is “the Beloved” (1:11). Divine love has become human in Jesus. His life will reveal the path of love incarnate in the world.

Church life is how we organize ourselves as an everyday pilgrimage into the humanness of Jesus—in our rituals of worship and fellowship. We become the body of Christ as we share our lives, as we offer each other the companionship of God’s incarnate love. Life together “is the radical exploration of what it is to be human,” writes Dominican priest Herbert McCabe. “To live in community ... is the exploration of God.” The Christian faith is an invitation to grow closer to God as we live into the humanity of Jesus.

September 19

First and Last

THE DISCIPLES HAVE given up everything to follow Jesus. And they wonder if this life with him will be worth the sacrifices. When the kingdom comes, obviously Jesus will appoint them to leadership positions, so they bicker. Jesus overhears the dispute and says, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35). Their deliberations, their calculations are confounded by his comment. No one wants to be last, unless that means they’d be awarded with being first—but to strive for last as a tactic to achieve first place would betray a disciple’s selfish ambition, a desire Jesus won’t tolerate in his community. Their arguments unravel.

Jesus turns his friends away from their obsessions with greatness, with climbing into the echelons of authority, power, recognition. He gestures to the children in the streets as the ones who hold the keys to the kingdom: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me” (verse 37). This is not a call for family values or a plea to prioritize our children. There’s nothing of modern sentimentalism regarding childhood. Instead, as the biblical scholar Ched Myers explains in Binding the Strong Man , “Children represented the bottom of the social and economic scale in terms of status and rights in the ancient Mediterranean world.” Myers notes the astonishing fact in this story “that Jesus draws attention to children at all, for they were considered nonentities.”

When I read this story about the child in Jesus’ arms, I thought of the kids I saw this summer in Tijuana, Mexico, as my car inched to the border crossing, on my way into the United States. Young children—5 or 6 years old—sold gum and begged for change, trying to survive in an economy decimated by the border wall and the politics of exclusion. “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” First, of course, we’ll have to tear down that wall.

September 26

All Can Do God’s Work

JOHN AND THE rest of the disciples seem to think that they’re the only ones in town with access to the power of Jesus. “Teacher,” John says, “we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us” (Mark 9:38). Included in the job description for discipleship, he assumes, is the task of being ministry police. John believes that Jesus “belongs” to the disciples, thus they should have the corner on the market for administering the kingdom of God on earth. If Jesus has entrusted his ministry to the disciples, then people beyond their circle who use Jesus’ name and cast out demons are competitors and rivals. Ministry, according to John, involves an adversarial posture toward others.

Jesus replies with a word of judgment. “Whoever is not against us is for us” (verse 40). God’s power is not a possession. No one has proprietary rights on the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus confuses our thinking about God’s presence in the world. He shifts our attention away from competition and toward the work that needs to be done, work anyone can do. We need all the help we can get, because the demonic ravages our world—forces of evil that ransack the goodness of God, that wreck the wonders of creation.

To work against a society, an economy, a culture that produces such demons requires all the allies we can find. “Whoever is not against us is for us.” Jesus calls us to resist forces of destruction alongside anyone, regardless of who they claim to follow. No time for jealousy. No room for pride. This struggle for healing and justice requires solidarities that reach beyond our communities. To give ourselves to God’s movement involves the formation of coalitions across differences and identities.