Distorted views of "God's will"

I doubt any of you will be surprised that, most days of the week, I am not likely to be quoting John Dominic Crossan or Marcus Borg. I have no taste whatever for The Jesus Seminar approaches, for all that I shall concede that, however much one disagrees with his conclusions, Crossan's scholarship well may be the most important research on first century Palestine available. Nonetheless, there are some very enriching points in the Crossan and Borg work, "The Last Week," which focuses on the depiction of Palm Sunday through "the first Holy Week," based on the Gospel of Mark. For example, I very much liked the explanation of how flawed many later notions can be of "atonement theology," since I myself prefer the Eastern emphasis on deification.

What image, for any devout Christian, is more vivid than Jesus' time in Gethsemane? In "The Last Week," there is a very worthwhile quotation: "Jesus prays for deliverance. He prays that this hour might pass from him...Both 'hour' and 'cup' refer to his impending torture and cruel death..Yet he hands himself over...'not my will, but thy will be done.' It is important to add that this does not mean that Jesus' death was the will of God. It is never God's will that the righteous suffer. It was not God's will that Jesus Christ died, any more than it was the will of God that any of the martyrs before and after Jesus were killed. Yet we may imagine them handing themselves over in the way that Jesus did, from Peter and Paul to Thecla and Perpetua to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the nuns in El Salvador. The prayer reflects not a fatalistic resignation to the will of God, but a trusting in God in the midst of the most dire of circumstances."

Fortunately for most of us, martyrdom is not likely to be ahead. That does not erase that the general view of "God's will" is dismal. Once, when I was speaking of Julian of Norwich, I mentioned that I rarely have heard anyone say "God's will" unless someone was dead. (Of course, in Julian's time and place, just about everyone was dead.) It is never used for any happy, joyous occasion, but only when there is great tragedy, or rejection, or heartbreak.

"Trusting in God in the midst of the most dire of circumstances" - that is an image which I can find beauty. (I am not suggesting that it is anything for which I have a knack, more's the pity.) There is no question that there is much that we cannot understand, or that we do not have divine minds, or that our glimpses of God are so short of his true nature that we can speak of a divine plan only in the vaguest of terms. I can strongly subscribe to cosmic redemption, without having the slightest notion of in what this consists specifically. As I have indicated in previous posts about religious philosophy, we have no answers to the problems of evil.

But how did it happen that "God's will" became an image of inevitable pain? Why don't we ever use that term in relation to Creation, redemption, grace? I've yet to hear anyone say to a repentant sinner (that's all of us, my friends - and what a great joy it is...) "you know, it's not what we want, it's what God wants..." As everyone who has known the joy of repentance may be aware, at a point when it was not what we wanted (or at least didn't recognise), the Good Shepherd was coming after us before we even knew we wanted to return. (No, sensationalist sorts, I do not happen to be anyone of whom you would read in tabloids... Sin comes in many varieties, and each of us has had points of major conversion in one way or another.)

I shiver to think of some of what I've heard described as God's will - usually to people who are in the midst of terrible pain. A mother whose child has died does not want a little saint in heaven - she wants her baby! Much worse, I'd like to give forty years in purgatory (and don't think I'm not connected) to those who refer to the untimely death of someone's spouse, child, or other very close loved one, 'reassuring' the bereaved that God may have taken him because the deceased otherwise may have fallen into mortal sin and ended up in hell.

The full scope of God's will is not something I'm about to claim to be able to grasp (nor can anyone.) Yet, if we think of him, for example, as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier - we don't know what all of that means, either, but continuing creation, redemption, and sanctification is rather a better picture than one who has some puzzling, always painful plan (unknown to the sufferer, of course) - a trickster who loves to slam doors in people's faces - or (thank heavens, this isn't Catholic, so I haven't heard it much) who has some secretive formula for "accepting Him," which, if not recited, means He'll thrown his children into hell.

I'm not at my best today, admittedly. Trust is far from my strong point - and, since love requires trust, my own love for God is not the "white hot" I wish it were. Just to refer to Crossan and Borg once more - martyrs were most valued as witnesses (to the resurrection, I must add.) I have no doubt that they would much have preferred not to have been tortured and killed, though it normally involved, as with Jesus, a reaction coming from quite natural causes (often political.) The earliest bishops, for example, were largely faced with either totally denying the faith (and compromising the faith of their flocks) or execution.

The trust itself must be the gift of divine grace - the response imitating Jesus in great love. Human wickedness is not God's doing - he does not need evil to be the Creator of Heaven and Earth! (A role which he did not abandon on the 7th day described in Genesis - he is the eternal Creator.) God did not turn to Judas, Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate and push a button. In his humanity, Jesus of Nazareth had the vocation of a prophet and of proclaiming the kingdom - and this led to his execution. (Those who sent him to the cross had no notion that he was the Second Person of the Trinity - that may sound like saying 'the grass is green,' but I'm afraid that all he was to them, in the second and last quotation from Crossan of my life, was a "peasant, nuisance nobody.") I don't doubt He indeed could have summoned the twenty legions of angels - but his assuming our humanity precluded such actions (not to mention that, as history proves, displays of power tend to be more destructive than otherwise.)

If I weren't so weary, I would have written today's entry (also one with total puzzlement) about how this miserable world is one in which Jesus tells us "the kingdom" had already come. I'm not that ambitious for the moment. Still, if we think of resignation to God's will in terms of trust, without thinking he cooked up the trouble in the first place, it may help us to get through the veils of our own weakness, anger, fear, and such.