I Love You If…
Sample Chapter
The twenty-something year old stumbled and weaved his way precariously across a six-lane highway in Columbus Ohio – making it to the other side more by luck than good judgement. His name was Brennan Manning, and he felt happy and secure so long as he had his pint bottle of vodka in his hip pocket. Suddenly he emerged from his alcoholic fog just long enough to spot a happy looking couple as they approached him. He tells how they were ‘kissy-facing and huggy-bearing’ – until they noticed Brennan.
‘I’d been on a twelve-day binge,’ he says. ‘Unshaven, matted hair, filthy clothes, rancid with BO – I didn’t deserve to be with decent people.’ And as the young couple averted their eyes and slipped past him maintaining their safe distance, Brennan was enduring the loneliest moment of his entire life.
These days, he’s a respected preacher and prolific writer, but the thing that sets him apart from most preachers and writers is this; he recognises that God loved him as much then in his state of disgrace as he does now in his state of grace. Isn’t that profound? And while most of us would give some sort of intellectual assent to it, head knowledge can take a long time to move down the 18 inches or so to become heart knowledge.
Few of us can fully embrace that most remarkable aspect of the character of God; he loves unconditionally. But then again, his love for us is so incredible that the Bible describes it as; ‘so great you will never fully understand it.’ (Ephesians 3:19).
Perhaps our upbringing has much to do with it. For example, I live in a part of the UK that still operates the Grammar School selection system, and I remember my oldest son panicking ever so slightly as he prepared for his examination.
In a thoughtless attempt to motivate and encourage the boy I heard myself saying, ‘If you pass the selection procedure we’ll go to London for the weekend. We’ll visit the Houses of Parliament and Madame Tussaud’s. We’ll eat pizzas until they come out of our ears and we’ll stay in a fancy hotel.’ But as his little eyes widened in anticipation, it dawned on me that I was also telling my boy that if he didn’t pass I wouldn’t be taking him anywhere – and that’s the cruelty of our meritocratic world system – you get what you deserve. Then I quickly capitulated – ‘We’ll have a fantastic time in London, pass or fail,’ and we did.
And so we deceive as we have been deceived. Our unspoken, ‘I’ll love you if …’ is interpreted by our children as, ‘God loves me if …’ – and that is so wrong. It seems that men have built the church on a foundation that is indistinguishable from the hierarchical and competitive principles of Western Capitalism. Now if you and I want to adhere to Western Capitalist principles, that’s fine – actually, maybe not, but that’s for another day. But meanwhile, don’t present God as one who is more inclined to approve of people because they are wealthy, respectable, religious and middle-class, than he is of people who languish at the bottom of the pile. Those are our values, not God’s.
Middle-class religion can be very selective in its view of the life and ministry of Christ. It’s interesting that Jesus chose his first public address to set out his stall as he quoted from Isaiah 61;
'The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon mr, because the Lord has anointed me to
bring good news to the poor He has sent me to comfort the broken-hearted and
to announce that captives will be released and prisoners will be freed.'
Who was he targeting? The poor, the broken-hearted, the captives, the prisoners, those covered in the ashes of shame, and those who mourned.
The job of the church is to share the unconditional love of God with the poor, the needy, the homeless, the prostitutes and the abused, but how can we show it if we don’t know it? Brennan Manning knows it, and I’m still struggling to grasp it. The fact I’m trying to get my head around is that God loves the likes of me so much that he chose to die rather than be without us.
|
