When God Changes the Rules
Theologian Bruce Epperly sympathizes with Jonah’s reluctance to become a prophet to the Assyrians.
What would you do if God asked you to challenge everything you thought was true? What if God told you to turn your back on the religious values you learned in church and in the Bible?…. Worse yet, what if God changed God’s mind to expand the circle of grace to include our nation’s worst enemies…?
Moreover, what if the God you believed in … changed the rules of the faith, threw out the spiritual guidebook that shaped your life, and commanded you to adopt a different, and unprecedented, approach to life? Would you follow God’s new directions, stay put, or run away from this rule-changing God?…
In the past few decades, committed Christians have struggled with theologically radical ways of reconceiving marriage and divorce, equal rights, war and peace, the insights of other religions, homosexuality and marriage equality, and the nature of mission in light of changing understandings of God’s vision for our world. If God is still speaking, then God can surprise us with new insights for changing times. Like Jonah, we must decide how we will respond to a god whose ways are different than we imagined.
Epperly invites us to consider how God is calling us to move beyond fear of the other:
In a world in which politicians fan the flames of fear and anger, Jonah presents a provocative possibility: What if God loves our enemies as much as God loves our friends? What if God’s revelation comes to outsiders as well as persons from our own faith tradition?…
We are all tempted to create a God of our own making, who will uphold the status quo and baptize our values as God’s definitive word. When God challenges our way of life and the religious and cultural values we hold dear, we are tempted to run away in search of a new god—a god of our own making—who will support our privileges and prejudices and lead us into battle against our foes. In contrast to nationalist and parochial images of God, the Book of Jonah portrays a different vision of God: God, the iconoclast; God, the lover of our enemies; and God, who cares for non-humans with the same devotion as God cares for humankind. Constantly doing a new thing, God calls us to be innovative and iconoclastic as we embrace new understandings of God’s vision for humankind and the world….
[Jonah] believes that God changed God’s mind, and he doesn’t know which way to go. His running away is a running from a new, more universal and loving, vision of God….
Jonah asks us what it means to follow God’s way in a world of terrorism, xenophobia (fear of strangers), and fear-based politics. God calls us toward world-changing discipleship in our time. Will we run away from God’s vision or follow God’s call to embrace otherness, with all our ambivalence and anxiety, or will we baptize our prejudice and hatred in the waters of religious faith?
| Jesus Has Prepared a Place for You…Through the Cross |
 Yesterday, we saw how the popular view of heavenly mansions along streets of gold misses the true intent of Jesus’ words to his disciples on the night of his arrest. His concern was to comfort them with the assurance of their place with him and his Father forever. If that’s the case, however, why does Jesus say, “I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2)? It certainly sounds like he has work to do building palaces in some distant heavenly realm. While that imagery might spark the imaginations of children in Sunday school and appeal to the cultural materialism of religious consumers, it’s not what Jesus had in mind.Still, this Jesus-as-heaven’s-homebuilder view remains popular in large part because it conforms nicely to a view of the future held by many contemporary Christians. Sometimes called the “evacuation theory,” it teaches that the earth is destined for destruction, but Jesus is going to rescue us off this sinking ship just in time and resettle us safely in a shiny new place he’s currently working on. This eschatology—or theology of last things—is why some Christians dismiss efforts to reform this world, and why they focus their faith and imaginations on heaven. That is, after all, where they plan to spend eternity and the place they think Jesus really cares about. There are many errors with this theology, but let me highlight just two.First, this view incorrectly believes Jesus is focused on preparing a new world rather than ruling over this one. This contradicts the central message of the gospel. Jesus has not surrendered this world to false kings and illegitimate rulers so that he can build and rule over a new one, nor is God’s mission to discard the first creation as a mistake so he can reign in the next one. On this point, Scripture could not be more clear—we do not worship a God who replaces but a God who redeems. The New Testament declares Jesus to be Lord over this creation and that he is even now ruling over the world at the right hand of the Father as he works to redeem all things (see 1 Corinthians 15:24ff). And the day is approaching when all of creation and everyone in it will acknowledge his true identity as Lord. Second, pop Christianity’s view of Jesus as heaven’s contractor and urban planner misses the point of his farewell discourse altogether. When Jesus speaks in John’s gospel of leaving his disciples, returning to his Father, being lifted up, or being glorified, these are all ways of speaking about the same event—his death and resurrection. So, when he tells his disciples “I go to prepare a place for you,” it does not mean that after he leaves via the cross he’ll begin his next project of preparing a place for them. Rather, Jesus is saying that his departure via the cross is precisely how he will prepare a place for them. Jesus’ leaving and his preparing are not sequential (leave first and then prepare a place), but rather simultaneous (leaving and preparing a place happen at the same time). In other words, through Jesus’ death and resurrection he will prepare a place for them in God’s house; to dwell forever in God’s presence. So many of us are quick to jump over the cross and focus our faith entirely on heaven. Our cultural bias is to emphasize the glory and diminish the agony, to declare victory rather than carry the cross. To escape this world to find comfort in the next one. That instinct also causes us to misread Jesus’ final words to his followers. We think he’s talking about a heavenly construction project when in truth he was pointing them, and us, to the far greater work he accomplished through his death and resurrection. Like the gospels themselves, our faith would be far stronger if we spent less time contemplating heaven and far more time contemplating the cross. |
