A Windfall of Delight
Wednesday, November 4, 2026
Those who bless the world in the lifelong process of learning to ripen … are those who have mastered the art of sustained effort, infused with a surrender to hidden sources of grace.
— James Finley
CAC faculty member James Finley shares his thoughts on spiritual maturity as a form of ripening:
We ripen in holiness and spiritual fulfillment as we learn to sit in the sun of God’s mysterious, sustaining presence that energizes and guides our efforts, bringing us to realms of grace that are beyond, way beyond, anything we can achieve by our own efforts alone….
The lifelong process of ripening brings about a corresponding ripening of our ability to understand the fundamentals in a wiser, peace-giving manner…. As a person ripens in unsayable intimacies in God, they ripen in a paradoxical wisdom. They come to understand God as a presence that protects us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things. This is the mystery of the cross…. It does not mean that God prevents the tragic thing, the cruel thing, the unfair thing, from happening. Rather, it means that God is intimately hidden as a kind of profound, tender sweetness that flows and carries us along in the intimate depths of the tragic thing itself—and will continue to do so in every moment of our lives up to and through death, and beyond….
We might say that, as fruit ripens, it fulfills itself in giving itself to us. In a similar way, we do not undergo the transformative process of ripening for ourselves alone, but rather that our transformed presence might be a source of nurture to others.
Then too, there is the fruit that, in remaining unharvested, falls onto the ground and dies. The lesson here is in Jesus’s words, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it brings forth fruit…” (John 12:24).
And so it is with us. As we grow old we realize that, in all we have been through, Love has been using us for its own purposes. And for this we feel immensely grateful. We know, too, that our inevitable passing away, in which we fall into the ground and die, is not the end of our ripened and transformed life. It is rather our passage into an infinite and deathless fulfillment. Saint John of the Cross [1542–1591] talks about a windfall of delight. [1] When fruit becomes very ripe, the slightest wind can cause it to fall to the ground. This is also true of us, and not just in the sense in which we learn to be undone and fulfilled in all the unexpected little blessings that come to us throughout the day. The windfall of delight pertains as well to our last breath, which we know and trust will send us falling forever into the deathless depths of God.
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John 10:10 and the Problematic of Divine Violence
OCT 29, 2026
A Very Problematic Hermeneutic:
“It is God who kills, steals, and destroys,
but Jesus came to give life to the full.”
—Wm. Paul Young
During a conversation with Paul Young (author of The Shack and Return to the Shack), he observed how common it is for Bible readers to infer disturbing theologies of divine violence that undermine Jesus’ revelation of God. He also noted dangerous ethical corollaries among Christians that result from these missteps.
First, you’ll note that Paul is obviously riffing off Jesus’ words in John 10:10:
“The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy;
I have come that they have life,
and have it to the full.
Jesus’ claim is indeed central to both our theology and our hermeneutic (interpretive system). Paul and I believe that when Jesus spoke, he spoke as the Word of God—or as Brian Zahnd says, “Jesus is what God has to say about himself.”
That’s not a scandalous thought for any Christian who remembers Jesus’ words, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). The epistle to the Hebrews doubles down: “He is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Hebrews 1:3).
To creedal Christians from Jerusalem to Alaska, from Argentina to India, the confession is that God is one—and that Father, Son, and Spirit share one ousia (being or essence). The conviction is that Jesus reflects the same nature of the God he reveals, and conversely, that God is known through the Son who has made God known. Theology 101 speaks of three persons sharing one divine identity, so Jesus can say “I AM” and claim God’s very character.
To those who accept and conserve the ancient faith, John 10:10 becomes a powerful theological statement, although the math is profoundly simple:
- 1. Jesus says, “It is the thief who is the death-dealer. I am the life-giver.
- 2. Jesus says, “To see me is to see the Father.”
- 3. Thus, “God is not the death-dealer. That’s the thief. God is the life-giver.”
Destructive Theological Inferences
And yet… another theology emerged and became dominant in the Protestant West (though not only there) that abandons Jesus’ claims in just the way Paul Young describes. It proclaims God as a death-dealer, punisher, and destroyer—a vengeful God exacting justice through never-ending violence from whom Jesus must come to save us.
Do you see the theological problems in this model?
- 1. God is not like Jesus. God is wrath. Jesus is a redeemer.
God is who we’re redeemed from. - 2. Jesus does not share one essence, nature, or character with God.
Jesus and God are not one. They are different. - 3. Jesus is not the perfect image of God. Jesus is other than God.
Jesus is not God.
Dubious Interpretive Methods
And so on. How do Christian theologians slip into such obvious, egregious errors? This involves a basic hermeneutical error: departing from the “Emmaus Way” of reading Scripture, where a Christian reading of the Old Testament must always begin with Jesus as the means and end of interpreting the Bible.
In this case, we start with John 10:10 as a theological non-negotiable and read the Old Testament through Jesus’ picture of God. God is not a death-dealer; God is a life-giver. Okay, so then what about Old Testament narratives of divine violence?
Indeed, what about them? Years ago, Archbishop Lazar Puhalo put it this way (some readers will recall): Any Scripture that claims to reveal God must bow to the living God when he came in the flesh. In other words, descriptions of God enacting or commissioning stealing, killing, or destroying must be subordinated to Christ, our final authority for faith and practice.
Then what do we do with those texts that seem to say otherwise? The fathers and mothers of the Great Tradition trained us and modeled how to read those texts long ago, so our modern amnesia is actually without excuse. (I review their approach thoroughly in A More Christlike Word).
We must not start our reading with the destruction texts and treat them as primary, infallible descriptions of God, nor read them literally without reference to Jesus, who said, “You have heard it say, but I [God’s self-revelation] say [otherwise]…” That’s the crack we trip over, inevitably landing us in the Christological errors mentioned above.
Dangerous Ethical Corollaries
I mentioned up front that Paul also exposed some dangerous ethical corollaries connected to these theological and hermeneutical stumbles. It boils down to imagining ourselves as God’s appointed agents of divine violence. With God as the author of destruction and wrath against the wicked, how do these divine judgments take effect in this world?
Christians often attribute divine design to pandemics, geological calamities, and catastrophic weather… but we rarely stop at leaving retribution to ‘natural law’ or ‘acts of God.’ We have a track record of appointing ourselves as God’s executioners, whether on foreign crusades or domestic death rows. Rather than “overcoming evil with good” (as per Romans 12), we take a two-step approach: first, the loyalist church affirms death-dealing via the state sword (Romans 13), then campaigns to assume control of the state and so wield it ourselves (via Christian nationalism).
This hideous outcome starts somewhere… but it also goes nowhere if we, as theologians, Bible interpreters, and peacemaking disciples of the Life-Giver, plant ourselves firmly in the good news gospel of John 10:10.
