Loving as God loves

The answer is not really the standard one that a sin against an infinite God is an infinite offense and demands infinite satisfaction; and therefore God, the Infinite, became man and died to provide that satisfaction. Granted the "offense," objectively has the dimension of being against an infinite God; but he is such that he does not need any "satisfaction." There is a sense in which this can be understood correctly, I suppose; but that sense drains the "satisfaction" of most of its meaning.

The real point is that once a person sins, the choice cannot, short of a miracle, be erased as an operative act in his eternal life; and consequently, eternal frustration is inescapable.

But the human being, because of original sin, does not have himself under full control, and so is not totally wrapped up in his sin, as I mentioned earlier; and therefore it is possible by a miracle to erase the choice and still leave the person intact--if the "erasure" is done while we still are bodies and can change.

But why would God do this? For the same reason he would create. Because he can. Not because he would "feel better," or gain in any way. Not because he "feels sorry" for us or "feels" anything at all. Simply because he can.

This is love. To do something which benefits another when there is absolutely no self-reference in it at all. That is how God loves us.

And so the horrible death of Jesus was not because our sins are so horrible that they demanded it. Jesus himself saw that the death was not necessary, when he prayed God not to let it happen.

But then if it wasn't necessary, why did it happen? First of all, it happened because the people chose it to happen. Jesus, by not answering during his trial at the Sanhedrin, gave the council an opportunity not to find him guilty, since there were not the required two witnesses to give the same testimony against him. But when Caiphas asked him, "Are you the Prince, the Son of God?" then this was a command issued by one who had authority over him as a Jew; and so he was required to answer truthfully, with an answer he knew they would take as blasphemy, and make him guilty of death.

But then, before Pilate, Jesus also made a reply ("My kingdom is not one in this world") which gave Pilate a chance to free him ("Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to what I say"); but which Pilate chose to ignore--at which point, Jesus again said nothing in his defense.

So it was not the will of God that Jesus was submitting to; it was the will of men; and because it was the will of men, it was the will of God.

But the second reason why it happened was the one Jesus gave at the Last Supper: "No one has greater love than this: to give up his life for the one he loves." That is, the crucifixion and its horror was to demonstrate graphically the love of God, not the demands of the justice of God. In this sense, what Jesus was illustrating was (a) that there was no self-interest whatsoever in his saving us from our sins; and, paradoxically enough (b) that God doesn't care what our sins are.

That is, the death of Jesus was so horrible that a person looking at it has two choices: "Is my sin really that ghastly that it would demand a punishment like this to atone for it?" or "Is the love of God that great that he would undergo this for my little pecadillos?" Since few of us are really more than fools when we sin, a realistic assessment would incline toward the second choice--which is the real one.

Some spiritual writers use the first alternative as evidence that our sins are actually much greater than we think they are, using that notion of "infinite offense" I mentioned earlier. But Jesus never hinted that God's wrath was such that he had to die to satisfy it; but he did explicitly state that he died to show what his love for us was. And objectively, all any sin is is an attempt to do what cannot be done; it is just deliberate foolishness, and is laughable, not shocking. It is a temptation to regard sin as "great" and "terrible" and "evil" and so on, because it makes us think that we have power when in fact the essence of sin is powerlessness.

Jesus died, among other things, to free us from the grip of original sin; and a good part of the grip of original sin is precisely looking on things in terms of good and evil; we think in a Manichean way of the world as a war of good against the powers of evil, and we hope that the powers of good will prevail.

But the fact is that evil has no power; evil is impotence masquerading as power; it is nothingness masquerading as something. Jesus overcame evil because he made it possible for us to change our way of looking at things, not because there was something to overcome. If you look at a doughnut, you can see the hole; but the hole is nothing at all, not something that is "opposed" to the doughnut; it is the absence of doughnut, and nothing more.

Similarly evil, even sin, is not anything at all; it is the hole in our intentions. The act we do is not evil, even when we kill someone, as can be shown by the fact that it is not evil to kill a person in self-defense. The harm done by an evil choice is not "really bad," as can be seen from the fact that we sometimes have to do something from which harm results in order not to sin--as when, for instance, the Christians refused to worship idols and eat consecrated food, even though this unleashed the persecution which saw thousands of them fed to lions. This is not to say that this harm is good, any more than killing a person in self-defense is a good act. "Good" doesn't really apply to such things, except in that watered-down sense of "well, it isn't bad."

And that is the point, of course. "Good" and "bad" are ways we look at things; and Christianity can free us from this. As God looks at things, our sins are not "bad," and so do not demand "satisfaction," let alone the enormous satisfaction that is entailed in the death of Jesus.

I should interject here that, in keeping with the Christian paradox, we will have to come back to good and evil because Jesus is human as well as divine and therefore thinks in human as well as divine fashion. But we don't have much trouble with the human way of thinking, so let's stay with the divine one for the moment.

So far, then, we have learned from the Divine way of considering things, that the Redemption shows that God loves the world absolutely unselfishly, that our sins don't really matter to God, and that evil has no power whatever.

But what of Paul's statement, "This is God's will: your rescue," if in fact he doesn't care about our sins and the damnation they bring? Again, why did he bother to redeem us?

This is the second point about the way God loves. He wills our rescue, not in the sense that he wills that each of us in fact escape hell, because (presumably) some of us won't take advantage of the rescue offered, and will damn ourselves. He "wills our rescue" in the sense that he wills that our rescue be available if we want to use it. We cannot rescue ourselves, once we have sinned; but rescue from our sins is not a contradiction, and is miraculously possible by an intervention of God into the world. He then intervenes to make possible what is impossible without this intervention.

He wills the salvation of each of us insofar as each of us wills it; that is, salvation is not withheld from anyone; but God doesn't want those who damn themselves to be saved. he doesn't "will their rescue" in that sense or they wouldn't be damned. That's the "permissive will of God" rearing its ugly head again. If we want to ignore the rescue available to us and be damned, that's perfectly all right with God.

In that sense, I suppose that Jesus would have died for our rescue even if no one had ever availed himself or it and been saved from his sins. Jesus died, not to make us saved, but to give us the chance; if we take the chance, fine; if we don't, fine.

What this means, then, is that God's love is not indifference. An indifferent God doesn't care whether we sin or not, and won't do anything either to help us not sin or to save us from the consequences of our sin. A loving God, apparently, will give us the help we need and want, and will save us from the consequences of our acts insofar as this is not absolutely impossible (as it is with the angels, who can't be redeemed); but he has no "stake" in this--it doesn't matter to him whether we take advantage of the opportunities he offers us.

Notice that when we do things to help others, we resent it when they reject our help and continue to do themselves damage; and we resent it most especially when they condemn us for "interfering" when all we were trying to do was help them--as if we got anything out of it. But this is not loving as God loves. If we loved as God loves, we would offer help; but if it wasn't wanted, this wouldn't bother us. And we wouldn't keep trying to force it on the person we were trying to help, either; it would be there, in case he changed his mind, but if he didn't, then that would be fine with us. And this in spite of our knowledge that the person was doing something really damaging to himself.

Notice that "doing something damaging" is another way of saying "doing something bad"; and this in turn is another way of saying "doing something that contradicts my idea of the way he ought to be." When you help a person "overcome his fault" or "stop doing what is damaging to him," then you are imposing your idea of what is "good" for him on him; you are saying that you know what his "real true" self is, and that he is falling short of it. You are taking your idea as "objective fact" and ignoring his idea of his "real" self as a "delusion."

But neither idea of the "real true" self is objective; both are subjective. His idea is the goal of his life; and even if it is self-contradictory, it must ultimately prevail, because he is self-determining. The point is that there is no objective meaning to "what is good for him." So when you "help" him with this attitude, you violate his self-determination in the name of what is "good" for him.

But Jesus' death for our sins was not this way. Jesus did not die to persuade us to be converted; he died to make conversion possible. And this is the third point about the way God loves: God's love for his creatures is an infinite respect for their reality.

God manipulates inanimate objects and things that are living but have no choice; he provides opportunities and information for those that have choice. He gives us the Commandments so that we can know what to avoid in order not to be at cross-purposes with ourselves; he gives us the Crucifixion so that we can erase those choices that we have perversely made and avoid their eternal consequences; he gives us the Church and the sacraments so that we can live this new life more easily (if we choose) and integrate it with our natural lives. But he does this in perfect consistency with what we are as self-determining.

Even when God manipulates the inanimate and animate world so that it evolves into what it is today, he only manipulates the chance element built into its laws, so that the laws of nature are left intact, while nature itself (because of the manipulation of these chance events) is lifted beyond its own unaided capabilities, and inanimate nature, essentially inferior to life, generates the conditions of life and is lifted into life, and vegetative life is lifted into sentient life, and sentient life is lifted into the spiritual life of the intellectual body, man; and then man is lifted into the Divine life itself--but always leaving the nature intact.

It follows that the Christian, who loves as God loves, has God's respect for the reality that exists. He who looks on things as "bad" does not respect the reality in front of him. You can't look on things as "bad" without comparing the reality unfavorably with your idea of it: what it "ought" to be, according to you. This is not respect for what is; it is contempt for reality. This is the most important reason why the Christian, in taking over God's attitude, has to give up "good" and "evil."

This is not to say that the Christian ignores the potentials things have. A person who loves as God loves knows the reality before him, and can see what powers it has to develop. Hence, he can, like his Master, provide the opportunities for it to develop according to its capacities. This is very different from "correcting what is wrong."

Let us take an alcoholic as an example. The human way of loving an alcoholic is to see how he is ruining his life, and to help him--even to force him, if need be--to get out of this trap he has got himself into. The Christian does not consider the alcoholism and the degradation and all the rest of it as bad. He sees the person as he is, not in relation to what he could be if he were not an alcoholic. His respect for the alcoholic means that no matter what the alcoholic does, even if he continues and gets worse and worse, does not matter to the Christian; it cannot make him love the alcoholic less, or distress him more. He will accept the alcoholic absolutely.

But he is there if the alcoholic wants help. If he wants to talk, the Christian supplies ears. If he wants support, the Christian encourages him. If he wants advice, the Christian gives it to him, if he knows it. The Christian studies the alcoholic, to find out what step he could take to be happier--either with his problem or to get rid of it. The Christian is willing to face the possibility that the alcoholic might never recover, and the other possibility that, all things considered, it may not be better to get rid of the problem. Force will be applied only to the extent that the alcoholic is not free, and that it might actually work.

It isn't that the Christian will do anything that the person who knows how to treat alcoholism wouldn't do; it's that his attitude toward the alcoholic is different. He respects the alcoholic infinitely; it isn't that he "loves" him in that condescending sense; it isn't that he considers the alcoholic, even in his degraded state, as the "equal" of himself; it is that he has a reverence for him because he is, simply because he is. He does not consider him as "fallen," is perhaps the way to put it; he looks on him as being.

The fourth thing to learn from the crucifixion about the way God loves us is that Jesus' life ended with the crucifixion, without even one of his Apostles (his Representatives, who were to carry on his teaching) having the faintest idea of what his teaching was. His whole life was to teach us the meaning of God's love; and only Mary loved in this way; but she was taught earlier, before ever he was born.

His whole life was a failure, in other words.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, when asked how she felt in trying to help the poor and sick in India, when there were so many that her efforts amounted to nothing, said, "God didn't ask us to succeed; he only asked us to try."

And, especially since the "trying" is the attempt to affect people's minds and hearts, and people are free, the attempt is often doomed to failure.

And what this means is that God's love for the world does not have a goal. There is not something that God "wants the world to achieve." God does not have a purpose in this sense. The "purpose" God has for creation is, as I mentioned that it exist, not that it work toward some goal he has set for it.

And thus, God's love does not think in terms of success and failure. Jesus died to provide the chance for us to think the Divine thought; and people nowadays are turning Christianity into a plan for achieving a just economy. There is nothing wrong with a just economy; but this is a human goal, and it is completely beside the point of what Jesus died for. Jesus, as the Book of Revelation points out, is a failure throughout the whole of history; and his failure is his success. That is, "failure" does not have meaning in the Christian context; because Divine love imposes no purpose on the beloved; it is beyond purpose.

Purpose is rational, but divine love is trans-rational. It can support purposes; but itself is not purposive. If Jesus had as his purpose in this goal-sense the salvation of the world, then he failed, because not all are saved. But if he had as his "purpose" simply what he did: providing the opportunity for salvation, then he succeeded; but in this sense, the "purpose" is the act itself, not a goal to be achieved by it. God has, in this sense, "his glory" as his purpose in creation; but this is not a goal; it is simply that the creature is the glory of God, no matter what it does.

The trouble with this analogous sense of "purpose" is that we tend to interpret it as if it were a goal to be achieved, and this again apparently gives us a power over God, allowing us to "thwart his will" and "make him angry" and the rest of it. It is the serpent's temptation again, to which so many--even of good will--succumb. We have no power over God; none, none, none. Even the crucifixion of Jesus did not mean that we had any power over him, "Don't you realize that I could ask my Father and he would send me twelve legions of angels?"

So where are we? If we are to be Christian, what we have to do is think and love the way God thinks and loves. To think the way God thinks means that we don't consider ourselves or our concerns as objectively important; that we don't think in terms of "good" and "bad"; to love as God loves means that we are not affected by what we do for others, that we provide opportunites for the benefit of others without having a personal stake in whether they avail themselves of them or not; that we have infinite respect for the reality we are working on, seeing it as it is and deferring to its reality, rather than imposing our idea of what it "really is" or "ought to be" on it; and that we are not concerned with the success or failure of what we do for the world.

An attitude like this is not humanly possible. A human being either considers himself to be important, or he "forgets himself" for a cause, which then takes over the role of supreme importance for him. But God, the Word, did not consider himself as being important, ("When he was in the form of God did not consider being equal to God something to be held onto"), nor did he consider his mission and its success to be important, because he knew it would end in failure, in spite of his ability to make it succeed. Nothing is important, objectively; nothing is important for one who thinks as God thinks.

But the person who considers nothing as important is either the one severely depressed, who does nothing, or the one who is frivolous and will do anything. The Christian does what is good and avoids what is evil, not because it is important, not because it matters, but simply because. Because he can. Because he loves as God loves, and God does things because he can.