Eternal Surprise
Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, March 5, 2022
Contemplating the sin and shame and death that tars us would do us good. But when you do, make sure you rise up afterwards, and turn your face to the heavens and cry tears of quick delight as you remember that God in Christ is for you. How do you know? Because he shut the dragon’s mouth, he bore the burdens we can’t set down after prising them from our grip, he made himself a spectacle of shame so we could be honoured as royalty. Because God loves you, and he wants you, and he has come to get you.
At the height of the pandemic, I was invited by one of my best friends to preach at his church in Manchester, which of course meant via Zoom from my living room.
This collided with the height of our house renovations—we had a labourer in to strip the old plaster off the halls, stairs and landing, and then plasterers in to board and skim. We do our own plastering, but we want to be precariously perched on a ladder halfway up the stairs about as much as the average tradesperson does.
Because they’re a law unto themselves, the plasterers announced on the Saturday that they would be back on Sunday morning to do some more. I carefully explained that I was preaching that morning, hoping to dissuade them, but they just assured me they would be quiet when we needed them to be.
So that’s how on the morning before the church meeting started, I was in the kitchen with the kettle on making everyone a drink and chatting with one of the plasterers about what church was like. We’d been talking earlier in the week—he was Irish, and it emerged he was a lapsed Roman Catholic who had walked away from the church long ago. He was deeply curious about faith, and this morning asked what I was going to be speaking about, so I told him the story from the gospels (Luke 7) that I was preaching from that day.
Jesus encounters a funeral procession outside of a small town. There’s a widow, who is accompanied by the town to bury her only son. Her beloved child is dead, and with his death her livelihood and hope for the future has gone. She has nothing left, no one to care for her. She is bereft.
Jesus stops the procession, comforts the mother and then reaches out to touch the bier his body is placed on. This is a taboo act, you don’t willingly touch the dead—the death transfers to you, spiritually speaking. Which is, by the by, the logic behind the Old Testament food laws, though I didn’t explain that to the plasterer.
He was rapt listening to the story. I’m a good storyteller, but this was a bare bones narration in the kitchen while I stirred a mug of tea for him to drink, the story was doing its own work.
Then we come to the climax. Jesus looks at the young man, who he is not afraid to touch, and says “get up.” In a beautifully understated line in Luke’s narration,
And the dead man sat up
The plasterer looked at me, eyes wide, and viscerally expressed his surprise in a way I will not repeat in print.
-
In Defense of The Therapeutic
Do we indwell a therapeutic culture? In one sense, unfortunately, yes: Rieff, Jones, and Trueman rightly lament the self-centered psychologizing of our society. In another sense, sadly, no: Nearly every aspect of our culture militates against true therapy. The pervasive noise of distractions hinders the gospel’s healing touch.
Talking about the gospel as therapeutic is dangerous. Not wrong, just dangerous. I used to think it was wrong, since Philip Rieff famously inveighed against the psychologizing of the self in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, his prophetic 1966 book. His critique fueled my suspicion of all things therapeutic.
Noted theologians have taken up Rieff’s mantle. Gregory Jones warns in Embodying Forgiveness (1995) that in our therapeutic culture, we are in danger of manipulating forgiveness by turning it into a self-help process: We are told to forgive others not for their sake but for ours, since it gives us psychological relief. The result, Jones rightly insists, is that we no longer “discern whether there are tragic misunderstandings or culpable wrongdoing and brokenness that need to be dealt with through practices of forgiveness and repentance.” Rather than work through the mess to make things right, we turn forgiveness into a tool for restoring our own inner peace.
More recently, Carl Trueman has turned to Rieff to trace the genealogy of contemporary culture. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020) follows Rieff’s claim that our therapeutic culture has two baleful effects. First, it treats the community as oppressive and therapy as a means to counter this. This leads to the second effect: It subverts the proper relationship between individual and society. Whereas the individual once learned to take his proper place within the broader community, the community now serves the psychological wellbeing of the individual.
Rieff, Jones, and Trueman all warn against a therapeutic culture’s dangers. In their august company, one might think twice before putting up a defense of a therapeutic culture.
Let me nonetheless give it a try. It’s not that I disagree with the famous troika. Their critique of contemporary culture is truthful, incisive, and indispensable. Still, a caveat is equally indispensable, for the gospel’s very aim is therapeutic.
The Greek verb therapeuein means “to heal” or “to cure.” The purpose of the gospel is arguably that we be healed. Metropolitan Hierotheos discusses theology as a therapeutic science and speaks in detail about how to heal the soul. His book Orthodox Psychotherapy: The Science of the Fathers argues that priests are in the therapy business: They “not only celebrate the Sacraments but they cure people. They have a sound knowledge of the path of healing from passions and they make it known to their spiritual children.”
Read More -
Why do Christians Pray, “For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, For Ever”?
The moment we bow the knee to Jesus, that ghastly spirit of self-fulfillment, which claws and gnaws at our souls, howling “Mine be the glory!” flees back to the hell from which it came. In its place comes sanity, joy, and a peace that transcends every pain and trial. What a happy prayer to pray: “Lord Jesus, thine be the glory!”
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen. — Matthew 6:13 (KJV)
The splintering pain at the core of every human being, and which today is felt more acutely than ever in the West, is precisely the pain of the square peg being bashed into the round hole.
We were designed and crafted to praise Jesus Christ with our bodies and souls. If Jesus is God’s Son, the beautiful Universal King and Savior, then it’s impossible to conceive of a higher, happier, and more expansive purpose. He is worthy of our praise, and it is a delight to give it.
Yet, we insist on battering ourselves into the cramped cavity of self-fulfillment. This leaves us bruised, brittle, and spiritually exhausted.
The doxology after the Lord’s Prayer is a perfectly biblical and correct thing to pray.
The traditional ending of the Lord’s Prayer is not found in the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament.[1] A pious scribe, copying Matthew’s Gospel by hand, perhaps could not help adding the doxology after the Lord’s Prayer. It is generally accepted that it is taken from David’s prayer to God in 1 Chronicles 29 where David says similar words.
Read More
Related Posts: -
It’s a Trap!
We are in a warfare that requires the prudent be on the lookout for evils to avoid. In your hearts, acknowledge the traps that are all around you. And if you really need to, say it out loud to shake you from your apathy and turn from the temptation.
When I was in college, it’s very likely that people thought I was a little weird. Around 2008, I started to really seek the Lord. I had been saved a few years before then, but around that time I had someone show me that I could read and understand the Bible for myself. I was soaking up everything and growing like a weed. I was also a little weird (still am?). Put those two things together and you get an interesting outcome. Here’s what I mean: I used to wear one white sock and one black sock to remind me that the flesh warred against the Spirit (Gal 6). I made a little Bible carrying pouch to wear on my belt and called it my “sheath” for carrying around my “sword” (Eph 5). And if you were walking by me on campus, sometimes you might hear me exclaim, “It’s a trap!”
As anyone who has sought the Lord will tell you, the more you see of God, the better you see yourself. Specifically, the more you see of your own insufficiency.
Read More
Related Posts:
