“Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady.” -lyric from U2’s song “Stand Up Comedy”
Over the last year, as I discontinued church planting efforts and stepped back into full-time work as a finish carpenter and contractor, I’ve had Bono’s words above echo in my mind almost daily. Yes, we sometimes participate with God as his hands and feet, but he doesn’t need us, and he certainly is capable of doing things without our assistance. The U2 lyric is a reminder that our activism, though well-intentioned, can often flirt with hubris.
We say that “Salvation belongs to the LORD” but often go about “kingdom work” as if our contributions were indispensable. They’re not. Additionally, we pride ourselves that we, the Church, are better than the “them,” or those in the world, but are we really? Moreover, have we really thought deeply about what Jesus meant (if anything definitive) when he gasped his last and cried, “It is finished”? Again, are we sure Jesus really finished something? Or was it just potential; that is, only finally determined when we give God a hand by doing “the work of an evangelist,” helping more sinners choose wisely? When Jesus said, “It is finished,” was he just saying something akin to, “I got things kick-started by paying sin’s debt. Now it’s up to you (with the Spirit’s help, of course!) to take it from here.” Or were Jesus’s words more consequential, breathtaking, and wider in scope? Said differently, what might it mean for the creator and all-powerful, sovereign God and Judge of the universe to actually defeat sin, conquer death, and accomplish salvation “once and for all”? What might the full implications of something like that be?
In wrestling with these questions and letting go of some of my own frantic illusions, I’ve found the insights of the late German theologian Karl Barth provocative, comforting, and challenging, and I hope you do too:
“Sin has been canceled. Death has been vanquished… the world is not abandoned but has a beginning and a goal… The objective fact is that Jesus Christ has come and that He has spoken his word and done his work. That exists, quite independently of whether we believe it or not. [Read those last two sentences one more time and let them soak in.]
This holds for all, for the Christians and for the non-Christians… that the world is ‘worldly’ goes without saying. But it is the world in which Jesus Christ died and rose again… [Yes,] the Church is the place where one knows that, and that is indeed a tremendous difference between the church and the world…. Therein lies a special grace, about which we may be glad every morning. We really have not deserved this grace, [however, and]… the Christians are no better than the children of the world. Therefore, it can only be a matter of their [the Christians] showing… something to others who do not know…
If we wish to understand [God’s judgment] aright…, we must… repress certain pictures of the world-judgment, as far as we can, and make an effort not to think of what they are describing. All those visions, as the great painters represent them, about the judging of the world (Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel), Christ advancing with clenched fist and dividing those on the right from those on the left, while one’s glance remains fixed on those on the left! The painters have imagined to some extent with delight how these damned folks sink in the pool of hell. But that is certainly not the point… Jesus Christ’s return to judge the quick and the dead is tidings of joy… For He that comes is the same who previously offered himself to the judgment of God…
…It is not a question of our Yes and No, our faith or lack of faith. In full clarity and publicity, the ‘it is finished’ will come to light…. In the Biblical world of thought, the judge is not primarily the one who rewards some and punishes others; he is the man who creates order and restores that which has been destroyed…
God’s grace and God’s right are the measure by which the whole of humanity and every man will be measured… God knows everything that exists and happens. [Yes, knowing this can feel terrifying], and to that extent, those visions of the Last Judgment are not simply meaningless. That which is not of God’s grace and right cannot exist… [This is where] much human as well as Christian ‘greatness’ perhaps plunges… into the outermost darkness.
That there is a divine No is indeed included in the idea of judgment. But the moment we grant this, we must revert to the truth that the Judge who put some on the left and others on the right, is in fact he who has yielded himself to the judgment of God for me and has taken away all malediction [curse] from me.”[1]
[1] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper, 1959), 129-136. Slight edits, including punctuation, have been added to make it more readable.