Sunday, May 03, 2009
Sermons and Lessons
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” - MATTHEW 5:43-48, RSV
My text is taken from the New Testament lesson: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”
This text has been preached upon many times in the memory of all of us. Usually, however, the emphasis has been upon the moral admonition that we should love our enemies, and not much attention has been paid to the justification of the love of the enemy that Jesus gives by reference to the impartial character of God’s love. It is on the second theme that I want to speak this morning.
There are many things to say about the first theme, for Jesus is suggesting in his Sermon on the Mount that you cannot be moral if you are too strictly moral. The highest morality of forgiveness is, as Berdyaev says, “the morality beyond morality.” Nobody who is strictly moral can forgive, because forgiveness is at once the fulfillment of every concept of justice, and its annulment. Jesus justifies this “morality beyond all morality” by saying God is like that. The love of God is an impartial goodness beyond good and evil. The providence of God is an impartial concern for all men without any special privileges in it.
Thus, the structure of meaning for the Christian faith is completed against all the contradictions in history, where there are no simple correlations of reward for good and punishment for evil. God is like nature, says Jesus, like the impar¬tial nature which you could accuse of not being moral at all, because the sun shines upon both the evil and the good, and the rain descends upon the just and the unjust. A nonmoral nature is made into the symbol of the transmoral mercy. Here is a very radical concept, and one of those words of Scripture that we never quite take in. It is a word of Scripture that has particular significance because it is set squarely against most of our religion, inside the Christian Church as well as anywhere else.
When we say that we believe in God, we are inclined to mean that we have found a way to the ultimate source and end of life, and this gives us, against all the chances and changes of life, some special security and some special favor. And if we do not mean that - which is religion on a fairly adolescent and immature level - at least we mean that we have discovered amidst the vast confusions of life what is usually called the moral order, according to which evil is punished and good rewarded, and we could hardly feel that life had any meaning if we were not certain of that.
The Bible is full of this debate between what might be called the instinct of religion and the gospel of Christ. The natural instincts of religion demand that my life be given meaning by a special security against all of the insecurities of life. If it should seem as if goodness and evil - punishment for evil and reward for good - were not being properly correlated in life, then God will guarantee finally that they will be properly correlated.
Thus, in the Scriptures the words of the Psalms, “A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.” Or the many intercessory prayers, the intent of which is “A thousand at your side, ten thousand at your right hand,” let it not come to my loved one. What a natural prayer that is and finally how impossible! “For in the time of trouble He shall hide me, and he shall set me upon a rock.” In a word, plead my cause, 0 Lord, against them that strive with me, fight against them that fight against me.
Examples can be multiplied and it must also be realized how very natural are these kinds of prayers. Has there ever been a conflict in the human community where we have not felt we could not fight the battle were not the Lord on our side? Perhaps, as Abraham Lincoln said, we did not as frequently ask the question of whether we were on the Lord’s side. These are natural religious instincts, the natural efforts to close prematurely the great structure of life’s meaning. Much more justified is the other aspect of this sense of special providence not that God would give me special privileges, special securities against the other man - but that in a very hazardous world where it is not certain that good will be rewarded and evil punished, at least God should set that right.
“Blessed is he who considers the poor!” to use another word of the Psalm, “The Lord delivers him in the day of trouble.” Many years ago, tithing was popular in some of the churches. A member of my congregation had started tithing as a twelve year-old boy and had become a millionaire. He was quite convinced that the millions were the reward of his tithing.
“Blessed is he who considers the poor! The Lord delivers him in the day of trouble.” I was never much convinced by this millionaire businessman because of my first pastoral experience when I took the church of my deceased father for six months. The first pastoral problem I had was dealing with an old man whom I greatly respected, who really had the grace of God in him. He had considered the poor to the degree of giving striking miners so much credit at his grocery store that he lost his business. In the seventy-eighth year of his life, he had to face the problem of bankruptcy, and the fact that there was no simple correlation between his goodness and the fortunes of his life.
Both kinds of faith were wrong. First, that if we pray to God fervently enough he will establish some special security for us against the security of the other person. Or secondly, the belief that there are simple moral correlations between the vast processes either of nature or of history and human virtue. The history of our Puritan fathers in New England illustrates how wrong are both of these propositions. There were some very great virtues and graces in their lives. But the doctrine of special providence represents the real defect in our Puritan inheritance. These Puritan forefathers of ours were sure that every rain and every drought was connected with the virtue and vice of their enterprise - that God always had his hand upon them to reward them for their goodness, and to punish them for their evil.
Their belief in special providence was unfortunate, particularly so when a religious community developed in the vast possibilities of America, where inevitably the proofs of God’s favor turned out to be greater than the proofs of God’s wrath. It may be the reason why we Americans are so self-righteous. It may be also the reason why we still have not come to terms, in an ultimate religious sense, with our responsibilities; with the problems of the special favors that our nation enjoys compared with other nations. But first of all we have to realize that this picture of God’s love is not true. The Scriptures also are full of testimony that it is not true. Certainly it is the point of the Book of Job. Job first hopes that God is a God of simple justice, but it is proved to him that this cannot be the case. Then Job protests against the fact that if he does wrong he is convicted as a sinner, but if he does right, he is no better off. “I cannot lift up my head.” Ours is a confused kind of world, says Job, in which there is no guarantee that the righteous man will prosper. Is there a God in this kind of world?
These are the protests that run through the Scriptures as they run through life. “My feet had almost stumbled,” says the great seventy-third Psalm. “My steps had well nigh slipped . . . when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. . .Their eyes swell out with fatness, . . . and they say, ‘How can God know?’
“When I saw the prosperity of the wicked” - here is man in history involved in the web of relationships and meanings, but not of simple ones. There must be some moral meaning here. Is there not some punishment of wickedness in life? And I do not mean any of the arbitrary punishment which we inflict by our courts. For life is not completely at variance with itself. There is reward for goodness in life, and there is punishment for evil, but not absolutely. The same law which punishes the criminal punishes the Savior. And there are three crosses: two for criminals who cannot meet the moral mediocrities of life, and one for the Savior who rises above it. This is life.
Martin Buber, some years ago, made a remark about the special spiritual problems that we face in our world, where we cannot bring to any simple end the structure of moral meaning in which we stand. “When the Nazis ruled,” he said, “even when they were at the height of their rule, I knew in my heart that they would fall, that they would be punished.”
But now we face a future with greater threats of destruction than during the Nazi period. And this will continue partly because it is a problem that involves all the confusions of modern history against which our own goodness is not adequate. There is no simple moral resolution of the nuclear dilemma. These are the facts of our historic existence; life cannot be correlated easily into simple moral meanings; nor can the Christian faith be validated by proving special acts of providence in your own or somebody else’s favor.
I have a certain embarrassment about this issue in the great debate between Christianity and secularism. I am convinced of the Christian faith in the God revealed in Christ and whom Christ says is partially revealed in the impartialities of nature. Yet it seems to me also true that a certain type of secularism has advantages over us on any point where, to quote William James, Christianity becomes “an effort to lobby in the courts of the Almighty for special favors.”
Against this lobbying for special favors, one must admit that there is an element of nobility either in modern or ancient Stoicism. Marcus Aurelius said: “If so be the gods deliberated in particular on those things that should happen to me, I must stand to their deliberation, but if so be that they have not deliberated for me in particular, certainly they have on the whole and in general deliberated on those things which happen to me. In consequence and coherence of this general deliberation, 1 am bound to embrace and to accept them.” There is a certain nobility in Stoic courage. It has no sense of an ultimate relationship to God as a final expression of the Christian faith, but as far as it goes, is it not true?
Modern man, under the influence of natural science, sees the problem more critically than it was seen before. We see that nature, whatever may be God’s ultimate sovereignty over it, moves by its own laws. Even so good a theologian as the late William Temple did not understand this. He tried to solve it b saving the laws of nature are merely God’s habitual way of doing things. If he does not want to act in the habitual way, he will choose another way. Surely this is too voluntaristic a conception of how the forces of nature work.
An analogous proposition would he that my heart beats in a habitual way, but if I choose, I could have it do something else. No, my heart has its own automatic processes do the forces of nature. Many in our modern world have come to despair about this vast realm of seeming meaninglessness.
Though we have some sympathy from a modern scientific culture which says such special providence is not true, what concerns us more as Christians is the protect of Jesus against the underlying assumptions. It is not true that God gives special favors, and it is not true that there are simple moral meanings in the processes of history. We cannot speak simply of a moral order which if defied, would destroy us. Though Jesus is concerned about the whole dimension of the gospel, it is not so much whether these things are true or not upon their own levels, but whether they would be right. God’s love would not be right if it were this kind of a love. This is the point that Christ makes in the Sermon on the Mount, that God’s love would not be right. The Christian faith believes that within and beyond the tragedies and the contradictions of history we have laid hold upon a loving heart, the proof of whose love is first impartiality toward all of his children, and secondly a mercy which transcends good and evil.
How shall we appropriate this insistence of Christ in our life? All of us, including some who are not conventionally religious, have a desire for an ultimate security. Even people who are not conventionally religious often pray in the hour of crisis. In that sense, all men are religious. Yet under the discipline of the gospel, we should bring each one of these prayers under scrutiny.
This does not change radically the problem of intercessory prayer. Perhaps we have to consider lift in three different dimensions. First, there is the vast dimension of nature where we cannot expect that God will put up a special umbrella fur us against this or that possible disaster. In the realm of nature, we face the problem of natural evil. Jesus was asked, “Master, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus’ answer repudiated the idea of special providence: “It was not that this man sinned or his parents have sinned but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.” There is no meaning to this blindness except the ultimate possible meaning of how the blindness might become a source of grace. It is a most terrible thing to correlate natural evil immediately to any moral and spiritual meaning, and yet it is a wonderful thing to correlate it ultimately. Likewise Jesus replied, when asked about those killed by the fall of the tower in Siloam, “Were they worse offenders than all the others who dwell in Jerusalem? I tell you, no!” Do not try to relate natural catastrophes to moral meanings. Do not ask the question whether people killed in an earthquake are more guilty; more sinful, than others. “I tell you, no!” Ask the question, rather, what ultimate use, what final point for the grace of God is there in this calamity? But do not correlate it in such a way that it ceases to be a calamity, fur this belongs to the realm of nature.
In the realm of history we have another problem, of course, because history is a realm of human freedom and human agency, and if it did not have any moral meaning at all, it would be intolerable, If there were not some reward fur goodness, life would be absolutely askew If there were no likelihood that forgiveness would produce the spirit of forgiveness, and mutuality the spirit of mutuality and reciprocity; it would be hard to love and trust each other. Yet in the processes of history these things are not simply correlated. The suffering of the innocent is one of the most terrible things in the collective enterprise of man. When, towards the end of the Second World War, we started to bomb the Germans into submission, we bombed Hamburg first, the city that had more anti-Nazi votes than any other German city. These anguishes are the facts of life as we find them in history.
There are no simple correlations. This does not mean that we will not pray for our loved ones in the hazards and tumults of history, when so frequently their destiny is a curious combination of the physical and the spiritual. We certainly will not stop praying for their health, particularly in view of what we know about psychosomatic characteristics in the human personality today. We will pray for the health of other people and pray for their healing.
This is the realm of history which is a vast middle ground between the realm of grace and the realm of nature. But ultimately, of course, our Christian faith lives in the realm of grace, in the realm of freedom. This is God’s freedom and my freedom, beyond the structures of my body; the realm of grace where I know God and am persuaded, as St. Paul says, that he knows me.
In that realm, finally, all concern for immediate correlations and coherences and meanings falls away. The Christian faith stands in the sense of an ultimate meaning. We may be persuaded that God is on our side - not against somebody else - but on our side in this ultimate sense. We are “sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, . . . will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
It is on that level of meaning that the Christian faith makes sense. The lower levels are a threat, not only to the sense of the meaning of life, but finally to the morals of life. We must not deny that there is a kind of religion that enhances the ego and gives it an undue place in the world. But from the stand¬point of our faith we should take our humble and contrite place in God’s plan of the whole, and leave it to him to complete the fragmentation of our life.
O God, who has promised that all things will work together for good to those that love you, grant us patience amidst the tumults, pains and afflictions of life, and faith to discern your love, within, above, and beyond the impartial destinies of this great drama of life. Save us from every vainglorious pretension by which we demand favors which violate your love for all your children, and grant us grace to appropriate every fortune, both good and evil, for the triumph of the suffering, crucified, and risen Lord in our souls and life. In whose name we ask it.
The Providence of God
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” - MATTHEW 5:43-48, RSV
My text is taken from the New Testament lesson: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”
This text has been preached upon many times in the memory of all of us. Usually, however, the emphasis has been upon the moral admonition that we should love our enemies, and not much attention has been paid to the justification of the love of the enemy that Jesus gives by reference to the impartial character of God’s love. It is on the second theme that I want to speak this morning.
There are many things to say about the first theme, for Jesus is suggesting in his Sermon on the Mount that you cannot be moral if you are too strictly moral. The highest morality of forgiveness is, as Berdyaev says, “the morality beyond morality.” Nobody who is strictly moral can forgive, because forgiveness is at once the fulfillment of every concept of justice, and its annulment. Jesus justifies this “morality beyond all morality” by saying God is like that. The love of God is an impartial goodness beyond good and evil. The providence of God is an impartial concern for all men without any special privileges in it.
Thus, the structure of meaning for the Christian faith is completed against all the contradictions in history, where there are no simple correlations of reward for good and punishment for evil. God is like nature, says Jesus, like the impar¬tial nature which you could accuse of not being moral at all, because the sun shines upon both the evil and the good, and the rain descends upon the just and the unjust. A nonmoral nature is made into the symbol of the transmoral mercy. Here is a very radical concept, and one of those words of Scripture that we never quite take in. It is a word of Scripture that has particular significance because it is set squarely against most of our religion, inside the Christian Church as well as anywhere else.
When we say that we believe in God, we are inclined to mean that we have found a way to the ultimate source and end of life, and this gives us, against all the chances and changes of life, some special security and some special favor. And if we do not mean that - which is religion on a fairly adolescent and immature level - at least we mean that we have discovered amidst the vast confusions of life what is usually called the moral order, according to which evil is punished and good rewarded, and we could hardly feel that life had any meaning if we were not certain of that.
The Bible is full of this debate between what might be called the instinct of religion and the gospel of Christ. The natural instincts of religion demand that my life be given meaning by a special security against all of the insecurities of life. If it should seem as if goodness and evil - punishment for evil and reward for good - were not being properly correlated in life, then God will guarantee finally that they will be properly correlated.
Thus, in the Scriptures the words of the Psalms, “A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.” Or the many intercessory prayers, the intent of which is “A thousand at your side, ten thousand at your right hand,” let it not come to my loved one. What a natural prayer that is and finally how impossible! “For in the time of trouble He shall hide me, and he shall set me upon a rock.” In a word, plead my cause, 0 Lord, against them that strive with me, fight against them that fight against me.
Examples can be multiplied and it must also be realized how very natural are these kinds of prayers. Has there ever been a conflict in the human community where we have not felt we could not fight the battle were not the Lord on our side? Perhaps, as Abraham Lincoln said, we did not as frequently ask the question of whether we were on the Lord’s side. These are natural religious instincts, the natural efforts to close prematurely the great structure of life’s meaning. Much more justified is the other aspect of this sense of special providence not that God would give me special privileges, special securities against the other man - but that in a very hazardous world where it is not certain that good will be rewarded and evil punished, at least God should set that right.
“Blessed is he who considers the poor!” to use another word of the Psalm, “The Lord delivers him in the day of trouble.” Many years ago, tithing was popular in some of the churches. A member of my congregation had started tithing as a twelve year-old boy and had become a millionaire. He was quite convinced that the millions were the reward of his tithing.
“Blessed is he who considers the poor! The Lord delivers him in the day of trouble.” I was never much convinced by this millionaire businessman because of my first pastoral experience when I took the church of my deceased father for six months. The first pastoral problem I had was dealing with an old man whom I greatly respected, who really had the grace of God in him. He had considered the poor to the degree of giving striking miners so much credit at his grocery store that he lost his business. In the seventy-eighth year of his life, he had to face the problem of bankruptcy, and the fact that there was no simple correlation between his goodness and the fortunes of his life.
Both kinds of faith were wrong. First, that if we pray to God fervently enough he will establish some special security for us against the security of the other person. Or secondly, the belief that there are simple moral correlations between the vast processes either of nature or of history and human virtue. The history of our Puritan fathers in New England illustrates how wrong are both of these propositions. There were some very great virtues and graces in their lives. But the doctrine of special providence represents the real defect in our Puritan inheritance. These Puritan forefathers of ours were sure that every rain and every drought was connected with the virtue and vice of their enterprise - that God always had his hand upon them to reward them for their goodness, and to punish them for their evil.
Their belief in special providence was unfortunate, particularly so when a religious community developed in the vast possibilities of America, where inevitably the proofs of God’s favor turned out to be greater than the proofs of God’s wrath. It may be the reason why we Americans are so self-righteous. It may be also the reason why we still have not come to terms, in an ultimate religious sense, with our responsibilities; with the problems of the special favors that our nation enjoys compared with other nations. But first of all we have to realize that this picture of God’s love is not true. The Scriptures also are full of testimony that it is not true. Certainly it is the point of the Book of Job. Job first hopes that God is a God of simple justice, but it is proved to him that this cannot be the case. Then Job protests against the fact that if he does wrong he is convicted as a sinner, but if he does right, he is no better off. “I cannot lift up my head.” Ours is a confused kind of world, says Job, in which there is no guarantee that the righteous man will prosper. Is there a God in this kind of world?
These are the protests that run through the Scriptures as they run through life. “My feet had almost stumbled,” says the great seventy-third Psalm. “My steps had well nigh slipped . . . when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. . .Their eyes swell out with fatness, . . . and they say, ‘How can God know?’
“When I saw the prosperity of the wicked” - here is man in history involved in the web of relationships and meanings, but not of simple ones. There must be some moral meaning here. Is there not some punishment of wickedness in life? And I do not mean any of the arbitrary punishment which we inflict by our courts. For life is not completely at variance with itself. There is reward for goodness in life, and there is punishment for evil, but not absolutely. The same law which punishes the criminal punishes the Savior. And there are three crosses: two for criminals who cannot meet the moral mediocrities of life, and one for the Savior who rises above it. This is life.
Martin Buber, some years ago, made a remark about the special spiritual problems that we face in our world, where we cannot bring to any simple end the structure of moral meaning in which we stand. “When the Nazis ruled,” he said, “even when they were at the height of their rule, I knew in my heart that they would fall, that they would be punished.”
But now we face a future with greater threats of destruction than during the Nazi period. And this will continue partly because it is a problem that involves all the confusions of modern history against which our own goodness is not adequate. There is no simple moral resolution of the nuclear dilemma. These are the facts of our historic existence; life cannot be correlated easily into simple moral meanings; nor can the Christian faith be validated by proving special acts of providence in your own or somebody else’s favor.
I have a certain embarrassment about this issue in the great debate between Christianity and secularism. I am convinced of the Christian faith in the God revealed in Christ and whom Christ says is partially revealed in the impartialities of nature. Yet it seems to me also true that a certain type of secularism has advantages over us on any point where, to quote William James, Christianity becomes “an effort to lobby in the courts of the Almighty for special favors.”
Against this lobbying for special favors, one must admit that there is an element of nobility either in modern or ancient Stoicism. Marcus Aurelius said: “If so be the gods deliberated in particular on those things that should happen to me, I must stand to their deliberation, but if so be that they have not deliberated for me in particular, certainly they have on the whole and in general deliberated on those things which happen to me. In consequence and coherence of this general deliberation, 1 am bound to embrace and to accept them.” There is a certain nobility in Stoic courage. It has no sense of an ultimate relationship to God as a final expression of the Christian faith, but as far as it goes, is it not true?
Modern man, under the influence of natural science, sees the problem more critically than it was seen before. We see that nature, whatever may be God’s ultimate sovereignty over it, moves by its own laws. Even so good a theologian as the late William Temple did not understand this. He tried to solve it b saving the laws of nature are merely God’s habitual way of doing things. If he does not want to act in the habitual way, he will choose another way. Surely this is too voluntaristic a conception of how the forces of nature work.
An analogous proposition would he that my heart beats in a habitual way, but if I choose, I could have it do something else. No, my heart has its own automatic processes do the forces of nature. Many in our modern world have come to despair about this vast realm of seeming meaninglessness.
Though we have some sympathy from a modern scientific culture which says such special providence is not true, what concerns us more as Christians is the protect of Jesus against the underlying assumptions. It is not true that God gives special favors, and it is not true that there are simple moral meanings in the processes of history. We cannot speak simply of a moral order which if defied, would destroy us. Though Jesus is concerned about the whole dimension of the gospel, it is not so much whether these things are true or not upon their own levels, but whether they would be right. God’s love would not be right if it were this kind of a love. This is the point that Christ makes in the Sermon on the Mount, that God’s love would not be right. The Christian faith believes that within and beyond the tragedies and the contradictions of history we have laid hold upon a loving heart, the proof of whose love is first impartiality toward all of his children, and secondly a mercy which transcends good and evil.
How shall we appropriate this insistence of Christ in our life? All of us, including some who are not conventionally religious, have a desire for an ultimate security. Even people who are not conventionally religious often pray in the hour of crisis. In that sense, all men are religious. Yet under the discipline of the gospel, we should bring each one of these prayers under scrutiny.
This does not change radically the problem of intercessory prayer. Perhaps we have to consider lift in three different dimensions. First, there is the vast dimension of nature where we cannot expect that God will put up a special umbrella fur us against this or that possible disaster. In the realm of nature, we face the problem of natural evil. Jesus was asked, “Master, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus’ answer repudiated the idea of special providence: “It was not that this man sinned or his parents have sinned but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.” There is no meaning to this blindness except the ultimate possible meaning of how the blindness might become a source of grace. It is a most terrible thing to correlate natural evil immediately to any moral and spiritual meaning, and yet it is a wonderful thing to correlate it ultimately. Likewise Jesus replied, when asked about those killed by the fall of the tower in Siloam, “Were they worse offenders than all the others who dwell in Jerusalem? I tell you, no!” Do not try to relate natural catastrophes to moral meanings. Do not ask the question whether people killed in an earthquake are more guilty; more sinful, than others. “I tell you, no!” Ask the question, rather, what ultimate use, what final point for the grace of God is there in this calamity? But do not correlate it in such a way that it ceases to be a calamity, fur this belongs to the realm of nature.
In the realm of history we have another problem, of course, because history is a realm of human freedom and human agency, and if it did not have any moral meaning at all, it would be intolerable, If there were not some reward fur goodness, life would be absolutely askew If there were no likelihood that forgiveness would produce the spirit of forgiveness, and mutuality the spirit of mutuality and reciprocity; it would be hard to love and trust each other. Yet in the processes of history these things are not simply correlated. The suffering of the innocent is one of the most terrible things in the collective enterprise of man. When, towards the end of the Second World War, we started to bomb the Germans into submission, we bombed Hamburg first, the city that had more anti-Nazi votes than any other German city. These anguishes are the facts of life as we find them in history.
There are no simple correlations. This does not mean that we will not pray for our loved ones in the hazards and tumults of history, when so frequently their destiny is a curious combination of the physical and the spiritual. We certainly will not stop praying for their health, particularly in view of what we know about psychosomatic characteristics in the human personality today. We will pray for the health of other people and pray for their healing.
This is the realm of history which is a vast middle ground between the realm of grace and the realm of nature. But ultimately, of course, our Christian faith lives in the realm of grace, in the realm of freedom. This is God’s freedom and my freedom, beyond the structures of my body; the realm of grace where I know God and am persuaded, as St. Paul says, that he knows me.
In that realm, finally, all concern for immediate correlations and coherences and meanings falls away. The Christian faith stands in the sense of an ultimate meaning. We may be persuaded that God is on our side - not against somebody else - but on our side in this ultimate sense. We are “sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, . . . will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
It is on that level of meaning that the Christian faith makes sense. The lower levels are a threat, not only to the sense of the meaning of life, but finally to the morals of life. We must not deny that there is a kind of religion that enhances the ego and gives it an undue place in the world. But from the stand¬point of our faith we should take our humble and contrite place in God’s plan of the whole, and leave it to him to complete the fragmentation of our life.
O God, who has promised that all things will work together for good to those that love you, grant us patience amidst the tumults, pains and afflictions of life, and faith to discern your love, within, above, and beyond the impartial destinies of this great drama of life. Save us from every vainglorious pretension by which we demand favors which violate your love for all your children, and grant us grace to appropriate every fortune, both good and evil, for the triumph of the suffering, crucified, and risen Lord in our souls and life. In whose name we ask it.
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