Interstellar and the Incarnation

(Warning: Minor spoilers ahead.)

2014: A Space Odyssey

When Interstellar came out last November, the hoopla surrounding it was matched only by the film itself. It was, in a word, spectacular. It was a true space epic on par with 2001: A Space Odyssey in its scope and profundity, and it arguably outdid 2001 with its more humane depiction of mankind's future (i.e., no disturbing acid-trip tran- scendence into who-knows- whatzit). Add to it moments of thrills and suspense, plus outstanding special effects that afforded scientifically accurate space phenomena, and it is as I said: spectacular.

It is not unfair to say the film espouses humanism, but it's not entirely fair either. True, there is a great deal of emphasis on humanity's ability to save ourselves with our pluck, ingenuity, and (above all) science and technology, but there is something more than these that the film acknowledges, something outside of science and technology and pure reason but not wholly outside of us: love.

Kickin' it old school.

This is a new kind of hu- manism. Old school human- ism (from the Enlightenment to Modernism) saw Reason as the supreme attribute of humanity, and thus its advancement was our pri- mary motive power: we are built to know, so let us unlock and understand and manipulate and control the very fabric of existence. Love, being primarily emotional, was unreasonable, and therefore of limited use outside of coercion and manipulation. (See The Abolition of Man.) Such an older humanism is present in Interstellar, mainly embodied in Matt Damon's character, the interestingly named Dr. Mann, who talks a big game about his duty to preserve the human species at all cost. Such costs included betraying his own teammates (killing one of them) and nearly wrecking the entire interstellar mission in a foolhardy move that only killed himself and jeopardized everyone else. All the while, he excuses himself as doing what is necessary, and how one day the human race will recognize him as a hero.

Dr. Mann: the failure of the old.

He's an interesting character, mainly because you know he doesn't believe a word of what he's saying. The brilliance in Matt Damon's performance is the anguish and struggle you see come over Dr. Mann as he does his nefarious deeds in his well-meaning attempt to save humanity. There's more that could be said about him, but the movie makes the basic point quite clear: Dr. Mann's way is not the right way. His attempts to be purely detached from his decisions fail miserably (in more ways than one), and Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) rightly dubs him a "coward," someone who uses rational justification as a smokescreen for giving up hope.

But what exactly drives Cooper and the others? The answer is love. Love is their motive power. Not some abstract "love" for the human race, but specific, concrete love. Cooper goes on the mission because saving the earth means saving his daughter. Amelia (Anne Hathaway) is trying to reach a fellow explorer trapped on a distant planet because she loves him, even though getting to him is not an option, and the scene where she argues for going there anyway ends up with her admitting that she's wants to go there simply out of love, but what's wrong with that? Maybe love is something scientifically understandable, some force or power or substance in the universe existing dimensionally in ways we don't yet understand but know it's real because we experience it nonetheless.

Cooper and Amelia: the near miss of the new.

That scene is fascinating to watch, because as Amelia goes on, her argument breaks down and sounds utterly absurd, and the movie lets it sound absurd because it is utterly absurd to try and scientifically quantify love. It is (as she puts it) "transcendent," something existing beyond the scope of pure scientific inquiry, and yet it is knowable because we just know. Our experience and intuition rise to defy (and convince) our reason. It was this sequence, listening to Amelia speak of love this way, that made me later realize how amazingly, frustratingly close to the truth this movie got.

Listen again to what was being said: Love is a transcendent something existing and acting within our universe and yet is greater than it, filling it, and driving us in our deepest being to move beyond ourselves towards something other than ourselves. That sounds suspiciously like God.

Think about the basic plot: Cooper agrees to go on an interstellar journey across space and time to save humanity from an inevitable doom, and he does this all out of love. That sounds suspiciously similar to the Gospel.

Somewhere in time....

And think of the climax: When Cooper is swept up into a tesseract of Time, he attempts to communicate with his daughter out of frantic, desperate love for her by interacting with the physical world from his transcendent position. During this scene, he at times literally had his finger on the Incarnation: his transcendence touched the very dust.

This is not a Christian movie. Christopher Nolan was not deliberately trying to symbolize the Gospel or Incarnation. I believe that it just happened that way, because the Gospel and the Incarnation are true (not just factually and historically but also ontologically and ultimately), and you can't talk about "love" in any serious or profound way without them. It just isn't possible. (It's vital to note that the very strength of the "love" in this film is made possible because we see it incarnated in Cooper's relationship with his daughter. In this way, it avoids becoming merely sappy and sentimental.) This is the film's true power and what makes it so moving: not just its incredible composition as a work of art but also that it was so incredibly close to the truth. It brushed up against it multiple times, literally (as I said) placing its finger on it.

In the end, brushing up was all it managed to do. Since the film contained no concept at all of Christ or God (either for or against), it couldn't make the final step to connect it all together. Just as old school humanism emptied Reason of any higher meaning and thus left it bankrupt whenever it came up short (as it did in the 20th century), so Love in the new humanism points to nothing beyond itself and thus must ultimately remain mysterious and unknowable, a transcendent something that we experience but don't really understand. We experience it, but are ultimately shut out from it. It is there, but it is silent.

Thus, the film feels like a near, near miss.

But, good grief, what a spectacular near miss.

Seriously: you need to see it.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2015

 

The Dirty Hands of God

"How long will You look on? [...] O Lord, be not far from me." Ps. 35:17, 22

An old friend of mine has been leaving much of the faith he grew up with, and it has made him say some strange things. For example: one of his step-daughters (who's about six or seven) came up to him and asked if he would like to donate some money to her church. He asked her why and she said her church was trying to raise money to build a well or water pump (I forget which) in some African village that did not have a consistent and clean water supply. My friend then asked her if she knew God really loved those people, and she said He did. His response was: "Then why doesn't He give them water?"

Knowing my friend, I'm sure he thought he was being clever or funny, though I don't know whether or not he gave her any money. What I do know is that his final statement was ironic, ironic because of its ignorance about God and His main means of operation in the world today: the Church. The Church is made up of all true believers everywhere and is referred to in Scripture as "the body of Christ" (Rom. 12:3-5; I Cor. 12:12-27; Eph. 4:15-16), which means several things, but one in particular is that the Church is the continuing presence of Christ (and thus, God) on earth in human form after His ascension. That is why my friend's statement was ignorantly ironic: he wondered aloud why a loving God wouldn't give people water, not seeing that God was in the process of doing just that through His body, viz., the people of a local church, including my friend's own step-daughter.

I suppose the fact that God doesn't play by our rules (or our logic or "good" ideas) can be quite frustrating. It would seem simpler and smarter for God to just snap His fingers and fix a problem, any problem, all problems, in an instant. But He doesn't. He seems instead to take the long way around: holding off the apocalypse while working out His will through people and their actions. It does seem counter-intuitive, though why it's not is an issue for another post. For now, the point is that what the story of Scripture (and I would posit common Christian experience as well) seems to say is that God prefers to work through things: actual objects and places as well as people and their actions. He does not work in the abstract nor perform out of thin air. As with the creation in Genesis and on through to today, all God's works are gritty and tangible, even if they're often too subtle to be a spectacle.

The god of this world.

We demand a spectacle. We often demand (as my friend did in a roundabout way) that God "prove" himself though some spectacle, some instantaneous feat from nowhere, like He's a magician performing tricks for an audience. It is the attitude Mussolini had when he said, "God, if you are there, strike me dead!" It is the sentiment expressed in a very moving scene in The Grey when Liam Neeson's character calls out for God to save him from the dire situation he's in (which of course "God" doesn't do). It is the position held by the Pharisees when they demanded a "sign" from Jesus (Matt. 12:38; Matt. 16:1; Mark 8:11), and Jesus' answer then seems to be God's answer now: "no sign will be given" (Mark 8:12). No performance, no spectacle, no show. It is not the way He works.

"Let's get down to 'de nitty-gritty."

God's work is concrete and patient, like an invincible yet currently invisible seed planted in the earth, growing unstoppably though subtly. He does not work through instantaneous nothingness but rather though all the solid substances He has made: through flesh and blood, through dirt and water, through all the elements of nature and man. His presence has been marked by pillars of fire and cloud as well as whispers and whirlwinds, and His influence has been felt by thunder and hail as well as plagues of famine and pests and diseases. He wrought His will through the lives of nations and empires as well as individual people, from Moses and Joshua and Samuel to Balaam and Rahab to Peter and Paul. He has revealed Himself, first in words through voices and writings, and then by becoming a man Himself. And all of His acts take their time, from 40 years in the wilderness to 400 years of silence to 2000 years of the Church. He is always practical, methodical, and patient.

The hands of God.

Again, this can seem counter-intuitive to us, or at least counter to our intuition, which is necessarily limited, finite, and fallen, and of course God's thoughts are not our thoughts, etc. However, I don't care to leave the whole thing at the feet of "God works in mysterious ways," because I actually like the way He works. Seriously. I like that it is concrete, actual, gritty, a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-your-hands- dirty affair. I like that the heart of the king (or president) is in God's hands (Prov. 21:1), and that my sanctification is God working through me (Phil. 2:12-13) rather than outside of me or in spite of me. I like that he can work and chooses to work through a local church and a little girl in order to bring water to someone. In short, I like that God is an incarnational God, a God of flesh and blood and earth. He is not "out there" or "over there" somewhere but rather right here with us, in the midst of all of us (Acts 17:26-28), both our pains and our joys, weeping and rejoicing in turn, and all the while working His unstoppable will and way through the actual, everyday lives of His actual, everyday people.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

A Lover and a Fighter (a Christmas postscript)

The following is from pages 124-125 & 130 of C.S. Lewis' book Reflections on the Psalms:

[The Psalms' focus on the Messiah as a conquering hero] emphasizes an aspect of the Nativity to which our later sentiment about Christmas (excellent in itself) does less than justice. For those who first read these [messianic] Psalms as poems about the birth of Christ, that birth meant something very militant: the hero, the "judge" or champion or giant-killer, who was to fight and beat death, hell and the devils, had at last arrived, and the evidence suggests that Our Lord also thought of Himself in those terms.

[...]

The hero has come.

Read in this sense, the [messianic] Psalm restores Christmas to its proper complexity. The birth of Christ is the arrival of the great warrior and the great king. Also of the Lover, the Bridegroom, whose beauty surpasses that of man. But not only the Bridegroom as the lover, the desired; the Bridegroom also as he who makes fruitful, the father of children still to be begotten and born. Certainly the image of a Child in a manger by no means suggests to us a king, giant-killer, bridegroom, and father. But it would not suggest the eternal Word either---if we didn't know. All alike are aspects of the same central paradox.

In Our Midst (Christmas Homily)

"...eyes to see..."

"O taste and see that the Lord is good." Ps. 34:8

The goodness of God is not an abstraction, not a mere dog- matic assertion requiring no more than intellectual assent. Rather, the goodness of God is to be a sensory experience (and not the only one). It is meant to be tactile and fragrant, audible and visible and flavorful. This does not mean that you will suddenly receive complete comprehension of the incom- prehensible God. What it does mean is that His goodness is meant to be experienced in the actual moments of your life. It is to be a point of contact between you and the Divine, a moment of Incarnation, a moment where God leaves the ivory tower of your mind and becomes real in the midst of your experience.

As close as the house you're standing in.

If our God is hidden, it is because He is too immense and not because He is too obscure, like the house you're living in, which is the only one you don't see when you look out your window. It is too close for perception, and so is God. The incomprehensibly im- mense God is in your midst always, and though the limits of our mind cannot grasp Him fully, He is meant to be experienced. He is meant to be met in the moment. In ancient days, though veils and walls kept Him separate from His people, He still had a place amongst them, an actual dwelling in the Holiest of Holies. Today, though time and space and perception seem to separate us, He is not far from any one of us (Acts 17:26-28). Furthermore, He has made His people His dwelling place (John 14:23; II Cor. 6:16), a body fitly joined together (Eph. 4:15-16), so that He may be experienced by us as well as through us to the world (Matt. 5:14-16).

Our God believes in making Himself known, believes in revelation and incarnation, believes in proving Himself to be real. If he had not spoken through His word, if He had not come in the likeness of men, then we would have cause to call Him an obscurantist. But He did, so we do not. He has proven His presence (Is. 45:18-19; Heb. 1:1-2), he has proven His love (Rom. 5:8; I John 4:9-10), and He continually proves His goodness. Therefore, ask for eyes to see Him, to see His goodness, and to let that goodness build a monument to His presence in your life.

"I have not spoken in secret...."

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

The Word is Alive (and Non-Negotiable)

"To the law and to the testimony. If they speak not according to this word, then it is because they have no light in them." Is. 8:20

Q: What rule has God given to direct us [on] how we may glorify and enjoy Him?

A: The word of God, which is contained in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us [on] how we may glorify and enjoy Him.

(Question 2, Westminster Shorter Catechism)

For the Christian, the Bible is more than just "relevant"; not less than, but certainly more. It is "alive" (Heb. 4:12), i.e., "God-breathed" (II Tim. 3:16) and thus presenced by the Spirit of God, the same Spirit who leads to the truth (John 14:26; 15:26; 16:13) and searches and reveals the "deep things" of God (I Cor. 2:10). Divine origin is nothing new: many religions claim to have received truth from God (or the gods, or the divine essence). But divine inspiration---in that the word is alive with God's Spirit, who still speaks through it to us and thus securing its authority for all time---that is a unique invention in the history of religion. It could have only been introduced (or discovered) by a religion with incarnation at its center. The Word was made text as well as flesh (Heb. 1:1-2). This is why the Confession says the Bible trumps or supersedes all other authorities: its divine origin and inspiration.

I can see my house from up here.

It trumps and supersedes all the traditions of men, even the most wise or most holy. This does not mean that the whole body of human writing is of no use to us. On the contrary, all things are ours for the taking (Phil. 4:8), and many things can be beneficial, but nothing carries the weight of authority like the Bible. The buck stops with it. It is the rubric by which all other wisdom rises or falls. Thus, wisdom and traditions of the world, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Schopenhauer to even Nietzsche and Foucault, are all ours for the taking and leaving. They own nothing in us (I Cor. 6:12). Likewise, the wisdom and traditions of the Church, from Augustin and Anselm and Aquinas to Pascal and Edwards and Spurgeon to Lewis and Schaeffer, are also ours for the taking or leaving. Let them all come, but let them all rise or fall on this one foundation: the living truth of God.

I think I need some pants.

This living truth also trumps and supersedes human reason. Again, this does not mean that reason is useless or invalid, only that it does not have the final say. It can never have the final say anyway. As finite creatures, living in our unique yet limited capacity as subjective beings on one small speck in the universe, our understanding is necessarily limited, which takes true humility to see, for we all from time to time slip into the notion that we have it all figured out. "We know in part," says Paul (I Cor. 13:9), a profound statement for two reasons: (1) it asserts that we can "know," that we can have true knowledge, that understanding is not futile nor epistemology an empty exercise; (2) it asserts that our knowledge has limits, limits that only God can and will fill (I Cor. 13:10, 12). In one simple statement, we find rebuke to both the skeptic and the egoist. We find reason defended and put in its place, viz., beneath the authority of God's revelation.

Lastly, the living word and revelation of God trumps and supersedes what was once called "the light within," a Quaker term that meant the self-guidance of the "divine spark" within us, guidance without reference to any outside authority. This idea is still very attractive. You often hear the call to "follow your heart" or "listen to your guts" or some such thing. It is not all wrong. Like human reason, instinct and common sense have a place; but also like reason, that place is limited. Even more so, for our "heart" is deceptive (Jer. 17:9; Matt. 15:18-20) and deceived (II Cor. 4:3-4). To trust our hearts with reference to nothing else is to court disaster, for it is inadequate to know the truth, including the truths that only God can reveal (I Cor. 2:9-10).

Hey! Don't you tell me what to do!

"Follow your heart" has its religious versions as well, mainly in charismatic circles and in more liberal versions of Christianity, both of which refer to it as "a movement of the Holy Spirit." Liberal Christian- ity is especially egregious in this error, wielding the "Holy Spirit" like a bludgeon against even the Bible itself. Charismatic movements may use the "Holy Spirit" to justify absurd prophecies or raucous church meetings, but liberal Christian types (e.g., Rob Bell) use it to justify the complete eradication of doctrinal clarity and (by extension) the complete reversal of certain biblical positions. All this stems from ripping "the Spirit" away from any authoritative mooring other than your own whims, which is what "follow your heart" is really all about. It is an ennobling of our own self-centeredness, another means to justify our own ends.

This is what makes the Bible so offensive to many today: it is an authoritative mooring set outside and even against our own whims. It does offer wondrous possibilities, but it also demands compliance on every level. What it has revealed is the touchstone for any and every thing else, including itself. We can distinguish between "the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error" by what has been written by the prophets and apostles (I John 4:5-6). We can know who and what has or has not "light" because of the "law and the testimony" already delivered (Is. 8:20). It is a fixed point, as fixed as God Himself, for it is His word, presenced with His immutable presence and filled to bursting with His everlasting truth.

Just follow your heaAAAAAAAAAaaaaaa...!!!

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

"...where can you run to escape from yourself?" (Eschatological Vision, Part II)

"Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people; but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and His glory shall be seen upon thee. And the nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising." Is. 60:1-3

"...the Day-Spring from on High has visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace." Luke 1:68-79

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.... In Him was life, and that life was the light of men.... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us...." John 1:1-18

"Maybe redemption has stories to tell. / Maybe forgiveness is right where you fell." -John Foreman

The second element you find in the Christian eschatological vision is the divine intervention. Now, Christianity is not escapism. Many may claim it as such, preaching so-called "evacuation theology," but they are wrong. Escapism is about us going somewhere else; Christianity has always been about something coming to us (or someone, to be more precise). In the Christian equation, God is always the primary active principle. Any "action" that we take is necessarily secondary, a derivative of His. This is not to minimize our activity, but rather to put it in its proper context, viz., the context called God. He is the source and origin of all movement. He is Life-Giver and All-Sustainer, Creator and Ruler. To put it perhaps controversially, He is masculine while we are feminine: He is the actor, we are the receiver (and re-actor). What we do at the moment of reception (either to welcome or reject) is on us; but we did not make the action itself, neither did we make ourselves as receivers or anything else, and every strength we have or good and evil we do in reaction to His action comes from the life given from Him to us. If this minimizes us in any way, then let us be minimized; for God is, and without Him we are not. That is the singular theme pulsating throughout all of Scripture like the tides beneath the ocean.

It's all linked....

In the beginning before beginning, God acted upon the Nothingness and spoke words of Creation, His Word spoken and yet continually speaking and sustaining all things. Later on He spoke into the lives of many people. He spoke into the life of a pagan idol-maker, calling him the "father of many nations," and led him out into the wilderness to a place he'd never seen to found a people holy to God. He blazed into the life of an exiled shepherd, calling him to liberate His people from bondage and lead them to a "land of milk and honey." He summoned a shy tall man to be king, and then cast Him down and put a shepherd-boy in his place. He continually led His wayward people into captivity, and continually redeemed His repentant people out of it. He spoke through every prophet, from the exiled shepherd to a goat-skin-wearing wild-man living in the outskirts of Roman-occupied Israel. He announced His ultimate intentions to a virgin girl and then gave unto her and us all His Son, the Word Himself, speaking and bleeding and breathing new life into all who would receive. And His Spirit lives on in a Church, diffused and multifaceted yet united by that Spirit, speaking still until the ages end and the Word returns speaking judgment like a sword flowing from His mouth. And when all of the old has passed and the new has come and we enter into God's rest, there is no sign that His activity will ever cease, but rather it shall inaugurate a new thing again and again. So from the beginning of beginning to the very end and eternity beyond, God has the first and final word.

That is not escapism but intervention. Better yet, it is invasion. Other religions may have intervention (or interference), but it is at best mere instruction on how we can save ourselves, or at worst it is simply the randomness of capricious deities. Christianity alone has a different view. Our lives are not at the mercy of randomness, nor is our salvation bound up in moral instruction (as if we haven't had plenty of that already). Instruction would never save us, for our corruption is deep and inevitable. We do not need another code of conduct, nor a babysitter to constantly change our diapers. We need a surgeon to cut out and purge the corruption that has a deathly hold on us. We need a Spirit to speak new life into us, a Word to speak us anew, a Maker to remake us. Such a transformation, such renewal and upheaval, such divine invasion and revolution is the Christian story, from before the beginning until beyond the end.

It is not the optimist's story, who sees humanity saving itself with plenty of pluck and can-do spirit. It is not the pessimist's story, who sees humanity on its endless downward spiral, its mind unloosed from all tethers and its world unchained from all suns. It is not the stories told by the religions of the world, with their myriad retellings of self-enlightenment and self-salvation. It is the Christian vision alone who is the voice crying in the wilderness, crying out that God has acted, is acting, and will act again on behalf of our salvation and His glory, all without our help and all outside of our control and command.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

The Gospel to the Postmoderns (A Philosophy of Potatoes, Part V)

"I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create [national] calamity. I, the Lord, do all these things. Drop down, ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness. Let the earth open, and let it bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together. I, the Lord, have created it." Is. 45:6-8

There are always gaps in our lives: gaps of knowledge, of understanding, of ability, of identity and purpose. The truth of things always seems just beyond our reach, lost in a cloud of contradictory witnesses, all shouting their personal preferences in a private language of their own making. The white noise created by their effusions and emanations drowns out the clear cadences of reality, and we despair of ever getting to the truth of things, of ourselves. Our only hope (and what a paltry hope!) is to make our best guess, our best approximation to a target we cannot even see clearly. It is no surprise, then, that we all fall short.

It is no surprise to God either. It is the biggest joke of our contemporary, postmodern world that it thinks itself the new thing when it is really the old thing. The same old thing. The same old unbelief, now writ large. The same old failures: failure to see, to hear, to understand, to believe. All of our newest thoughts are merely a shiny new wrapper on the same old junk. We say that the authorial origin is displaced from us by our excess of discursive derivatives. God put it much simpler: we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We are separated from the Divine Origin of Being and Goodness by our primal deviation from His course. Consequently, we have all of us gone astray, even turning others to their own way, every man doing what is right in his own eyes because there is no king in the land. No authorial center to know and reference and be. We lost Him long ago. In our ignorance and arrogance we are lost, spiraling further down into the ever-widening yet ever-increasingly empty abyss of our lostness.

What can bridge this infinite gap? What can slice through all of the derivatives and find the Origin? What can retrace all the traces back to the Source? What can refill every absence with the presence of Meaning? What can reset all displacement and dispersion until the Whole is realized again? What can wash away our Sin? Nothing but the blood, the blood of God in Christ. Nothing but grace, the grace of God in Christ, for in Christ God became flesh and dwelt among us. The Origin became a derivative, the Source a trace, the Whole a discursive displacement, becoming one with the text, the conversation, the discursive field of play, the flesh and blood of men and the whoop and wharf of time. This was not an act of detached Reason, or cold Machine or mere Mind, nor another absurdism of fundamental Chaos. This was an act of grace, grace on the part of One greater than us, greater than all our noise, all our displacements, our mythologies and differances, greater than all our Sin.

Hear the Word speak into our present day delusion and crisis: grace alone is the bridge that spans the gulf of our mighty separation, the sword that slices through the jungle of our seemingly endless texts and myths and positions and postures and preferences and opinions and interpretations, cutting right through all of our jargon and gibberish, navigating the vacuity of our hyperspaces, deconstructing all of our simulations and simulacra, powering through every wall and obstacle that we have erected, crashing through with infinite, furious love and passion and purpose. His head is bleeding. His hands and feet and side are bleeding. His body has been demarcated by those in power. He was wounded for our dispersions, and by His stripes we are healed. By His resurrection, He defeated death and displacement and truth-to-power, so that at His name every knee shall bow and every discourse confess in one voice that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God most gracious. See what His grace has done. What only His grace could have done. It has brought us back to God. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

Advent Homily: Salvation is of the Law (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; He will save us." Is. 33:22

Here we see two simple yet staunch truths, one offensive and the other startling (and perhaps even more offensive). The offensive truth is that God, far from being a mere authority, is revealed as the absolute authority (of Israel specifically and by extension all things). The titles that He is given in this verse form a pattern that shows His authority to be all-encompassing.

As the "judge," He is the one who enforces the law: He passes sentence either to vindicate or punish, to deliver or destroy. As the "lawgiver," He is the one who makes the law: He (literally in Hebrew) "engraves" the law on tablets of stone, declaring forever what is right and wrong, just and unjust. And as the "king," He is the Law: He embodies its very essence and is its very reality, for the law is not the result of His arbitrary whims but the reflection of His perfect character. In sum, He is all-in-one the application of the reflection of the will that made and maintains and runs and rules all things. He is the one who is greater than us: greater than our notions and nations, greater than all our fads and fashions, greater than all our meta-narratives or private interpretations, and greater than all our Sin.

That last phrase points to the more starting truth: "He will save us." What's startling about this is that His identity as Savior is a direct result of His identity as the Absolute Authority. To put it simply, He can save us because He is in charge, because He has the power and the right to do so. Now, we often treat salvation as a category unto itself: God does save us, maybe not in spite of Himself, but at least in isolation from Himself, as though God took a holiday from His other attributes. ("Despite His sense of justice and holiness, God saved us anyway.") Scripture shows such well-intended thinking to be false: God's role as Savior is right in line and in accord with all His attributes, viz., His role as Absolute Authority. It is all linked together in one brilliant pattern that is God.

I suspect that we do not like this. Of course, we do not like the idea of absolute authority, but how much less will we like the idea of absolute authority being the grounds for heroism? It is bad enough that we have a king, but now we find that only the king can save us. And why? Because we have broken the law. Rebellion will not save us; rebellion is what's killing us. It is the height of idiocy to say that we must rebel against God in order to be free. We have rebelled against God, and we are not free but instead are enslaved to other masters, ones armed with cruel hate: the Devil and Sin and Death. It is vain to speak of questioning authority; we have questioned it. It is vain to speak of transgressing the boundaries; we have transgressed them. We have breached the wall, we have scaled the city, we have cast down the thrones of universal law, and we have paid for it with our souls, for in Adam we all died (I Cor. 15:22a), and all our talk is the rigor mortis setting in further and further and further. This rot will be purged with wrath, and we will be consumed in the purging, for the wages of Sin is death (Rom. 6:23a).

The only one who can save us from the wrath of the law is the Law Himself, the Law-giver and Law-applier, the only one who knows how to satisfy it. And He did satisfy it. He breached the walls of our insurrection to satisfy it. He mingled with the dust so that He might rebel against our rebellion. For this He was manifested: that He might destroy the works of the Devil (I John 3:8), the scheming, lying, son of perdition, whose trick have wasted the world. The King of kings met our anarchy with a little Anarchy of his own: the anarchy of righteousness against evil, of light against darkness, of order against chaos. That is the meaning of Christmas: the Law is our Savior, the King is our Hero. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

In the Name of Peace and Quietness (an Advent post by an Original Orthodox Rebel)

The following is from Dorothy Sayer's essay "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged," from the book Letters to a Diminished Church:

[The Incarnation] is not just a pious commonplace; it is not commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man---limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death---[God] had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

[...]

Possibly we might prefer not to take this tale too seriously---there are disquieting points about it. Here we had a man of divine character walking and talking among us---and what did we find to do with him? The common people, indeed, "heard him gladly," but our leading authorities in Church and State considered that he talked too much and uttered too many disconcerting truths. So we bribed one of his friends to hand him over quietly to the police, and we tried him on a rather vague charge of creating a disturbance, and had him publicly flogged and hanged on the common gallows, "thanking God we were rid of a knave." All this was not very creditable to us, even if he was (as many people thought and think) only a harmless, crazy preacher. But if the Church is right about him, it was more discreditable still, for the man we hanged was God Almighty.

[...]

If this is dull, then what, in Heaven's name, is worthy to be exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore. [O]n the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him "meek and mild," and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. To those who knew him, however, he in no way suggests a milk-and-water person; they objected to him as a dangerous firebrand.

True, he was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before heaven; but he insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites. He referred to King Herod as "that fox"; he went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a "gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"; he assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the temple; he drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; he cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people's pigs and property; he showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and he retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, [then] there can be nothing dull about God either. But he had "a daily beauty in his life that made us ugly," and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness.