God Does Not Work

Dear Kate,

We are called to "make God look good," so we were, week after week in our church, as if that's the core tenet of our faith.

Is it?

Maybe I am being unfair.  The point of the teaching, of course, is to encourage Christians to live a respectable life.  Still, so that...what?

So that God will become more commendable to mankind?  So that our particular brand of how God works will look more recommendable compared to other salvation schemes on offer?  So that going to church and being religious will look more reasonable in this Age of Reason?

More to the point: what can we possibly do to "make God look good"?  And if the premise is not that God doesn't look good enough in our eyes, why would we need to work on his appearance?  Shouldn't he be good in and of himself?

Jesus has been called the "Wisdom of God," the "living bread," the "author of our salvation," God's "indescribable gift," the "light of the world," the "rising sun," and--check this, the "originator/ruler/beginning/source of God's creation."  If he is all these, shouldn't we, instead, be "boasting all the more gladly about [our] weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on [us]"? (2 Corinthians 12:9)

All these suggest we have a good recipe to cook up a good religion, a human institution.  Consider the implied subject of the call: You go, and make God look good.  I make God look good.  We make God look good, together.  So, look at us, look at what we could do with this God, what we can use him for.  It is all about what we are doing to hold God together, lest he falls apart.

Yet the core tenet of Christianity, a revelation--beyond our reason and imagination and, least of all, our own doings, which, according to Karl Barth, makes Christianity not only different from all other religions, but not a religion, not a human institution at all--is a divine act: that God died on a cross.

God falls apart to make whole of his beloved.

Imagine your own child, dying, last day on her death bed, cancer.  Imagine your own brother, waiting to be executed, your wordless exchange with him while he chows down his last supper.  Imagine your own sister, raped and being blamed for it, you finding strong reasons to side with the reasonable public opinion.  You are almost at the foot of the cross now.  Now, slowly, very very slowly, look up.  And tell me: what on earth can you do to make God look good?

Not much, right?  The embarrassing sight, the stench of putrid flesh decomposing with the foundation of the universe, and, most of all, the impossible suspension of our disbelief to trust that this sort of grotesque display of "love" is necessary, let alone effective.  It doesn't work!  God Does Not Work!  Just like this past Sunday at church when I was sharing about how we should not look away from the suffering of our own brothers and sisters in Christ, someone's son was protesting from his lawn chair that whatever he thought he was hearing didn't sound right to his ears, and that if we cannot spring into some immediate action to wash our hands clean from whatever filth that we were made aware of, the bad-news-bearer might as well shut the hell up.  Come down from your ridiculous cross already, "Son of God"!  You are making us sick.

I have this little, but thick, book, documenting the many faces of Jesus, as imagined by artists, and on the page I shared above, of how bad he looked when the crown of thorns was laid on his head.  As far as I know I don't have cancer.  Yet everyday I feel like it is growing in me.  I use this book to pray my way into my dying.

How do we begin to speak about what we can do for God if we aren't exactly sure what God has done for us?

Yours, Alex

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