2024-07-05 A Meditation on Our Role

“3 Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. 4 In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. 5 And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. 6 For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” 7 It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? 8 If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. 9 Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? 10 For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. 11 For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” (Heb 12:3-11 ESV)

Healthy patience meets the selfless ambition, like that of the early church folk who read up in their cautiously-preserved holy writing, on submission to all earthly authority; we are simultaneously allowing some familiarity, flair, excitement, joy in our own little circles, while also attempting to be useful, submitted, inoffensive, not boasting, not imposing our quality of life or our right to celebrate life on the watchful eyes above.

Eyes who possess a Mystery we make no claim to own or understand; what it is, that makes for the gentle pleading, the patience, the attribution of good qualities of character and of intent and of duty, to these our masters somewhere “up there”. What it is that they possess that is Regal and Legalized and Noted, the fact a Christian is all about egalitarian ethics, all being in need of one and the same Jesus, all being sinners; yet we practice and get in habit of honorific gestures, learned in the humble grand lair, but also applicable in our own “down time” to those of our own familiar guild.

Hoping against hope, finding place for the heart, that place is inspiring us to greater tolerance of strange inquisitions and trials, strange disciplines and ceremonies, strange in that for all our talk of equal rights we also live in a stratified world, and the canary is found, the eagle-eye is found, the knowledge is kept up, in the most hard-pressed arenas; people pretend care for the lower classes, but are offended to see any Duty or Cause or Principle or Composure. It can offend against our own inadequate self-appraisal, our own failure to accept massive losses on some worldly measure, but Christian Hope on another measure.