2024-04-06 A Meditation on Complicity
“7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. 8 We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; 9 persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; 10 always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. 11 For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. 12 So death is at work in us, but life in you. 13 Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, “I believed, and so I spoke,” we also believe, and so we also speak, 14 knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. 15 For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. 16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, 18 as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” (2 Cor 4:7-18 ESV)
The abrasion of moral repugnance, of a stand against evil, of no more complicity, is stark and deafening. That is, all of us have our crosses to go to. All of us are nigh near and around the corner do find, resistance and opprobrium, stark enmity, inimical spirits, simply because of a righteous stand. This is because all of us need forgiveness: that we laughed at evil a bit, but didn’t go full on with the repugnance, with the no-more complicity, with actually to hate the thing.
On a future Judgment Day it will be noted our smooth glides and our principled stands, which things are a child’s play, are granted from a loving Father in heaven, are in the end convicting to all Men, Women of this world. That we somehow glided by. That we somehow still got on well with the seedbed of evil. That we somehow brushed shoulders and weakly blessed the very Author of Evil, Dastardly Impulse. Yet: if in this life you take a stand against Mephistopheles, you will have tribulations.
More is true: that God is racing to the scene of that same crime that we so struggle to coexist alongside with. That God is aware His people are compromised, have made their weak peace with wickedness, are Hurting, because to say “No” is to invite an avalanche. It is to be forlorn as a lone voice. It is even to question ourselves, were we wrong to stick our necks out there? After all, blessed are the peacemakers.
To the stations, then! Aware and cognisant: God is Good, and in Him is no evil. God is clearing the slate of our sinful ways and complicities, so that we have the gumption to lance forth Awake and Aware, Effective and Purposeful. We needed that Mercy, because otherwise it is perennial purgatory, perennial making-up… for things no man nor woman can be burdened with fixing. To heal is beyond our ken, beyond our ability, beyond our nature, in some things. Yet to know not only we are not Accounted, Expected, Anticipated to be a cut above bedrock, ground zero, familiar spirits, shoulders rubbed, is to Delight the Soul. It is to bask, awake and aware, that God is not the one who is telling us to dwell higher up. We know we dwell in the dregs. We know time and chance happen first to this one and then to that one: that it is our blessed Estate to be shown Mercy and to be Held High in Favor. It enables us actually, vividly, to do the Good Deed, to make our brief and timely, only once perhaps, imprint on Life. It challenges us, glad happy, with gladsome tidings, to share some Joy and Peace in believing, with all whom we’ve walked nervously around, whom we have corrected or shared with a prophetic Word; now, are we hated? Can we resume familial discourse? Are our “contributions” more like “indictments”? Are we acting in love?
The answer is that God programs us to be Peace and Joy in fellowship, in peace loving self-awareness of our sinful nature (looking no farther than the hourly impulses or attacks, the wandering mind), in certainty our dirt is His Death, and our unkempt nature is His Call to Rise. He Rose, that we might embrace the actual and filthy Man, who is us, who is our Body-double named Jesus now, who is our Peace and Sanctuary even as the walls come tumbling down, the cameras watch, the microphones launch a New Generation fascinatingly tamed and merged with all things Holy, New ways Jesus lives in community, New Ways God loves on us, filthy and unkempt, yet in this somehow promised and able to avoid the very thoughts we have no choice—no moral repugnance, no end of complicity—but to agree with. For a time, until it becomes a lesson in rejection. In rejecting the evil. In giving it broad scope, only to teach ourselves to discern.