2023-01-13 A Meditation on Noted

“And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” (1 Pe 1:17–19 ESV)

Anyone who has sat on a therapist’s couch knows the looming sense of judgment from some therapy: oh no, the therapist is making a note of what I just said! When we speak to one another, it can feel like the looming therapist writing down notes on every aspect of life we are struggling with. If we’re honest, then the soldier’s ideal picture has cracks in it, flaws, simple needs and ways we ratchet up the dependencies or flutter through the passions of the flesh. The ideal notion that, if we sign up for military service in the Lord’s armies, we are suddenly made over and immune to flaws, is nonsense. We need some breathing room in which to acknowledge how life today is just like life was before we signed up.

So the therapist hears a patent confession, and takes looming, scary, note of it. “No, no, I don’t mean I REALLY struggle with that, only in theory. With a grain of salt. It’s an in joke!” Yet the alternative is to put forward a full metal jacket of self-righteousness. It is to lie to ourselves. It is to confuse the better good deeds that our service entails, with an absence of trials and temptations that life still dishes out to us.

Make no mistake about it: testimonials are real that say, when once we have a mission or a project, so many sins of ennui and wandering, simply go away. The soldiering move may be the place where we’ve launched into this new stratosphere of goodness. It may be our loving wakeup call each morning. It may be the tuckered-out sense of a job in progress, and for today well done, that calms us falling asleep each night. The other men and women near in the barracks. Each lending a helping hand to fellow creatures, creatures who know they are not perfect. Our strength is in the model citizen, Jesus, who fought and swore an oath to uphold a standard, who knew we were all of us floating along in a tin can, today ready to confess and acknowledge, that all life is misery; that we approach goodness only accidentally, with angularity around personal quibbles. We fuss and turn ambitious pride, towards seemingly good outlay, but it isn’t enough. We need the “other”, the fellow soldier who inspires us because, though I may have good qualities, they have their own set of good qualities, and together we paint a fine picture.

So the inquisitorial line of discussion mints Christ-like servants. We either back off or go bravely to the Cross. We see just that classic insistence Jesus made: all life is painted in lines of sin and temptation, and today we have the master builder, the master painter, who hears of the sins that we are strongly avoiding today. Before I had daily missions, I liked to couch my faith in pill or bottle. Before I saw a prize waiting in the future, I liked to indulge the lustful images. Before I really had any thoughts about bodily holiness, I sinned against my own flesh and that of others.

So we take the occasion to sigh and to recognize, “Thank God! Here is genuine mission field!” So cliche, so much a call to return to first principles. Life “out there” is truly doubting and in simple ways bound up in fear or misinformation. So we can make a step in faith, and know that the notes that incriminate are notes that we need not worry about. The gospel has been upheld.