2023-11-01 A Meditation on Strange Peace
“5 For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. 2 Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. 3 I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. 4 You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace. 5 For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. 6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.” 15 But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.” (Ga 5:1–6 ESV)
Strange days for strange companions, strange ways for strange wars, personal and corporate wars, as the lull in conversation meets the excited chatter, the jabbering that fesses up or acknowledges (“ACK!”) something special here.
Untold is the level of patience, unheard of the amount of understanding: the Christian gathered is the Christian in space pocket, somehow amped, eager, welcomed, listened to. For a brief moment we can see the gladsome exchange. For a brief time we can excite and be excited just to be near other warm bodies. For a temporal lull we can hasten to strength, not lossiness, to boast not complaint, to winsome lives not our own decrepit state.
Jesus, Christ, is the boast and the winner of this dialog. No, we do not indulge those uglier aspects of a head-to-toe good scrubbing, except insofar as it is no denial of Him to point out how we… we have lagged and failed and succumbed and simply learnt things we would rather would stay out of our rationalizing and coherent self image.
The war means that no longer do we make compromises but rather shake off the doubts and the rationalizings, the plucky companion who swears up and down that they are cool and calm and untempted, because of their Jesus. And we feel the loser, the gauche loser, for testifying to longings and pangs that jibe against the Apostle’s call to be sober in the flesh, that is, to be chaste and without lustful indulgence.
War either makes us panic and compromise, or it makes us licensed to live Steel. We are steel because no longer is it social pressures to fit the spirit of the age, the status quo, the positive storylines we wish we could bless, if only they would stop short of claiming a wide distance earned by discipleship, a wide distance from those lusts and desires of the flesh.
Who can say, except that it is true Jesus was tempted but without Sin. Jesus knew the haggard equations wherein lust looks like love, love looks like hunger, normalcy is being pled by a desirous heart, and this goes soup-to-nuts: all our thoughts and actions in cosmic dance under the goal of bringing something to pass.
Pass it shall not. Thus more than self-control, we must “crucify” the flesh with its passions. That is an active ante upped. We up the ante and say, these feelings are too strong for me. They cannot be stage-managed, the kid gloves must come off. We are too be oblong and strangely shaped because of the shrapnel: a blast radius, and we not quite the needed distance in safety. We hobble, but soon gain eternal legs of Righteousness, because the Love was saved and the Lust was demolished. Because we made mint of the Talk, the righteous Talk, whilst pausing on the trials and listening to the Spirit who does make friends where there were enemies or there were lust monkeys.
All this is inviting of the criticism that we don’t understand Grace, that only by rolling with the punches can we emerge tested but unphased. To be unphased sometimes means to have killed the Law, rather than obsessing around the Sin. The Sin is a product of the Law: those without the law are so much more sane and cautious around sins of the flesh, simply because they don’t have the big “No!” staring them down and creating its very opposite. Yet the concomitant ease of cuddles both of spirit and of flesh, the ingrained modesty and shy qualities of the unit, the people, the cohort less sophisticated and less informed than those spoilt Christians, than us. For we have Divine Knowledge that makes us ten times more culpable. It turns actions into frigid removals, where there might have been a point of contact. The opposite sexes just don’t talk to each other, unless in marriage. All this, and some honesty that the hasty fellowship hour, the prayer group, is dealing with people conversational and loving on one level, but deeply in need of a breath of oxygen on another level.