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Flowers fall but the word endures
To be human is already to be called into question by the word that endures. It does not matter whether humans are clever or foolish as to survival. Figuratively, humans only endure as long as grass survives its season under the sun. We will all die; we are negated by death, whatever we achieve or think we have achieved in the relative brevity of our natural lives. Inasmuch as the word endures beyond our lives, it calls our lives into question; it stands in antithesis to every life and is the negation of every quest for life to become a word that will endure beyond its time. Where flesh withers and its glory falls, the word endures. This antithesis between flesh and word also creates a tension between the good pursued according to the way of all flesh—in the constraints of time, place and perspective—and the good announced by the enduring word. How can we tell the difference? v Throughout his writings, Paul resists confidence in any human quest for the holy, just and good or righteousness equated with tribal and therefore temporal or regional perspective. When this quest is monopolised within humanity without recognising its lamentable compromises in solidarity with all humanity—grass that withers—it generates meagre fruits that are easily dispersed like thistledown. For Paul, the difference between two expressions of righteousness is the source. This is also the difference between an ephemeral appearance of the good and its durability. Righteousness according to the way of all flesh might articulate a language of the good but it merely perpetuates an illusion that humans can sustain a word beyond their capacity and resources. Righteousness according to life in the Spirit is resourced beyond the limits of human life and has its enduring effect in recognition of a word otherwise than our own—a word of grace. In his own experience, Paul recognises that righteousness pursued according to any criteria that emboldens human self-elevation, even if seemingly spiritual and just, is nothing compared to the righteousness of God in Christ. In the field of human quest and perspective, pursuit of the perceived good invariably becomes a source of hubris and conflict. This does not promote the righteousness of God, for enmity is invoked by partisan designations of the more righteous and the less righteous, while hubris is installed in those who assume that a particular exposition of the holy, just and good is right and incumbent on everyone. A particular approach to righteousness may appear to be correct in stating a position on the conflicted realm of human responsibilities and ethics. If this is driven out of passion that creates enmity and underpins hubris, it is for Paul, unrighteousness; that is, it is possible to be wrong in assertions of being “right.” The perennial human propensity to turn the holy, just and good into an expression of enmity and hubris is all too easily forgotten. Grass withers and so too, words that are articulated from the zeal of partisan perspective. Yet this crisis is also a precursor to recognising the need for grace. Righteousness is not to be found here or there in the human quest to secure its imprimatur for a claim or status of being nearer than another is further from the good. Instead, it is known through faith as exposure to the grace of God, the source of integral life amid the human crisis of mortality and the perennial failure to secure the holy, just and good. This latter possibility is only as near as its confession in hearts and on lips in response to grace. Righteousness is given effect within human life apart from the perennial installation of enmity and hubris if its source and end is the grace of God. Grace exceeds human capacity, while finding in human hearts and hands the response of faith and humility whereby enmity and hubris are not possible because the ultimate source of the good is from God. The good cannot be used as a fulcrum or lever for partisan claims to righteousness or the moral high ground. There is no diminution of cost and difficulty here, yet to assert other than this is to negate the love of Christ for all as the ultimate testimony and paradox of Christian life. An occasion to relinquish the right to be right is a call to love as a response that goes beyond any assertion of presumed righteousness (this is the inaugural and precarious test of Solomon’s wisdom—life and justice exist where genuine relinquishment occurs. Barth). Where there is a need for our advocacy, the imperative to love will also call us to absorbing the effects of a perceived wrong with our own lives as a precursor to redemptive and truly creative judicial possibilities in human life—beyond the mere relativity of competing rights or case studies marshalled toward an ideology. Redemptive solutions are not possible without exposure to suffering and this response will inevitably require patience, grace and risk in what Paul refers to as the fellowship of Christ and his sufferings. That love endures all things is a reality that requires self-relinquishment, which allays the ever present temptations to abstraction and partisan fever. Any claim to love God while we nurture antipathy toward our fellow human is incongruous according to the Epistle of John. In a refusal to assert our right-ness or (self) righteousness, or yet our deserved due time, it is imperative to listen again to a word otherwise than our own or else we may be merely constituting our own word and adjudicating on it out of partisan impatience and ideology. Righteousness shows its face with patient humility not hubris, for the latter creates enmity and division. To work for the good is to recognise and affirm that God alone is the source of legitimacy for our acts of goodness as the one who exceeds human capacity and imagination in redeeming good from manifestations of evil. v God is for us, even if we are ultimately against ourselves in supposedly being for ourselves. In biblical terms, this is testimony to our creaturely status as grass that withers and our glory as flowers that fall; yet this too is an occasion for testimony to the love of God, the redemption of human life in costly self-deference and joyous transformation to which God disclosed in Jesus Christ gives shape. Yet God for us and with us is not perceived if we grasp at an illusion that in being for ourselves, however plausibly couched, we are capable of ameliorating human dilemmas and the perennial compromise of the good in the relativity of human solutions. The phenomenon of a neighbour’s need is testimony that not only has someone or some community failed him or her but that we all participate in this failure. The passion of Christ, being made sin who knew no sin, comes to us in every instant of human distortion before us in our neighbour, which also calls each to enter the suffering of Christ, tangibly, in this one and with this one who suffers because of others and therefore because of us all. The passion of Christ shows us that there is no enduring word on the human condition without suffering being its prefacing word. The imperative to love our neighbour is given out of no other premise than love as the ultimate predicate of God, exceeding the capacity of anyone to comprehend it, yet within the scope of each to participate tangibly, without an ideological agenda or caveats. In view of its demand, my lack and my actual and potential evasions, it is necessary to speak of self-giving love in the human creature as a miracle akin to being born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed.
Selected sources: Badiou Saint Paul; Barth Ethics; CD I The Word of God, II God, IV Reconciliation; Käsemann Romans; Kasper Jesus the Christ; Marion Prolegomena to Charity; Nygren Romans; von Balthasar Love Alone is Credible. |
