| The word that is near
Where is righteousness? Who has it? Who can speak about it? Who can adjudicate on it? Who announces the definitive word for the human good? These are questions that are debated in Plato’s Republic and the opinion pages of daily newspapers. In every age, there is a quest for the social good. Paul cites Mosaic tradition in which righteousness is found through obedience to the law; in desire for the law there is life. Yet Israel’s prophets recognised the necessity of God’s creative activity to bring to be things that are not, such as human transformation. The law, always being stymied or compromised through prevarication, will be newly inscribed in human hearts that know the Lord. The gospel of God announces the impossibility of pursuing righteousness, which is defined by the law as the holy, just and good. We can pursue righteousness in a religious ascent to God or we can descend into the depths of elemental flux and attempt to decipher it there. Yet righteousness will neither be found in the heights of ideology nor in the depths of phenomena. Paul’s preacher of good news proclaims the nearness of righteousness in a word otherwise than our own as it evokes faith in response to the grace of God in Christ. For Paul, the word of righteousness is stymied through tribal zeal, even if such zeal is focused in quest of righteousness. This evaluation depicts the fate of righteousness within human quests to secure the holy, just and good. It is only found through grace; the reality of this grace is known by hearing a word that is always near—the word of Christ. (Rom. 10) v Paul declares that the gospel of God was always proclaimed but not everyone listened for it. This is the Isaianic apocalypse reiterated within the gospels—of hearing but not hearing and seeing but not seeing within a context in which the word of God is assumedly heard and known. In presuming to know the word, it is not heard. Humans do not easily hear a word otherwise than their own opinions about life. This other word is difficult, making apparent a human crisis in its mortal negation and necessary exposure to grace through the naked abandonment of faith. Willing hearers, who have responded to the gospel of God for all, inevitably provoke jealous consternation among those who guard and promote the symbols of election or call, having turned them into markers of tribal identity and religious privilege instead. As presumed sources of righteousness, such markers are the antithesis of righteousness. Grace that gives the possibility of tangible righteousness is as near as response to a word otherwise that is heard and received in faith. Righteousness, like Wisdom personified, addresses those who would hear it in faith: Do not say to yourself, ‘Who will scale the heavens or plumb the depths’ in quest of righteousness, for the word of righteousness is near—on your lips and in your heart—as close as confession and faith. Righteousness declares where it is to be known. The righteousness of God is not to be found here or there in the human quest to secure a claim or status of being nearer than another is further from the good. All such comparisons are relative. Righteousness is known through faith as exposure to the grace of God, our source of life amid the human crisis of mortality and the perennial human failure to secure what is holy, just and good. Yet this latter possibility is as near as its confession in hearts and on lips. The word of God as a word otherwise is addressed by one nearer to me than I am to myself as the most intimate word of existence—a word that I do not command. Righteousness is as close as confession in deferral to this word of grace as a sustained point of reference in any enduring response. v To ascend to the heavens or to descend into an abyss in quest of righteousness is to neutralise the passion of God in the odyssey of love through Christ traversing all things—life and death, height and depth in order to disclose this possibility for human life. In the light of grace, this possibility can be nothing other than faith working through love as our response in hearing. The readiness to hear the word that is near invokes humility in recognition of human prevarication and compromise in righteousness within the world. By contrast to signs or knowledge, empirical demonstration or plausible pragmatism, we are found by the word that calls us to declare the reality of God’s grace, as if in human estimation, this declaration is suspended on nothing. As a vulnerable vocative address, the call of God can lapse in the absence of hearing and reception. Yet there is always response within an exhilarating relay—in which each willing hearer is a runner—that awakens others to the joy of grace. Paul cites Scripture to celebrate this profound challenge: It is written ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’ Why beautiful? Because righteousness inducted by good news of grace can never become the monopoly of someone or some faction to be dispensed either verbally or ideologically among others. Precisely as a word otherwise than tribal privilege or partisan perspective—of which Paul refers to as the flesh—this word is accessible to all as the possibility of righteousness in human life without distinction. The gospel of God is not an easy word to accept; not all have obeyed the good news, even as Isaiah exclaims—as if incredulous that this should be so—‘Who has believed our message?’ Ultimately, faith can only come from what is heard through a word otherwise than our own, the word of Christ, which is a word of grace. In its sovereign freedom, the evangelical word—the good news—is heard between grace and faith that knows no integral word but the word of God. v Paul’s critique of hearing and not hearing discloses an apparent failure of the word within finite religious possibilities immersed in machinations of the flesh. In hearing, we are apprehended by a genuine word otherwise that paradoxically kills in making alive. We cannot conjure such a word; we tend also to resist it. We hear anew the word that kills because it makes alive in proclamation. By hearing, we also distinguish any human quest from the call of God in grace and recognise adjudications of righteousness according to the flesh by contrast to righteousness as a gift. The message of grace calling for our response of faith is not old fashioned or passé as it is often caricatured. Without a word otherwise that speaks from beyond our own conjectures, wishes and antipathies in assertions of where righteousness is to be found, we have no way of knowing that we are not ultimately talking to ourselves. Without another word, we may only be echoing the clamouring voices of newspaper opinion pages. In biblical testimony, proclamation of righteousness occurs as a genuine word otherwise than human possibilities—beginning with the call of a unique people from among the nations to speak a word that summons a new possibility for human life with righteousness inscribed on the heart, finally as a gift in Christ. In the response of faith to grace, vocative and volitional possibilities are awakened among others in expressions of righteousness from the heart. The word that is otherwise is paradoxically near to human hearts, lips and deeds. To confess is to act, if confession is not to be exposed to caricature. To believe is to inhabit with enthusiasm and dedication, decisions made and tangible commitments undertaken. The word that is otherwise is wholly present as good news of righteousness as a gift that need not be sought elsewhere—it is as near as the confession of hearts and deeds of gratitude among others. |
