Angela Center

Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

What's New

Reflection for July 24, 2005

Calendar

Psychotherapy /      Counseling Services

Conference Facilities

Registration

Contact our Staff

News

AC Press

HOME

Which will it be? Joy or gloom and doom?

"You stupid Galatians! You must have been bewitched." Thus St. Paul addresses recent converts in Asia Minor in a letter sent from Ephesus. He has learned that certain Christians, who thought Paul's Gospel of grace was too radical, had followed him into Galatia to undercut his work there. These Christians were still attached to a prevailing notion of God as a Judge whose laws, even the minutest, must be strictly observed if rewards were to be gained and punishment avoided. And given our human inclination to prefer fear over faith, the Galatians had easily relapsed into behaving warily under the gaze of - no longer Paul's gracious God - but an ambiguous God who talked softly while carrying a big stick.

And if I may paraphrase Paul's letter, he goes on to say, "Answer me one question: did you receive the Spirit by keeping the law or by believing the good news I brought you. I mean, what turned you on? Did fearfully keeping every little maxim prescribed in a rule book excite you or was it your discovery that God loves you absolutely - warts and all - and is willing to die for his son or daughter like any respectable parent? Which creed hit you right in the breadbasket? Can it be that you are so stupid as to give up the excitement, the energy that comes of knowing God to be a God of absolute grace - as he has made so evident in the nature and life style of Jesus - in favor of an ominous God who is no different than any Caesar who rules by fear?"

In this context we might imagine Paul wanting to remind the Galatians of Gospel parables with which they were familiar. Wasn't their discovery of God as a God of grace like the discovery of a buried treasure or of a real pearl among the many fake pearls displayed upon the counters of this world's creedal marketplace? So how could they rebury such a treasure and then lose the map! Or prefer counterfeit jewelry after handling the real thing! "You were running so well," he writes; " who was it hindered you from following the truth. Whoever it was wasn't sent by the God represented by our gracious Christ."

But if Paul might have reminded the Galatians of those two parables, what would he have done with the third parable contained in today's Gospel reading - the one about a net being drawn from the sea full of good fish to be saved and bad to be tossed into a fiery furnace? Would he have avoided it because it favors too much the judgmental God of his opponents instead of the God of grace Paul cherishes? Or maybe he would have interpreted it like the ancient Gospel of Thomas, which saw it akin to the parable of the precious pearl. To wit: the net does indeed draw forth an enormous load of fish, but all small fry except for one big one, the Gospel of Christ - whose gracious God dwarfs all the other denizens of the deep blue sea of human experience - a fish worth keeping!

But one thing is for sure in the mind of St. Paul as well as St. Matthew. If anyone has been introduced to the joyous revelation of God as a God of unrelenting, personal, bountiful grace (and the only God therefore capable of inspiring oneself to become a gracious person) and then lets himself be conned into accepting a narrower notion of God as someone to worry about, as someone sure to confirm one's already low self-esteem, then he will have indeed condemned himself to a state of perpetual "wailing and grinding of teeth". Which is a way of saying: a hell of a life is there for anyone who prefers a God made in his own fretful image to a God bearing the placid and trustworthy image of Christ.

-- Geoff Wood