Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (17 page)

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Julian of Norwich made the startling statement, “Sin will be no shame, but honor.” The lives of King David, Peter, Mary Magdalene, and Paul, along with contemporary witnesses such as Etty Hillesum and Charles Colson, lend support to Julian’s paradoxical statement. They all faced their capacity for evil, harnessed the power, and by grace converted it into a force for something constructive, noble, and good. This
mysterious grace is the active expression of the crucified Christ who has reconciled
all
things in Himself, transforming even our evil impulses into part of the good.

When Jesus told us to love our enemies, He knew that His love operating in us could melt the hardened heart and make the enemy our friend. “This applies supremely,” H. A. Williams writes, “to the enemy within. For our own worst enemy is always ourselves. And if with patience and compassion I can love that murderous man, that cruel, callous man, that possessive, envious, jealous man, that malicious man who hates his fellows, that man who is me, then I am on the way to converting him into everything that is dynamically good and lovely and generous and kind and, above all, superabundantly alive with a life which is contagious.”
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As the angel who troubled the waters said to the physician, “Without your wound where would your power be?”

A man in Australia decided that life was too hard for him to bear. However, he ruled out suicide. Instead, he bought a large corrugated iron tank and furnished it simply with the necessities of life. He hung a crucifix on the wall to remind him of the Rabbi and to help him pray. There he lived a blameless, solitary life, but with one great hardship.

Every morning and evening volleys of bullets would rip through the walls of his tank. He learned to lie on the floor to avoid being shot. Still the bullets ricocheted off the corrugated iron, and the man sustained several wounds. The walls were pierced with many holes that let in the wind and the daylight and some water when the weather was wet. As he plugged up the holes, he cursed the unknown marksman. When he appealed to the police, they were not helpful, and there was little he could do on his own about the situation.

Slowly he began to use the bullet holes for positive purposes. He would gaze out through one hole or another and watch the people passing by, the children flying kites, lovers walking hand in hand, the clouds in the sky, the flight of birds, flowers in bloom, the rising of the moon. In observing these things he would forget himself.

The day came when the tank rusted and finally fell to pieces. He walked out of it with little regret. There was a man with a rifle standing outside.

“I suppose you will kill me now,” said the man who had come out of the tank. “But before you do, I would like to know one thing. Why have you been persecuting me? Why are you my enemy, when I have never done you any harm?”

The other man laid the rifle down and smiled at him. “I am not your enemy,” he said. And the man who had come out of the tank saw that there were scars on the other man’s hands and feet, and these scars were shining like the sun.
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The lives of those fully engaged in the human struggle will be riddled with bullet holes. Whatever happened in the life of Jesus is in some way going to happen to us. Wounds are necessary. The soul has to be wounded as well as the body. To think that the natural and proper state is to be without wounds is an illusion.
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Those who wear bulletproof vests protecting themselves from failure, shipwreck, and heartbreak will never know what love is. The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi.

Shortly after I entered seminary, I went to a priest and told him about innumerable bouts of heavy drinking during my three years in the Marine Corps and how I grieved over time squandered in self-indulgence. To my surprise he smiled and said, “Rejoice and be glad. You will have a heart of compassion for those who walk that lonely road. God will use your brokenness to bless many people.” As Julian of Norwich said, “Sin will be no shame, but honor.” The dualism between good and evil is overcome by the crucified Rabbi who has reconciled all things in Himself. We need not be eaten alive by guilt. We can stop lying to ourselves. The reconciled heart says that everything that has happened to me had to happen to make me who I am
 
—without exception
.

Thomas Moore adds this insight: “Our depressions, jealousies, narcissism, and failures are not at odds with the spiritual life. Indeed, they
are essential to it. When tended, they prevent the spirit from zooming off into the ozone of perfectionism and spiritual pride.”
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Does this gentle approach lead to self-complacency? One who has listened to the heartbeat of the disgraced Rabbi, spurned and avoided by men and wounded by our transgressions, would never ask such a question.

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Only in a relationship of the deepest intimacy can we allow another person to know us as we truly are. It is difficult enough for us to live with the awareness of our stinginess and shallowness, our anxieties and infidelities, but to disclose our dark secrets to another is intolerably risky. The impostor does not want to come out of hiding. He will grab for the cosmetic kit and put on his pretty face to make himself “presentable.”

Whom can I level with? To whom can I bare my soul? Whom dare I tell that I am benevolent and malevolent; chaste and randy; compassionate and vindictive; selfless and selfish; that beneath my brave words lives a frightened child; that I dabble in religion and in pornography; that I have blackened a friend’s character, betrayed a trust, violated a confidence; that I am tolerant and thoughtful, a bigot and a blowhard, and that I really hate okra?

The greatest fear of all is that if I expose the impostor and lay bare my true self, I will be abandoned by my friends and ridiculed by my enemies.

Lately, my attention has been snagged by one verse in Isaiah: “Your salvation lay in conversion and tranquility,
your strength, in complete trust
” (30:15, emphasis added). Our obsession with privacy is rooted in the fear of rejection. If we sense nonacceptance, we cannot lay down the burden of sin; we can only shift the heavy suitcase from one hand to the other. Likewise, we can only lay bare our sinful hearts when we are certain of receiving forgiveness.

I cannot admit that I have done wrong; I cannot admit that I have
made a huge mistake, except to someone whom I know accepts me. The person who cannot admit that he is wrong is desperately insecure. At root he does not feel accepted, and so he represses his guilt; he covers his tracks. And so we get the paradox: Confession of fault requires a good self-concept. Repression of fault means a bad self-concept.
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Our salvation and our strength lie in complete trust in the Great Rabbi who broke bread with the outcast Zacchaeus. His meal sharing with a notorious sinner was not merely a gesture of liberal tolerance and humanitarian sentiment. It embodied His mission and His message offering forgiveness, peace, and reconciliation to all, without exception.

Again, the answer to the question “Who am I?” comes not from self-analysis but through personal commitment. The heart converted from mistrust to trust in the irreversible forgiveness of Jesus Christ is nothing less than a new creation, and all ambiguity about personal identity is blown away. So awesome is this supreme act of confidence in the Rabbi’s acceptance that one can only stutter and stammer about its protean, monumental importance. It is the landmark decision of life, outside of which nothing has value and inside of which every relationship and achievement, every success and failure, derives its meaning. It deals a mortal blow to cynicism, self-hatred, and despair. It is a decisive “I do” to the Rabbi’s call, “Trust in God still, and trust in me” (John 14:1). Sebastian Moore wrote,

The promised peace that the world cannot give is located in being in right relationship with God. Self-acceptance becomes possible only through the radical trust in Jesus’ acceptance of me as I am. Befriending the impostor and the pharisee within marks the beginning of reconciliation with myself and the end of spiritual schizophrenia.

In the Rabbi’s embrace, our evil impulses are converted and transformed into good. Just as the unbridled lust of the sinful woman in Luke’s gospel was transformed into a passion for intimacy with Jesus, so our possessiveness about money metastasizes into greed for the treasure in the field. Our inner murderer becomes capable of murdering homophobia, bigotry, and prejudice. Our vindictiveness and hatred are transformed into intolerance and rage at the caricatures of God as a petty accountant. Our chronic niceness is converted into heartfelt compassion for those who have lost their way.

And the meaning of the Rabbi’s words, “Behold, I am making
all
things new” (Revelation 21:5,
NASB
 
—emphasis added), becomes luminously clear.

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From among the many messianic titles conferred on Jesus, some used by His contemporaries, others bestowed by the early church
 
—Lord, Master, Savior, Redeemer, King, Pantocrator, Messiah
 
—I have focused on
Rabbi
for two reasons.

First, as I retrace the steps down the cobbled road of my life, I remember the quality of my days before I encountered Christ. I vividly recall the emptiness I felt as I drifted aimlessly from one relationship to another, one tavern to another, seeking solace from the loneliness and boredom of my desiccated heart.

Suddenly Jesus appeared out of nowhere, and life began anew. From being a nobody who cared about nothing but my own comfort, I became somebody, a beloved disciple, who cared about people and things. His
Word became “a light on my path” (Psalm 119:105). I found a sense of direction and purpose, a reason for bounding out of bed in the morning. Jesus was my Rabbi, my Teacher. With infinite patience He illuminated the meaning of life and refreshed the weariness of my defeated days. I cannot and will not forget the Great Rabbi who led me out of darkness into daylight. He is not a refuge from reality but the Way into its depths.

Second, the title
Rabbi
reminds us of the essential Jewishness of Jesus and of our own Semitic origins. Abraham is our father in faith. In the realm of spirit, we are all Semites. As Paul wrote, the Jews “were adopted as sons, they were given the glory and the covenants; the Law and the ritual were drawn up for them, and the promises were made to them. They are descended from the patriarchs and from their flesh and blood came Christ who is above all” (Romans 9:4-5).

Amid the current rise of anti-Semitism around the world, I want never to forget the special status of our Jewish kinfolk. Anti-Semitism is spit on the face of our Jewish Savior. To our shame, much of it is Christian spit.

A Jew of our own generation wrote gently but firmly, “We [Jews] must . . . question, in the light of the Bible, whether the message of the Old Testament which the New Testament claims has been fulfilled, has in fact been fulfilled in history, in the history lived and suffered by us and our ancestors. And here, my dear Christian readers, we must give a negative reply. We can see no kingdom and no peace and no redemption.”
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The tear-stained face of the Rabbi is ever before my eyes as I contemplate our past unchristian behavior toward our Jewish brothers and sisters. As Burghardt suggests, we need a fresh theology of Judaism and its destiny. We need more dialogue, more interfaith worship and communion. We need to meditate on the words of Shylock in Shakespeare’s
The Merchant of Venice
(here we can include any group of oppressed people): “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”

Calling Jesus
Rabbi
stirs our sensitivity to both His and our solidarity with the sons and daughters of Abraham as well as the sons and daughters of shame.

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The bride in the Song of Songs says, “I sleep, but my heart is awake. I hear my Beloved knocking. ‘Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one. . . . My beloved thrust his hand through the hole in the door; I trembled to the core of my being. Then I rose to open to my Beloved, myrrh ran off my hands, pure myrrh off my fingers, on to the handle of the bolt” (5:2,4-5).

The ragtag cabal of disciples who have caught the spirit of the bride, opened the door to Jesus, reclined at the table, and listened to His heartbeat will experience at least four things.
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First, listening to the Rabbi’s heartbeat is immediately a Trinitarian experience. The moment you press your ear against His heart, you instantly hear Abba’s footsteps in the distance. I do not know how this happens. It just does. It is a simple movement from intellectual cognition to experiential awareness that Jesus and the Father are one in the Holy Spirit, the bond of infinite tenderness between Them. Without reflection or premeditation, the cry “Abba, I belong to You” rises spontaneously from the heart. The awareness of being sons and daughters in the Son dawns deep in our souls, and Jesus’ unique passion for the Father catches fire within us. In the Abba experience, we prodigals, no matter how bedraggled, beat up, or burnt out, are overcome by a Paternal fondness of such depth and tenderness that it beggars speech. As our hearts beat in rhythm with the Rabbi’s heart, we come to experience a graciousness, a kindness, a compassionate caring that surpasses
our understanding. “That is the enigma of the gospel: How can the Transcendent Other be so incredibly near, so unreservedly loving?”
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We have only one explanation
 
—the Teacher says that is the way He is.