Damned For others?
Maria White never enjoyed good health and she died at
the tragically young age of thirty-two, but not before she had
established herself as a poet of note and married James Russell Lowell,
who, with her help, finally outshone her as "a name". She had a poet's
heart and like all the truly fine poets she saw things the rest of us
only grope after in part blindness. Speaking as a Christian I recognise
that human loves share in the flaws that are part of our humanity but
speaking as a Christian who has known more than his share of ignorance
down the years I haven't seen the beauty and riches God has placed in
these human loves. Too, I've underestimated their power even while I
admitted that they have immense power. I haven't seen the beauty and
richness of life because like so many others before me—people who've
taught and shaped me—I've spoken almost exclusively of sin and
forgiveness, of God's redeeming activity without connecting it with his
eternal purpose to bless and give life and I've said more about leaving
this life than truly living it.
Again, like millions before me down the centuries I've
narrowed the meaning of the life and death, resurrection and
glorification of Jesus to how they relate to and deal with sin. I can
hardly make up for my failure by now saying nothing about sin
and atonement for that would be tragic as well as a distortion of the
meaning of Jesus Christ. He deals with our sin, thank God!
But he deals with our sin to gain God's ultimate and
eternal purpose, namely, to bless the human family with fullness of
life; a fullness of life that is holy and honourable in righteousness
but a life that includes human loves cleansed of all of whatever that
mars them. Redemption confirms God's creation intention rather
than reduces or dismisses it. Redemption and blessing aren't two
distinct stories running parallel—they're two faces of one coin, two
themes in one drama.
I mentioned Maria White Lowell at the beginning because
in one of her poems she stresses the depth and appeal of human love. She
wrote four sonnets about her love for her husband, James Russell, and
she makes the point that if Death came and took her to heaven that even
there, in the midst of all the glory and with heaven's shining ones by
her side she would tire of the endless blue if she couldn't look down on
the earth and see the one she loved. No one should accuse her of
heresy; they should simply pay attention to her way of expressing the
beauty, glory and wonder of the love of one human for another.
Here's
what she says (quoted in H. E. Scudder's biography of her husband).
If Death uplift me, even thus should I,
Companioned by the silver spirits high
And stationed on the sunset's crimson towers,
Bending over earth's broad stretch of bowers,
To where my love beneath their shades might lie;
For I should weary of the endless blue,
If that one soul, so beautiful and true,
Were hidden by earth's vapours from my sight.
But what she implies about the depth of human love pales
before what we hear from Moses in Exodus 32:32. God has threatened to
obliterate apostate Israel and Moses, while freely acknowledging their
great wickedness, begs him to forgive them, "but if not, then blot me
out of the book you have written." What do you make of such devotion?
Then we have Paul in Romans 9:3 saying, "For I could
wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of
my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel." The scholars
tell of various linguistic possibilities and niceties but Dunn is surely
right when he says the search for linguistic options is fed by what
Paul seems clearly to say and N.T Wright refuses to hide his
astonishment at Paul's statement.
It would be foolish to think that Paul thought his being
anathematised could save others and there's certainly no need to think
he was actually saying to God what Moses did say to God. [There
is more in Paul's statement than there is in Moses'—but that would be
another discussion.] What seems clear beyond dispute is that Paul so
loves his people that being damned, cut off from Jesus, wouldn't be too
great a price for him to pay on their behalf. He knew what
Moses felt toward them and he knew even better what Jesus felt about
them and he here expresses his own heart toward them. Make what we want
of it, Paul's love for his people and his agony over their loss leads to
this outpouring of passion.
In Exodus 32:33 there is something of a rebuke—so I
judge—in what God says to Moses; but there is no reason for us to
believe that God is not pleased with the depth of Moses' feeling for
Israel. Paul isn't offering developed theology in Romans 9:3 but he is
revealing the wonder of the love humans can have for one another that
they can feel to such depths and express such ongoing thoughts.
By the time some of us are done trying to get around the
plain import of the statement we have Paul saying nothing worth saying.
"If it was permissible for me to ask such a thing and if I thought it
might avail something (though I know it wouldn't) I could see myself
praying such a prayer."
That doesn't at all sound like what Paul said. James
Dunn is right, "In cases like this it is always wise to ask not simply,
What did the author intend to say? But also, What could the author have
expected his readers to understand by his language?" It seems clear to
me that Paul is saying something like, "I'd be willing to be damned for
their sake; that's how deeply I feel for them."
I'm not the only one for who feels that there is a
handful of people for whom I feel so deeply that if they didn't make it
to the better world and life that is ahead it wouldn't be a better world
for me.
I know that we're not to read the deep feelings of Maria
White Lowell, Moses and Paul and "measure the speech of their hearts
with the rules of logic." Humans are capable of feeling so deeply that
they can contemplate losing all if their beloved gains. This is a gift
of God.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
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