Category: Spirituality

Today in church we heard a passage from Romans that contains one of my favorite couple of verses in the entire Bible (I imagine I’m not alone in this):

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:38-39)

I’ve come to think of the Incarnation itself in these terms: Jesus is God’s love, manifested and enacted, and sent into the darkest depths of human experience. In Jesus, God identifies with humanity in all its suffering and its sin. There simply is no “place”–physical, moral, or spiritual–where we can escape from God’s love. The Reformed theologian William Placher writes:

Reconciliation, then, is not about how Christ’s suffering appeases an angry Father. Our suffering has cut us off from God, and we can experience God’s love only as anger. God comes to be with us in the place of sin, as the way to bridge the abyss that lay between us, so that we can be in loving relation with God again. But coming into that place of sin is a painful business that costs a heavy price. It is a price that God, in love, is willing to pay. (Jesus the Savior, p. 141)

But if this passage from Paul is a great comfort, it’s also a challenge. Reading about Paul’s confidence in God’s love in the face of (as he writes earlier) “hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword” highlights how weak my faith in that love is, even though my distractions, sufferings, and temptations are much more mundane. And I can’t help but think that if I had a more robust faith I’d be able to act more bodly, doing risky things in the name of God’s love.

Part of the paradox of the Protestant notion of faith is that faith is supposed to be the ground for genuine good works–we are freed by God’s love to love our neighbors fearlessly–and yet we can’t will ourselves to have faith. Faith is a gift; though there is difference of opinion about the extent to which we can each prepare the soil to receive it.

So the question is, how can we come to trust viscerally in the love that Paul is describing, in a way that makes a real difference? Is this where spiritual practices play their role? Do we learn to love God, and to perceive the love from which nothing can separate us, by learning to pay attention to God? Is that what prayer is for?

“Christ’s death on the cross and his descent into Hell … reassure us that we can never wander so far astray as to be outside the humanity with which Christ has identified.” – William Placher

“Jesus came to forgive sin unconditionally for God. Our sin, our unbelief, consists precisely in the fact that we cannot and will not tolerate such forgiveness. So we move to kill him. There is nothing for him to do then but to die ‘for our sins,’ ‘on our behalf,’ ‘give his life as a ransom for many.’ For him to stop and ask us to ‘shape up’ would be to deny the forgiveness he came to give, to put conditions on the unconditional. Thus he must ‘bear our sins in his body’—not theoretically in some fashion, but actually. He is beaten, spit upon, mocked, wasted.” – Gerhard Forde

“Sin and death are brought to submission by the persistence of Christ’s love. All their forces are spent upon him, but he carries on loving. In the end the voices of the thief asking to be remembered in God’s kingdom, the forgiven soldier at the foot of the cross recognizing by Christ’s death that he is the Son of God, witness to love’s triumph.” – Stephen Cottrell

“The single central thing is the conviction that for us to be at peace Jesus’ life had to be given up. It isn’t that a vengeful and inflexible God demands satisfaction, more that the way the world is makes it unavoidable that the way to our freedom lies through the self-giving of Jesus, even to the point of death. In the kind of world that you and I inhabit, the kind of world that you and I make or collude with, this is what the price of unrestricted love looks like.” – Rowan Williams

“And what is this Gospel? It is nothing less than the conviction and experience that God loves the whole world. What we see in Jesus is the revelation of an inclusive, all-embracing, generous loving. A loving that washes the feet of the world. A loving that heals individuals from oppression, both physical and spiritual. A loving that takes sides with the poor, vulnerable, diseased, hated, despised, and outcasts of his day. A loving that is summed up in his absolute commitment to love at all costs, even in extreme suffering and death. As Sydney Evans once wrote, ‘What Jesus did on the Cross was to demonstrate the truth of what he had taught: he showed a quality of love—such that the worst that evil could do to such love was to give such love ever fresh opportunities for loving.’” – Andrew Linzey

“The kenosis, or self-emptying, of Jesus, which expresses in historical time the kenosis, the long-suffering of God, is the sacrifice which makes possible the theosis, or raising to God of human life, enabling it to share in the eternal life of a God of limitless love.” – Keith Ward

“God in Christ crucified cancels the curse of human vulnerability to horrors. For the very horrors, participation in which threatened to undo the positive value of created personality, now become secure points of identification with the crucified God. To paraphrase St. Paul, neither the very worst humans can suffer, nor the most abominable things we can do can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:31-39).” – Marilyn McCord Adams

“The cross of Christ was not an inexplicable or chance event, which happened to strike [Jesus], like illness or accident. To accept the cross as his destiny, to move toward it and even to provoke it, when he could well have done otherwise, was Jesus’ constantly reiterated free choice. He warns his disciples lest their embarking on the same path be less conscious of its costs (Luke 14:25-33). The cross of Calvary was not a difficult family situation, nor a frustration of visions of personal fulfillment, a crushing debt, or a nagging in-law; it was the political, legally-to-be-expected result of a moral clash with the powers ruling his society.” – John Howard Yoder

“That God, out of love and concern for us, would so humble Godself as to unite Godself with not just lowly humanity but humanity in the most dire straits—that is the sacrifice, made by God in Christ on our behalf, in death as over the course of Jesus’ whole life.” – Kathryn Tanner

“God’s forgiveness is indiscriminate. That’s the bedrock conviction of the Christian faith. ‘One has died for all,’ wrote the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 5:14). That simple claim has immense implications. All means all, without exception. There are no people who are sufficiently good so that God doesn’t need to forgive them and Christ didn’t die for them. There are no people who are too wicked for God to forgive them and for Christ to die for them. And there are no people whom God, for some inscrutable reason, decided not to forgive.” – Miroslav Volf

“The taking on of the servile and sinful human condition, as foretold in Second Isaiah, is presented by Paul as an act of voluntary impoverishment: ‘For you know how generous our Lord Jesus Christ has been: He was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that through his poverty you might become rich’ (2 Cor. 8:9). This is the humiliation of Christ, his kenosis (Phil. 2:6-11). But he does not take on the human sinful condition and its consequences to idealize it. It is rather because of love for and solidarity with others who suffer in it. It is to redeem them from their sin and to enrich them with his poverty. It is to struggle against human selfishness and everything that divides persons and allows there to be rich and poor, possessors and dispossessed, oppressors and oppressed.” – Gustavo Gutierrez

“Because Jesus is at once the ‘yes’ of God to humans in fidelity and also humanity’s ‘yes’ to God in faith, we are lifted into a higher life than we could ever imagine, a sharing in the life—and the eternal dance of gifts given and received—of the triune God.” – Luke Timothy Johnson

“[W]hat was really exciting to Paul was that it was obvious from Jesus’ self-giving, and the ‘out-pouring of Jesus’ blood,’ that this was the revelation of who God was: God was entirely without vengeance, entirely without substitutionary tricks; and that he was giving himself entirely without ambivalence and ambiguity for us, towards us, in order to set us ‘free from our sins’—‘our sins’ being our way of being bound up with each other in death, vengeance, violence and what is commonly called ‘wrath.’” – James Alison

“Because [Jesus] died for us, we never die alone without representation, without hope for personal identity beyond the grave. We will never have to die alone on a Godforsaken hill outside the gate. We can die in a communion of his love, in the assurance of the forgiveness of sins, with undying hope for resurrection and eternal life. Because Jesus died the death of the sinner as the sinless one, assuming our lot by his love, he can be our representative. Because he died the death under the law as the man of love, full of life to share and taking time for others, he can be our representative. He can be our representative because, in being raised from the dead, he was approved by God as having the right credentials to be the ambassador of the human race. — Carl Braaten

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked anything.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
—George Herbert

Neat article at Commonweal on the theological insights from recently translated ancient Syrian Christian hymns and antiphonal poems.