a lawless blog

It happens to be Proclamation Day in Denmark as I write, which is an opportunity for us to ask what Mark meant when he said Jeshua came into Galilee proclaiming the goodnews of God. Prince Frederick will actually become king by force of the proclamation (and concomitantly Princess Mary will become queen). A proclamation is more than a simple announcement of news.

It is an official word that has power to bring into being what it says; to make it happen. The new 'kingdom' of God began with Jeshua's proclamation.

In Mark's world everyone would have recognised that in the case of a prophet (and that's what Jeshua appeared to be) the power, the authority of his word came from God.

For a proclamation of the Goodnews to have any effect, two things are required: that it come across to the target audience in language they can relate to; and most importantly that it is communicated with conviction.

To find the right words and metaphors for today is our most pressing challenge. I've written three or four drafts of this essay and only now do I feel confident in the suggestions I will offer. The filtering and sorting process goes on and on and only gradually is the precious ore revealed.

Now I'm going to invite readers to join a search for a caption that will capture the essence of Christianity, i.e., sum up the Goodnews of God that Jeshua proclaimed.

This is my best suggestion:

"God intends us to live a life of free, self-motivating love."

What's in this three-word formula? Actually it is one single idea with three different labels. To be free is to be self-motivating is to love.

We want to find a way of expessing the essence of the Goodnews message in language anyone could relate to, so let's see what this formula breaks down to.

To be free is to live in freedom. This is among the deepest desires of women and men everywhere, the motive behind resistance to oppressors, and the cause of protessts and revolutions.

To be free is to be self-motivating. When we are not forced from outside the self we choose for ourselves what we want to do in life. We're happy with our choice and we get into it willingly. In this situation the self can expand to its full potential.

The usual word for all this is love: perhaps this four-letter word adds the necessary emotional content to our caption, but in the end 'love' refers to what we freely choose because we want to, i.e., without being constrained by law or by force, or by dire necessity. 'Love' is our shorthand way of encapsulating the complex of 'free and self-motivating' living.

"I'm so lucky: I love what I do for a living". "I love my work." "I've chosen to be a farmer because I love it." Expressions like these can be heard on TV every week.

Love of freedom and the freedom to love make things happen in the world. The people of Taiwan have just chosen a leadership that will assert and fight to "maintain their independence, rejecting the seductive 'safety' of dialogue that would likely lead to assimilation into China. They know they might pay dearly for that choice, but they're prepared for that because self-determination is vitally important to their self-worth, their dignity.

The same can be said of the people of Hong Kong, of Ukraine, and of both the Palestinians and the Israelis in their current conflict, quite apart from the question of unwarranted violence.

For each one, personally, life is a series of free choices. We know what a difference it makes to be able to choose freely where we live, what we do, who we marry, how many children to have, how we spend our spare time and so on.

The great angst of our world is for those who don't have these freedoms, being locked into poverty or constrained by disability or simply disadvantaged by circumstances of colour, language, creed, etc

The goodnews is that God favours our freedom so much that the only obligation we have is to work for the freedom of others. In the gospel the disciples were instructed to obey the Law of Moses, it being the law governing the whole of life, religious and civic. But Paul saw that the Law was not the source of Life, but in many ways an impediment to the best of life. Only by shedding that bind of obligation under law could a person expand to the full and make real in themselves the gift of life. Paul saw that peope felt they had to earn their place by submission. They were virtually buying the way into heaven. But, he insisted, life is a "grace" - a gift: life is pure gift, and all its richness and joy is given free. Communion in God can only be by love.

In conclusion, the ultimate goal, the ideal, is to become a person who is self-determining, self-motivating, one who is moved from within and not constrained or pushed by outside forces. We're trying here to focus on our deep inner self-awareness.

Of course every life is full of constraints, whatever we do, but if we love who we are, what we've chosen to do, our freely-chosen ambitions, etc., we start each day not just with a will but with eagerness to live our time fully.

No law or binding obligations can constrain those who are self-motivating. They fly above all that. Even punishing hardship is taken on board with a will so that it is endured positively and one is not crushed under it.

Christianity is a philosophy and spirituality of free self-motivation, of love. The Message of Jeshua was that the Father wants this and nothing less for every human being. Christianity provides a community context in which this can happen.

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If we were to offer Christian life in these terms, a spirituality of freedom, it seems to me people would be keen to give it a try. Living a spirituality is a matter of integrating oneself as a complex whole, of learning to be comfortable in oneseelf with a wholesome life. Religion falls short here as its very name speaks of binding.

What I'm suggesting is more than a philosophy of life or an ethic for living in society; it goes beyond reasoning because it declares that freedom is possible in spite of all the setbacks - it is possible because it is God's will, and it is given cost free as our heritage.

Paul has some hair-raising expressions about being free. To the Galatians he wrote: "So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law. (Gal 5:1) Such teachings do not fit well within an institutional framework so they are neglected, passed over as not applicable.

Life in the church is centered on obligation and obedience. A consequene of this is that many come to the conclusion that the 'love' so much talked about must be an emotional state - feeling good about God and the Church and people we help. They actually try to learn to feel love, exercising themselves in feeling good even in revolting situations; suppressing their feelings instead of rising above them in willing acceptance, binding themselves to the good as if that were to love God.

That is what the institution does. This is not the goodnews of God that Jeshua proclaimed. Love cannot be forced or bound. Love means spontaneously moving towards the good. It is the good we long for that draws us out of ourselves. We expand from within till our whole self-awarenes is of peace, joy, and sometimes happiness.

We could go on forever finding ways of telling of this self-motivating freedom we call 'love'. I'm sure many readers will have something to contribute here.

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Just a word about the second requirement for effective proclamation - it must be expressed with conviction. We're not talking about God or about Christ's promise; we're letting the Goodnews be seen as it affects us. How deep our conviction is will become evident if we simply share it rather than preach it in any form. More about this on another occasioin.

There is one more thing to add: The Christian spirituality I have outlined above is poles apart from the usual translation of the second part of Mark's caption: 'Repent and believe the good news.' These words are loaded with binding obligation. A simple choice of other words can give a totally different feel to the challenge while remaining true to the Greek text as we have it.

"Change your thinking about life and trust in God's goodnews."

Not to trust the Father God that Jeshua tells of is equivalent to not trusting nature itself. Even in face of the harsh reality of an evolving world there is convincing evidence that nature's way is development, not destruction. Evolution involves a steady progress towards greater complexity, towards enhancement of beauty, and towards the wonder of self-awarenesss. Jeshua's message is that we can entrust ourselves to this process because, he assures us, there is no nasty god waiting to smash us to pieces for 'mistakes' we imagine we've made. The Father/Mother God freely choses to love us, to care about us, to care for us.

What does it take to surrender to this very warm and comforting way of thinking about life?

a lawless blog

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time