All in the Family

Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.  Matthew 10:34-36 NASB

Sword – For half a century I lived within the accumulated expectations of my relatives. They watched me grow up, earn degrees, create a business, fall apart more than once and do things that I now very much regret. I became identified by my history of behavior. Everyone could say, “That’s sounds just like him.” They drew conclusions based on my past. They assumed, just like we all do, that my past actions would simply continue into the future. How could they think otherwise? We are all products of our own history.

Until God makes something new.

God decided I needed a new family. To get that new family I had to have a new identity. After years of struggling with God in the presence of my natural family, in a matter of days God changed everything about me. Suddenly all those identifying marks that made me part of my family on earth did not seem to fit. I discovered that what I tried to find in other relationships was replaced by a deeper satisfaction and confident identity I had never experienced but only glimpsed. I was thrilled. God became real. I couldn’t wait to greet Him each new day.

But my old family had other reactions. One member asked me to stop communicating about the change in my life. It was upsetting her religious assumptions. Another person told me that these changes were too much to deal with. “Please don’t tell me any more,” was the message. “I just have too much trouble handling it.” Someone else was a bit less kind. “Don’t bother me. I don’t believe it anyway.” One suggested that if these changes were real, I should make amends to everyone. Most just said nothing. They would rather not confront the possibility of real change. It left too many question marks.

Now I understand why Yeshua made such a shocking statement about family relationships. He knew that radical change would upset all the previous dynamics. He knew that people don’t like change. Actually, I’m not surprised. If I had no real experience of the power of God to change people, I would be the first one to say, “That stuff Skip is saying is just fake. He’s grasping for anything to help him feel better about his circumstances. I know him. Pretty soon we’ll be hearing that he is back to his old ways. People don’t change.”

From our natural perspective, meaning is derived from the past. We live in a world of cause and effect. The natural direction of cause and effect is toward the past. What has already occurred becomes the basis for explaining what will occur. The fact that the sun came up every day for the last ten thousand years becomes the basis for claiming that it will come up tomorrow. Past dictates future (except in the stock market, of course). As a result of this orientation toward the past, we assume the meaning of a man’s life can be explained by his past behavior, environment and experiences. This is not a “nature-nurture” debate. Both nature and nurture lie in the past. Both are subsumed under the banner of cause and effect.

But God’s point of view is different. From His perspective, the past is no indicator of the meaning of my life. The past is only the process by which I arrive at a turning point. The meaning of my life in God’s world is found in the future because the meaning of my life is what God intends to do with me from now on, not what I have already done to myself. This is the message behind Yeshua’s declaration in John 9. The blind man is not blind because of some occurrence in the past (although, of course, from the cause and effect perspective, there must have been a reason in the past for his condition). The blind man is blind because his blindness is about to become the opportunity for God to demonstrate his compassion and His power. The reason for this man’s condition has nothing to do with how he came to be blind. It has only to do with what God will make from his blindness. What matters is why and the answer to the why question is future directed.

The change in direction is the essence of forgiveness. Unless God is able to alter the sequence of cause and effect, forgiveness is impossible. Forgiveness implies a new beginning, and an inexplicable interruption in the natural chain. Forgiveness is an opening to a new future, a future that is no longer determined by what I have been but rather by what I will be. God doesn’t care how I got into the ditch. He wants to show me why being in the ditch can change everything about me.

But those of us who live in the cause and effect world cannot understand this break in the chain. How could we? Cause and effect demands uninterrupted compulsion. Why would anyone believe that life patterns could be dramatically altered? For many years I was someone who claimed to be a Christian but acted in ways that denied any real inner transformation. It was a sham. Perhaps not deliberate, but certainly obvious. That is the tragic verdict about most “believers.” We claim to be followers, but if we really took a hard look at our lives, we would not see anything substantially different between how we behave and how the most ethical non-believers behave. We lack the power of God coursing through us because we live as though cause and effect rule us. We just try to be good people, not holy people. We just try to get by, not die completely to self. We just try to help out, not sacrifice. So the world takes a hard look (as it did of me) and says, “Well, he’s a nice guy but . . .” Yeshua was not a nice guy. He was a radical disruption to all expectations. And he asks us to follow him.

When the change in my life finally came about because God made life impossible without Him, all that past record was still attached to me like a felony conviction. My family still had my old resume filed away in the character assessment drawer. The new behavior didn’t match the resume. It was like going to a job interview for the president of the company with a resume of a janitor. No leadership history. Don’t trust this one.

I knew the change was real. I knew that things were somehow different. But the outside world didn’t have any evidence except my claims. Who could blame them for not believing?

When God gets a hold of us, a revolution begins. We know that the world doesn’t look the same. But those who knew our past lives cannot see the reconstruction inside. We have history to overcome, a history that is as determined as the cause and effect chain that governs our natural understanding of meaning. With our newly acquired enthusiasm, we forget that external assessment of our transformation is naturally tied to past explanations.   God doesn’t forget this important characteristic of transformation. The history of the people of Israel in the wilderness is the story of forgiveness in the temporal dimension. God had to let an entire generation die in order to free Israel from its past perceptions. It’s a lesson we need to take to heart. Meeting God in the wilderness often requires leaving a generation behind.

Of course, most people really do hope for change. They are not so cantankerous or obstinate that they simply won’t allow real transformation. The problem is not that they have given up. The problem is that they are worn out. When God begins remodeling life, there are a good number of previous structures that need to be torn down. Every forgiven person has an historical architecture to overcome. The longer God has been chasing us, the less enthusiasm others will have about our remodeling. That’s why families easily rally around the child who confesses faith but withhold genuine encouragement for older adults. That’s why new friends are more likely to volunteer aid while life-long relationships stumble. Our pasts present formidable evidence against us. Those who know our pasts bridle their endorsement. They want to be convinced before they sign up again.

Yeshua is completely realistic about the separating power of forgiveness. The break in the causal chain is not easily understood and even less easily accepted. Yeshua knows that when love comes to town, hearts will be broken as well as mended. Some of us will not be able to handle the shift in the direction of meaning. Forgiveness requires a radical departure from the natural view of life. Forgiveness introduces a new factor in the equation of explanation, a factor that cannot be understood, anticipated or determined by the previous chain. For some of us, forgiveness is not a welcomed word. If I truly recognize the power of transformational forgiveness in the life of someone whose architectural history is well known to me, then this power to rebuild implies a great threat. It implies that I too can change. My past life can be radically altered by forces outside of my control and explanation. Forgiveness comes as a loaded gun. To shoot the enemy of love, I may have to turn the weapon on myself.

When I finally came to my senses, I was unprepared for the reticence of those life-long relationships. I knew the transformation as an existential reality. There was no denying my experience. But just as no one can truly know my pain, neither can anyone know my joy. At best we have only analogous understanding. I know pain, therefore I have some approximate idea of your pain. But I do not know your pain. I just read the external signals and recognize that they are a lot like mine. I am not a cancer survivor. My appreciation of that struggle is only appreciation, not identification. But even the cancer survivor will never fully understand the personal depth of any other survivor. In the end, we are all uniquely separated embodied beings.

Transformation is also interpreted by analogy. Unless I have experienced the radical alteration of real transformation, I am like the man who appreciates the struggle against cancer but who cannot know its ravages in my own body. The un-transformed have no analogous experience for interpreting the transformed. Past relationships devoid of personal transformation are incapable of understanding. There is no common ground. This is the first reason why forgiveness separates. The shared experience is missing.

The second reason forgiveness separates is seen in the difficulty of interpreting analogous behavior even when common ground exists. When I tell you that I am also a cancer survivor, the only way that you have of determining the truth of my statement is the evidence I present. But I could fake it (as insurance examiners will confirm). Fortunately, when it comes to things like cancer, there is physical evidence. But what do we do about matters of the soul? Without physical evidence, how is it ever possible to sort out the fake from the real? The answer, of course, is behavior. That’s why the Bible consistently claims that if we are true followers of the Way, our behavior will change. It is simply not enough to make the soul claim of transformation. The evidence must be observable if the claim is valid.

Evidence is simply a matter of the collection of the facts. Or so it would seem. But spiritual matters are not always so cut and dried. What would we do about the “evidence” that resulted from the claims of faith made by some very important Biblical role models? Would we be quick to support Abraham’s claim that God told him to sacrifice Isaac? Would we vouch for Noah’s claim that God wanted him to build a boat in the middle of the desert, or for Hosea’s claim that he was supposed to marry a prostitute, or for Isaiah’s claim that he was to lie naked in the streets for three years? Too often, much too often, we subject evidence to our standards before we take up the matter in God’s court.

Gathering evidence takes time. That is the other problem. Transformation can be instantaneous. When the Spirit moves, a man is uprooted. The old dies. The new is born. But the evidence of this new birth is gathered slowly. Fortunately, God is very patient. Unfortunately, human beings are not. The demand to “prove” your faith may be nothing more than succumbing to the current culture’s infatuation with instant analysis. In a world where the news is a live feed, meticulous insight and understanding are merely dust in the wind. Just go to the video. Forget about time-lapse comparison.

Transformation changes me.   I know it. I notice my behavior begins to change. Slowly. Incrementally. If you’re really looking, you may observe it. But the pressure to deny that transformation really changes me will be greater than your need to lift me up. Denying transformation keeps you safely outside. Outside of my now re-ordered world and outside the possibility that you might also need a re-ordered world.

Yeshua brought a sword. It is two-edged. What cuts me to the bone will also cut you. And in the new family, only the bleeding are brothers and sisters.

Topical Index: transformation, cause and effect, family, Matthew 10:34-36, sword