All in the Family (2)

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 1995

Against – 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 determined by 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 a 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 from 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.  It implies that 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 just 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 truly 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 just 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 spirit?  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 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 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 may only be 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.  My behavior begins to change.  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.

Topical Index: change, transformation, against, household, family, Matthew 10:34-36