This is Week 2 of our Lent series. Click here for week 1.
In a small coffee shop, a friend sits across from me, anger in his voice as he recounts a conversation from a campus pastor from the prior week:
“I thought God loved me,” my friend says.
“He does, but you have to meet a certain standard,” the campus pastor responds.
This picture, of a God who loves us tentatively and hesitantly, has been following me for weeks. After this year’s Super Bowl featured an ad in which Jesus washed the feet of a homosexual and a woman who had an abortion, Christian social media was ablaze with indignancy. He gets us, sure, he cares about us, but ultimately he wants us changed. He wants us sanctified and made holy. To, in any way, normalize or associate the perfect Christ with a wretched sinner is a blasphemous affront to Jesus’ divinity. He can wash the feet of some sinners, but there’s certain lifestyle, permanent, or habitual sins so egregious Jesus would never bend down to wash. Just as the campus pastor highlighted, God loves you, He gets you, He’s willing to wash your feet. But first you need to meet a certain standard.
About a week after the Super Bowl, Tenth Avenue North dropped their second single of their comeback era (can I get an Amen?!). The song is called Invited, and it posits a radical message: that “even if you’re guilty, our God is able to love you.” Everyone is invited to the table of God. Again, the keyboard Christians came out to condemn and caution. Sure, God invites people to the table, but we have to meet a certain standard to sit. Bad company corrupts and if we allow sinful people to sit at the table with us, their sin will get all over us. The idea that God could love the guilty is too radical and inclusive for Christianity.
In other words, the table that God offers is a little less like Invited and a little more like Mean Girls. You can sit with God, but only if you follow the rules: Pink on Wednesdays, no sweatpants (except Fridays), no tank tops two days in a row. If you break these rules, you can still be our friend, you just can’t sit with us for the day.
Everywhere I turn, I keep meeting this Regina-fied God, hungry for us to let Him down, thriving off the power of giving us love just to take it away.
Jesus is a complicated figure difficult to fully understand. There’s one moment of his life, though, that I’m always revisiting with awe, anger, confusion. It’s a verse that’s missing in some ancient authorities, but present in others, and the symbolism of that alone makes it all the more poignant to me. Jesus has just been sentenced to death and the authorities have carted him off to The Skull. They’ve strung up his beaten and bleeding body to a cross fixed between two other prisoners scheduled for execution. With his arms outstretched, through laborious breath, bleeding and stained with human waste, Jesus says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Arguably, though, they do. They called him King of the Jews, a mockery of the title of Jesus. They gave him a crown of thorns to belittle his heavenly crown. They felt his bones break and heard his skin tear. His blood splattered on their faces. They hoisted his body onto a wooden cross. They knew they were killing him. They knew who he was.
If God operated like Mean Girls, if He loved us once or if we met a standard, I don’t think Jesus would be concerned about forgiveness against the weight of his agonizing, slow death.
Jesus doesn’t wait for people to repent to die for their sins or interceded for their forgiveness. Even after Jesus intercedes for their forgiveness, makes space for them at the table, the people do not relent, suddenly inspired by the kindness of God to change their ways. On the contrary, the people double down. The people, entertained by public executions, continue to watch. No one runs up and rips him down, provides first aid. The leaders continue to mock him, demanding him to save himself is he really is who he says he is.
The sacrifice of Jesus is not based on our own work or lack thereof. It would be easier if it was, honestly. We’d feel so much better about ourselves. Grace would make so much more sense. Christianity would be a cuter religion. We would walk into the horrors of this world and at least get to rest in the knowledge that the people we didn’t like would never get to sit at our table. The people who had what was coming to them would get it.
Instead, following Christ is like walking into a crime scene. We smell the rot of death that somehow never gets fully out of your nostrils. On the walls and all over the floor, we see the blood and brain matter and bone fragment of a once living thing. We gape at the hardness of the body, the unnatural rigidity of death. And instead of searching the room for clues to capture the person who committed this atrocity, to put them to death or sentence them to life, we go to the kitchen and start making a meal for the person who did this. We pick out the best wine and the best bread. We pull down from the cabinet the fanciest dishware. We set the table with the tablecloth our grandmother sewed painstakingly and lovingly. We sit at the table in the same house as death and we make a meal for a murderer, and we hope that they decide to sit. It is their choice to sit down or to stay standing, but the table is made, and it is ready for them either way and always, even if they stay standing, stay killing. Even if they stand for years. Even if they stand all their life. We keep the table ready in hopes that one day, even if it is long and after years of increasingly deprave debauchery, that some day they will come and sit.
This is not a pretty religion. It is not simple or clean. It is not right. In fact, it feels wrong. It is an affront to human decency, to human expectation, to the inherent belief that goodness begets goodness and that ill begets ill. There is no standard to receive grace other than that you humble yourself far enough down to accept it, to believe that despite its ludicrous absurdity, despite its affront to everything you’ve ever done and ever will do, everything you are powerless to, grace remains open to you.
You cannot outrun it. You cannot earn it. And even worse than that, even more illogical, neither can anyone else. Even murderers, even lifetime sinners, even perverts and politicians and addicts and habit makers. Even the scum of the earth, the worst of the worst, cannot outrun God’s grace for them. On many points in Christianity I am willing to stay open-handed and gray-minded.
On this point though, that grace is undeserved and unearned, that it is unconditional to the point of offensiveness, I will not be moved. I will not be moved by the politicians who co-opt my faith to turn me against nation or person. I will not be moved by the self-righteous who thumb their nose up at sinners as though they are something else. I will not be convinced that there is a standard we need to achieve to earn God’s love, to finally be accepted as His children. I believe in God’s love.
What people who believe in a so-called “standard” to achieving God’s love are misinterpreting is two different types of sanctification. Sanctification is a churchy word that just means to make holy or to be set apart for special use. There are two kinds of sanctification: positional and experiential. Positional sanctification cannot be achieved by us. This is the sanctification, or the being made holy, that Jesus did for us on the cross. We were made holy, not by our own actions or our inactions, but by Jesus’ work on the cross to unify us to God. There is no standard for or requirement of this sanctification because it is not from us.
Experiential sanctification is something we do have control over. These are our habits and our choices, how we live our life. If you have been positionally sanctified by Christ, your life should reflect that in some way. You should slowly and continually become something more and more Christ-like. In doing so, in becoming more Christ-like, you will also become more humble, more aware of the gaps between yourself and Christ. And it is the rest and the peace of the positional sanctification that enables us to make the Sisyphean pursuit towards becoming Christ-like. It is Sisyphean because, as long as we are human, we will never achieve it. We will never be without sin. In this way, all of us live lifestyles of sin. All of us habituate sin. It is impossible for us not to. But because of what Jesus has done, because of the offensive, undeserved love and grace of God, that sin is unable to bar us from access to God’s love.
We can think of sanctification a bit like marriage, in part because we are, while we are alive, preparing to become Christ’s bride in heaven. Although human marriage is flawed and can end in divorce, a perfect, heavenly marriage never can. This – the marriage covenant – is positional sanctification. We are in the relationship no matter what we do or do not do because we made the decision to enter the marriage. We could be a terrible spouse and we would be a terrible spouse who was married. Ideally though, the fact that we’re married, the fact that we decided to get married, means that we love the person we’re married to and we work, bit by bit each day we’re alive, to make it a good marriage, a marriage where love grows. Ideally, we become a partner who buys thoughtful gifts, who pays attention to the small details, who supports the other person. Ideally, we try to be attractive to the other person, to do what we know they like, to love them how they want to be loved, to deny what we want in favor of what they do. But when we inevitably fall short, when we come home angry from a long day at work, when we’re forgetful and burn dinner a bit, when we stay at work too long and miss an important anniversary, our spouse does not end our marriage, toss out the wedding band, change the locks and ask us to try better next time. He waits for us patiently, mercifully, lovingly.
To return to the original metaphor, in heaven’s cafeteria, ideally, we are good dinner guests. Hopefully we are polite, funny, good-natured, pleasant, and fun to be around. But when we are sloppy, rude, irritated, quiet, hopeless, the table stays open and the wine keeps pouring. When we wear tank tops two days in a row, we can still sit and eat our lunch.
Let’s shed our Sisyphus skin, no longer pushing our boulder hoping that once we reach the top God will finally say well done. Instead, let’s walk with the Lord, trusting that any boulders that break our bones as they roll down the mountain, will be cleaned and bandaged with the blood of Christ.
Bryce Van Vleet is the #1 selling author of Tired Pages and Before We All Die Let’s Have One Last Chat by the Fireside. He also hosts the podcast Death in Dakota and sells poetry art here. You can support him by clicking through blog posts or donating (scroll to the bottom of the page).
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