This week, we’re beginning to look at the passages in Luke that show us Jesus’ final conflict with the religious leadership – “the scribes and the chief priests and the elders.” In that final conflict, we see Jesus who challenges what can be an overly simplistic picture of what a God of love looks like. We’ve just seen the gracious healer and forgiver in the stories of the blind man and Zacchaeus – now we catch a glimpse of the zealous warrior and defender. Jesus tells parables that end in severe justice on the enemies of God. He’ll storm into the temple and drive away the people looking to make a profit on the worship of God. In these stories, Jesus is not nice, gentle, and warm. He’s fierce, passionate, and dangerous.
What do we make of this man, of this God? How can this too be the God of love who welcomes children, looks for the sick and the lost, and suffers in the place of sinners? C.S. Lewis, in his book The Problem of Pain, explores how it is that God’s love and goodness can be compatible with his justice and judgment. Lewis says we typically reduce God’s goodness to a narrow understanding of love.
“By love…most of us mean kindness – the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven – a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see the young people enjoying themselves.’” (My apologies on behalf of C.S. Lewis to all the grandfathers who don’t match this description!)
Lewis goes on to say that this picture of goodness, while sentimental and pleasant sounding at first, is ultimately not love at all. A father who doesn’t much care whether his son is good or bad, mature or immature, doesn’t really love his son. Real love, says Lewis, is much better than this kind of indifference to whether the object of love is lovely. If we are to become the glorious creatures that God designed us to be, we need a God of real love who cares about his creation enough to do whatever it takes to protect us and shape us into real men and women. As Lewis says, “it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.”
In the end, what we have is a God who sees sin and suffering and says, “I love this world and these people too much to merely be nice to them, to merely wish them to be happy as they are.” God, in and through Jesus, is ultimately not in the business of comfort care, but of surgery and rehab. Lewis reminds us that God would have to cease to be a loving God to be content with us as we are. And “because he already loves us he must labor to make us lovable.”
This is the God we see flashing forth in Jesus, who loves his people too much to not prophesy of the coming judgment through his parables and actions. But Jesus also shows that this righteous God is not a cold and distant God. As all this is unfolding, we’ll see Jesus gaze out at the city and break down in tears, thinking of the coming wars and destruction. Jesus will bring consuming fire of God’s love, but not without being moved to weeping at the refusal of Israel to accept her king.
