1.
The Person of Sin in the Light of the Lordship of the Son of Man
We
are shameful before God because our holiness cannot compare with the holiness
of God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. We might do well when compared
with others or when judged according to some abstract moral code. But our
shameful existence as sinners is exposed as such when we compare ourselves with
Jesus Christ who was the one truly human being in his freedom for God. We are
shamed by Jesus Christ whether or not we know it or respond to it by being
ashamed or not. Both Pharisee and tax collector were equally shameful before
God, but only one humbly asked God for mercy (Luke 18:9f.). We are shamed by
Jesus Christ and ashamed of ourselves when the light of Christ’s lordship
shines upon us, when his Spirit critically directs us, when we participate in
knowledge of him and therefore of ourselves.
In
the light of Jesus Christ our Lord, we Christians learn that, even in our better
moments, all of us as humans set ourselves in opposition to Jesus Christ. We
may know ourselves in the characteristic relationships with Jesus Christ
established by all the people of the New Testament. In their abandoning,
denying, and betraying of Jesus Christ, they reveal our opposition to him in
all its ignoble mediocrity.
In
his light, we learn that even apparently good and decent people like ourselves
act shamefully. We cannot defend ourselves as basically good because Jesus
Christ has freed us from this triviality. What we may be tempted to consider as
normal caution or indifference is revealed in relation to him to be evil
ingratitude. The person indifferent to Jesus Christ is like a pardoned prisoner
who refuses to leave his cell. Any attempt to justify such truly abnormal
indifference is itself shameful.
So
in his light we learn, thirdly, that even otherwise fine people like ourselves
are truly sinners. As Christians, we know ourselves and all people only in
Christ. Jesus Christ identified with us as sinners, suffered our death in our
place, and in so doing was exalted and exalted us to fellowship with God. To
see ourselves exalted in Christ we must admit our abasement revealed in Christ.
If we cannot admit our separation from God outside of Christ, we cannot
participate in our reconciliation with God in Christ. If we cannot do that, it
is only because we want to make Hell our home.
Finally,
in Christ we learn that, as sinners and therefore as enemies of God, all were
put to death in Christ to live as new creatures in Christ. So no excuse exists
for continuing to live as sinners outside of Christ. Furthermore, the fact that
God himself in Christ combatted sin indicates the absolute seriousness of its
attack on God’s creation and therefore on God’s glory. God’s victory over sin
and liberation of us from sin in Christ means that we receive our lives as new
creatures as gifts of God’s grace, the grace which reveals our humiliation even
as it reveals our exaltation.
2.
The Sloth of Man
Pride
is the Promethean form of sin, the evil action contrasted by the humbleness of
the Word made flesh. Sloth is the unheroic form of sin, the evil inaction,
contrasted by the exaltation of man in Christ. The Holy Spirit indicates a
particular direction and in it a specific action. We do otherwise. Sloth is our
refusal to do God’s will even if the form of our refusal is frenetic action in
another direction.
Sin
is unbelief. Pride expresses unbelief in God by wanting to be regarded as God
and to act like God. Sloth expresses unbelief in God by not wanting to be
bothered with God or by God. Oddly enough, as slothful people we may still be
deeply religious, believing in life after death and worshiping a supreme being
committed to the well-being of man. We will worship a tolerant God and be
tolerant of God. But in Jesus Christ God is quite demanding, so our sloth will
be exposed finally by our rejection of him.
We
reject the divinity and humanity revealed in Jesus Christ because we do not
wish to live in his distinctive freedom. We may not be perfect but we like to
think of ourselves as good enough. We do what we can within the realm of reason
and regard the demands of Jesus as idealistic and unrealistic. But this is only
because we prefer the secure comfort of slavery to sin to the risky
responsibility of lordship with Jesus Christ. We prefer self-orientation and
self-direction to being Christ-centered and directed by his Spirit.
Sloth
is sinful finally because, in rejecting Jesus Christ, we reject the God who
comes to us in Christ, we reject the man who is truly our brother, and we even
reject our own humanity and therefore contradict ourselves. Our slothful
refusal of freedom in Christ expresses itself in our relationship to God as
stupidity, to our fellow human beings as inhumanity, to ourselves as
distraction, and to our own limitations as anxiety.
Sloth
as stupidity is the rejection of our freedom in Christ to be for God.
Jesus
Christ is the Word made flesh. As such it was his distinctive freedom to know
God perfectly, to witness to God perfectly, and to determine us for
participation in this same freedom. But through ignorance and unreason we
refuse to be free for God and so remain stupid fools. In the Bible, fools are
not the uneducated. Fools are people who feel no need to learn or live by God’s
revelation. All we think, will, say, or do apart from God’s Word is stupid. Our
foolishness is especially bad when we interpret Scripture in terms of our
culture rather than allow our culture to be questioned by Scripture. Our
stupidity is always dangerous because it spreads rapidly, is difficult to
discern in oneself, rarely (if ever) appears undisguised, and appears so
benign.
Folly
is also absurd. The fool is free, but refuses to be free; he has eyes to see
the light, but prefers to keep them closed and remain in darkness. The depth of
folly is indicated by the fact that it always pretends to be wisdom. Paul calls
this pretentious folly the wisdom of the world (1 Corinthians 1:20). It
includes all knowledge of truth and reality possible to man outside of Jesus
Christ and includes everything from happy commonsense to imposing expertise.
Because God refuses to be without the fools who think they can live without
him, even their apparent wisdom contains, within its limits, elements worthy of
respect and consideration (cf. Philippians 4:8f.). The disadvantage of these
elements is the excellent concealment of folly they provide. And regardless of
the form this apparent wisdom takes, it always regards the cross of Christ as
foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:18). This is easy enough to do in confrontation
with an arrogant Christianity, but it remains a temptation even in the best of
circumstances.
Sloth
as inhumanity is the rejection of our freedom in Christ to be for others.
Jesus
Christ is the one neighbor radically committed to the well-being of every human
being. In Christ we love God wholly and others as Christ loves them. In Christ
we glorify God and affirm their dignity. Jesus Christ is truly human because
truly committed to the well-being of all. Nothing can change the fact that all
of us are likewise directed in him. We only contradict ourselves, then, when we
respond to others with hostile indifference or violent hostility. Sloth as
inhumanity is this wanting to be alone instead of neighbor to others. It is
this constant reserve toward others on the basis of which we interact not to be
neighbor but only to further our own interests.
Beginning
quietly enough as nothing more than this distorted attitude, inhumanity quickly
grows and soon becomes a power all its own. Of course unleashing it may well
enable us to gain control over others. But loosing it means accepting its
domination because it inescapably subordinates us, our relations with others,
and theirs with us, to the inflexible law of retaliation. Inhumanity may begin
with only secret omissions or acts of indifference, but it passes rapidly
enough through passive or active violations against another’s dignity and soon
ends in open acts of destruction and death. This power is the same at each
point along the way even if we normally recognize it only in its most extreme
expressions. We do not need to become murderers before we live as slaves and
victims of sloth—or before we need God’s grace in Christ to free us from it.
In
brutality and war we clearly perceive the danger of inhumanity. Its real
threat, however, lies in the fact that like stupidity it is so highly
contagious. When someone treats us inhumanly, we are sorely tempted to respond
inhumanly in retaliation. Yet if we do, we too fall victim to its power.
Even
if we have fallen victim to inhumanity, we may still worsen our condition by
self-deception. This self-deception is hypocrisy. It is our attempt to hide our
inhumanity from God, from others, but finally from ourselves by calling it
philanthropy. In this sense philanthropy is our devotion to a cause intended to
improve the lot of others. The difference between genuine humanity and the
counterfeit humanity of philanthropy is a subtle but significant one. Genuine
humanity is our commitment to the well-being of specific human beings while
philanthropy is our commitment to a cause. The difference is between helping a
poor family and working to help “the poor” without ever establishing a
relationship with a poor person. We can devote ourselves wholeheartedly to a
cause, even offering our bodies to be burned (1 Corinthians 13:3), yet never
once give a thought for anyone but ourselves. Indeed the more righteous our
cause appears, the more inhuman we are apt to be. So, on our desire as
Christians to proclaim and defend the truth, we often succumb to using the deadliest
means.
Hypocrisy
is generally quite effective. In our devotion to various causes and concerns,
we usually succeed in convincing ourselves of our righteousness before God
despite our real inhumanity. But from time to time circumstances conspire to
strip the mask from our faces, and the truth again confronts us in all its
starkness. But because these dangerous times come infrequently and pass—for all
their horror—relatively quickly, we usually succeed in persuading ourselves
that they were the exception and not the rule. During the otherwise routine
times of our civilized society and lives, we reject those who nonetheless
insist upon our inhumanity. We accuse them of an unhealthy pessimism, of being
negative, of exaggerating evil and failing to recognize our basic goodness. So
we busy ourselves with good works until the next conspicuous outbreak of
inhumanity again forces us to pause.
Sloth
as distraction is the rejection of our freedom in Christ to be ourselves.
Jesus
Christ, by living according to the Spirit even in the flesh, lived a truly
human life at peace with himself in body and soul. His soul freely ruled his
body and his body freely served his soul. By his Spirit we too may live as
truly human beings in this ordered unity of soul and body. When we reject our
freedom in Christ, we live lives of distraction. But just as our rejection of
God and neighbor does not make either go away, so God’s liberating direction to
us in Christ to live in an ordered unity of soul and body constantly
demonstrates the futility of our rebellious assertion of one at the expense of
the other.
Even
so, distraction is absurdly real. We do absurdly will the disintegration of our
own nature. We do indulge ourselves instead of practicing self-discipline. We
prefer the pleasant slavery of our own permissiveness to the rigorous freedom
of God’s commands. We may be inclined to dismiss the soul as preserver of the
body to pursue a purely spiritual life at the expense of the body. We may
release the body from service to the soul so that it may follow its own
desires. Either way we succumb to this power of weakness.
We
also conceal this form of sin from ourselves. We do not want to live for God
according to his will but only for ourselves according to the powerful weakness
of the flesh. We hide this sloth behind the hypocritical rationalizations like
claims of freedom or naturalness.
Sloth
as anxiety is the rejection of our freedom in Christ from the fear of death.
Jesus
Christ supremely demonstrated his freedom as the royal man by freely dying in
obedience to God for the sake of man. In doing so he remained faithful to the
bitter end and now lives eternally as Jesus the Victor. Jesus Christ awaits us
at the moment of our death which itself is determined by God. So in Christ we
may live courageously and die joyfully. We cannot add to our lifespan (Matthew
6:27) and God knows what we need to get by until then (Matthew 6:32).
But
we fear getting by because we fear death. We are anxious about our limitations.
This fear and anxiety, where there should be joyful certainty, is the sin of
sloth. We plunge ourselves into unrest.
We demand assurances against possibilities we fear and assurances for
possibilities we desire. We fear sources of insecurity and desire sources of
security. We do this because we see nothingness awaiting us in death and not
God. All our care is nothing but giving form to nothingness. It is the power of
death in our life. But either we find joy and comfort in our end or we poison
our lives fretting about it. Even so, God is committed to us even as sinners
fearful of death. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything… (Philippians
4:5b-6a).
3.
The Misery of Man
The
Son of God humbled himself by joining us in the far country and brought us home
in his exaltation as the Son of Man. Our failure to acknowledge this truth does
not make it any less real for us in Christ. But it does leave us wallowing in
the stupidity, inhumanity, distraction, and anxiety which exist outside of
Christ. It therefore leaves us miserable. Freedom from this misery of sloth is
ours only in Jesus Christ.
Misery
is a fatal illness of which Jesus cured us by taking it upon himself and dying
in our place to give us a new beginning as new creatures. In our sloth we
absurdly prefer nothingness to God and self-contradiction to our own true
humanity. In doing so we make ourselves miserable. But no matter how severe,
this misery is only a weak reflection of the misery which Jesus Christ took
upon himself and expressed in his cry of abandonment (Mark 15:34). And on the
cross Jesus Christ revealed that we are miserable whether or not we know it or
feel it. But whether we think misery is ours alone or never ours, it is ours
whenever we allow ourselves to sink back into our past exile which was overcome
in Christ. It remains ours so long as we remain indifferent to moments of grace
offered to us by God. We are totally free in Christ; totally bound in ourselves
outside of Christ; and know sanctification only in the total conflict between
this freedom and this bondage.
Copyright © 2019
by Steven Farsaci.
All rights
reserved. Fair use encouraged.