No Root in Themselves

Mark 4:16-17

And these are they likewise which are sown on stony ground; who, when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with gladness;

And have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a time: afterward, when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word's sake, immediately they are offended.

 [This is a bit of a mess, which I would like to edit if there were no time constraint.  Hopefully, some parts makes some kind of sense…]

Isn’t Christianity supposed to make me happy?  If I believe in God, in Jesus Christ, if I keep the Lord’s Commandments and do what is right and just – then I should be richly blessed with all good and pleasing things.  I should have property and wealth, friends and family, I should have good health and a long life, with the enjoyment of happy and healthy grandchildren – shouldn’t I?  What use is it to give my whole life to Christ if I will still suffer evils, heartaches, poverty or disease?  Didn’t God promise good things to those who follow Him?

 

How tempting it is to be caught up in the good feeling of Christianity.  And it does feel good to know that the Creator and Master of the universe knows me and loves me, that He became a human being like me and died for me, that He rose from the dead, vanquishing the power of death, and gives to me the gift of eternal life in the joy of heaven.  I would want to live in that feeling always, singing songs of Thanksgiving and praise with my like-minded brothers and sisters, sharing the plenty of God’s Creation, safe from anyone who would harm me – safe even from sorrow, fear, temptation and doubt.  That good feeling that we get inside when we are joyfully filled with the loving presence of God is, it seems, the just reward for acknowledging and accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.  But… that good feeling doesn’t last.  We can, however, be satisfied with a more mellow knowledge of divine love without the fireworks.  We can live in a kind of peace that makes the whole world seem right.  But… even this doesn’t last.  And it shouldn’t.  Because the whole world isn’t right.

 

Something terrible happens in our lives – a loved one is diagnosed with terminal cancer or killed in a car crash or murdered in cold blood – and we cannot understand how God, how our loving and Almighty God, could let something like that happen to us.  We might ask: Did I not profess my belief in Jesus Christ loudly enough?  Did I not pray enough?  Did I not make enough sacrifices of my own self-centered will for the good of others?  What did I do wrong that God should let something so terrible happen to me?  Why wasn’t my loved one spared, why was I not saved from evil?  These are the questions inspired by Job in the Hebrew Testament of the Bible.  And God, perhaps, could answer us with the words that He gave to Job.  God could simply say to us, mere creatures, that we have no right, indeed, not even the ability, to question the will of God; for we cannot possibly fathom God’s mind or God’s plan.  In the Hebrew Testament, God allows Job’s faith to be tested to prove to the devil, as it were, that faith is not dependent upon happiness.  Faith is not dependent upon good feelings.  Faith is not dependent upon reward.  Of course… this Old Testament story has Job rewarded with earthly enjoyments at the end of its telling.  And a common answer to us, as Christians, when we suffer great loss in our earthly lives, is that we will be richly rewarded with great joy and plenty at the end of our earthly lives.  And so often, perhaps too often, we rest our faith in that promise.  When cruel people do cruel things to us, when we suffer physically, emotionally or psychologically, when troubles are set upon us from the world, we believe that God will make up for it in the hereafter, we believe that all will be right in the ultimate end.  That is the promise made by God, and, so, I believe it.  But… I should, I must, always remember that my faith cannot be dependent upon reward.

 

I cannot look at my troubles as something to simply endure and get through so that I can get to the good stuff at the end.  I must remember that there is goodness here and now in the limitations and difficulties of my earthly life – not only because through them I am purified, I am made better and more able to love and receive the fullness of joy in eternity, but also because I am created by God, living in the necessary limitations of my own body and of Creation itself precisely because I am not God.  God loves me enough to bring me into being, God, who is perfectly self-sufficient, perfectly perfect without me, creates me so that I may be, so that I may be alive in the goodness of God’s Creation.  As creatures are not God, we are imperfect, and therein lies our suffering.  Yet, this suffering is the suffering of love.  For our imperfections exist only because we exist, and we exist only because God loves us.  How could God love us if we did not exist?  How could we ever be joyful and happy if we were not first created, if we were never alive?  And, yet, in being alive, we first had to be created, and in being created by God we could never be God.  We were always going to be imperfect, which means that we were always going to suffer.  Would it be better to never have been born?  Only if we never become fully alive, only if we merely exist, ignorant of our reason for being, separated from the reality of God’s loving gift of life, only if we use our God-given gift of free will to turn away from God and live merely for the self-centered pleasures of our limitations and reject the fullness of being alive, reject God’s love and cruelly take others from it – only then might it be better to never have been born.  For beyond this earthly life is the choice of loving self or loving God, the choice of imperfection or perfection; one is the way of eternal suffering and one the way of eternal joy – for in eternity, joy is solely the giving and receiving of God’s love.

 

What does this have to do with faith in Christ?  Everything.  For Christ makes manifest for us the truth and power of God’s love.  For, though we suffer, we do not suffer alone.  We suffer for God’s love that brought us into being and God, Himself, suffers for that divine love as well.  God suffers with us, always and everywhere, because God loves us, always and everywhere.  To accept God’s word is to accept God’s love, to receive God’s word is to receive God’s love, and so to live God’s word, which is to live God’s love – it is to accept, to receive, and to give Christ.  Not in a self-centered burst of good feeling, for nothing true or good has it’s source in ourselves, but in the God-centered reality of life-giving, other-feeding love.