Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian
August 15, 2022
Only Love is Left Standing: God’s Problem with God
“The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up” (I Samuel 2:6)
I watched the tail end of a movie I really like the other night; ran across it while cable channel scrolling. Unforgiven, with Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris. In the last dramatic scene where Eastwood’s character, William Munny, gun blasts away multiple men in a revenge-filled and calculated calm he is asked by a fear-filled journalist bystander who Munny in his life has killed and how many he has killed before even this now witnessed massacre. Munny answers, without bravado and also without any apparent foreboding of accused guilt, that he has killed many people. He has just murdered in cold blood 5 or so men and without hesitation announces his history of annihilation and yet we, the viewer of this cataclysmic story, are cheering him on (weren’t you? I certainly am!) with righteous if not cheerful abandon.
What? Didn’t these men Munny just murdered have a good side to them? Didn’t they have families they cared for and “how about that time he went out of his way to help rebuild his neighbor’s destroyed barn?” and the other righteousness of their lives? When Munny stood gun-barreled over injured (by Munny’s gunshot) archenemy “Little Bill” Daggett (the Sheriff: How is it that good can be so evil?), didn’t Munny see there was some good reason, however miniscule, to let Little Bill live? And didn’t we expect that leniency just like we would from any self-respecting Bad Guy because the Bad Guy isn’t just through and through a Bad Guy is he? No, no leniency. Munny shot Little Bill point blank – and though bewildered, we the story viewer cheer him on (how is it that evil can be so good?).
What is going on here that this mass murderer could be such a hero? How could we possibly feel vindicated and feel the world is a safer and just place as Munny rides away, not into the sunset mind you, but into the absolute deluge of a pouring rain (the symbolism is just too rich)? It is because we the viewer know something of this Munny, we know he is doing all this carnage out of love and the need to establish wholeness and will do anything, including pushing madness and murder forward, making it all happen, to accomplish it.
The Old Testament of the Christian Bible establishes just such a narrative about God as God “hardens the heart of Pharaoh” and wipes out entire tribes if not ethnicities (those Amorites and others end up in the trash heap of history in the glory story of Israel). Israel defined itself by knowing and remembering that their God, the only God, cleared the way for them (meaning destroying whole cities and peoples) and they prided themselves in reminding themselves and others that it was not their mortal strength and weaponry that did the killing and the cleaning out but the immortal strength and power of their God, the Lord God, Yahweh.
What is going on here that such a Mass Murderer is such a hero? It is a theological story, an interpretation of history, told about how the God who liberates does so without regard to the Law, without regard to who gets what because they deserve it or not without regard for anyone or anything who would stand in the way of this God’s purpose and intent of liberating those to whom she has promised liberation. Notice how the writer of “Unforgiven” places the one person who witnesses Munny’s murdering and survives in the room and is the only one who talks to Munny after the killing is done. Notice this person is a self-stated, self-confessed, journalist by trade. And so how do we think we know of such a story of triumph over evil by evil means, victory over godlessness by the godlessness of God? The guy wrote it all down. He told the story of what he saw, but it was, of course, the story of what he believed he saw. Such too is how we received the Bible’s narrative of God’s glory that uses all means, including evil, to accomplish the promised liberation. Many people saw what they saw and wrote down what they believed they saw.
Then there is this Jesus who comes along and the story told about him is that of the great Liberator who stands in the tradition of Yahweh who gives people everything they need even though they don’t deserve it and does so in a way that he gets himself killed because of it and continues to do so because his death could not kill what he does, which is give people life for no good reason at all. He is alive and well, and so are we who take his word for it.
What is his word? You do enough, you have enough, you are enough. Now and for eternity. That truth is a story which humanity has pushed back on and rebelled against from the dawn of creation. The biblical narrative of Yahweh with Israel, embodied finally in Jesus, is the story of how God will stop at nothing, not even delivering death, in order to seal this truth, this “you do enough, you have enough, you are enough because I say so” upon every person in all history.
But it is important to realize this narrative of God destroying peoples for the sake of God’s promise is God’s story to enact, not ours to emulate. And it is critical to see how the story is completed, how the story ends. God will stop at nothing, not even mass murder, to keep God’s promise of enlivening all of creation through the people of Israel. This we say because an omnipotent God has no option but to “potent” against all comers. But how dangerous and destructive this is, how ungodly. It cannot stand if the world is to survive. Killing others for the sake of God in God’s name means only death for all. The vengeance of God knows no boundaries unless God steps in and stops God. Unless God takes on God Godself. Life can only overcome death, be the overarching creation story, if death is defanged and defeated. And the only way for death to be defeated in a life-giving way is to let death have its way, to not retaliate against death with death, to not fight fire with fire. But rather, straightforwardly and simply in love, die.
Love, then, wins. Life does not win a battle with Death. Love wins the battle over Death and Life.
No death given back, thrown back at death in order to find life. Only love done that transforms all death and life.
And so, Jesus.
Jesus. God taking on God Godself.
