Live, Drying Up, a Touch of Fall in the Kitchen

Field Notes From a Religion-less Christian

Tuesday, October 11, 2022 (my 41st Ordination Anniversary)

                                    Getting What You Deserve – Or Not!

“Steadfast love is yours, O Lord, for you pay everyone according to his deeds” (Psalm 62)

Psalm 62 is spot on in matching up with my theology and sense of how our relationship with God operates. Until that last line (see above). This says we get attention and “payment,” whatever that might mean in our imagination, that, justly or not, goes to getting good because we’ve done well or getting bad because we’ve poorly. That, to me, does not hold water. 

There are a couple of approaches to all of this that come to mind. 

One, the passage does mean we get punishment for bad “deeds” and reward for good. This is how the Law operates, no surprises. But while this is so, there is another action and communication from God which engages this Law and puts it to death. This action, this communication is called Gospel, the unmerited mercy of God. It’s not represented here in this last line of Psalm 62. When it does, however, show up, it puts this reward and punishment saga to death. 

Two, the Psalmist has it all wrong. They are writing within a Deuteronomic theology which sees God as relating to us transactionally, relating to us with a give and take based on how we behave and believe. In other words, the Psalmist is writing from the Law’s perspective, writing within the legal superstructure where behavior or belief are rewarded or punished, depending upon how well one measures up. And, to get at how this could be wrong as distinct from what I say above about what is being said (“you get what you deserve”) as being not wrong but incomplete, in this case, the writer is not thinking or realizing there is more to be said that mitigates and destroys the Law, but rather, simply believes the Law is the last word and we either live, or die, with it. 

One of Lutheran theology’s biblical interpretive tenets is to do something called “using the plain language of the text.” This means taking the text fundamentally at face value. It says what it means and it means what it says. This comes from Martin Luther’s pushback and abandonment of the Scholastic model of biblical interpretation (in which he was initially trained) that said the text actually has four different meanings, all of which should be considered for instruction and proclamation (teaching and preaching): the literal meaning, the allegorical meaning, the tropological meaning, and the anagogical meaning. When using this approach of the scholastics two things tend to happen, both of which Luther found offensive and off-key, not to say, just plain wrong. One, it tends to help us have the text say what we want it to say. Two, it tends to put us, instead of God, in the driver’s seat when it comes to who does the work of salvation.

If, rather than scholasticism’s attempt to make gospel out of law, putting God’s work of bringing salvation within a legal superstructure, one separates gospel from law, putting God’s work of salvation outside a legal superstructure, one can accept this legalism for what it is (e.g.  the text that says “you pay everyone according to his deeds”) but realize that is only a portion of God’s communication to us, not the whole story.

Indeed, there is a further word from God that is starkly illegal: humanity does not get what it deserves. There is neither reward for the good nor punishment for the bad. Clearly, this is an offense to the Law. It is outside the law, it does not operate within the law’s dictates or strictures. 

Where do we come up with such a notion as this, this notion that we will not get what we deserve in relation to God but rather get what God decides we will get? It comes from reading the Scripture for what it actually says, in two overarching narratives that actually end up being one big story. 

One narrative is the Christian Old Testament wherein the people of Israel keep getting beat up by God for their mistrust and disobedience (that’s what the texts say: God was doing the punishing and the killing). Then, there ends up a group of the people of God (the so-called “remnant”) that God does not destroy because God simply cannot give up on trying to make good on her creation. It’s important to note that this notion of a remnant being left, where some make it and most do not, as actually being good news for all, even those who do not make it, is a strange notion to us in most 21st century western culture, especially in the U.S. It is strange because we today in this western culture do not buy into the same cultural values of ancient Hebrew culture (and actually many peoples/cultures still today). What we don’t buy, that they did, is that what happens to one person actually happens to all of the people in the tribal community and what happens in the tribal community to all actually happens to each individual person. So, if some, a “remnant,” come out good in the end, that same goodness applies to all, no matter the past circumstances, including death. Western culture values the individual as sovereign, not interdependent. So, for this western culture, to say that when a  remnant remains means that actually all remain simply does not compute.  

In the end, then, the people of Israel do not end up with what they deserve. Not only do they not get chosen because they are good (cf. Abraham and Sarah are selected to be blessed, to be a blessing, mind you, out of the blue, or should we say out of obscurity and a foreign people) but they also do not get, as I have been saying here, punished or destroyed as a people because they are bad. Israel does not get what it deserves by the letter or the spirit of the Law. God decides there is another approach that God will use to counter God’s own legalities. It’s called Gospel – a promise given, for no good reason and against all odds, that will not be denied. This is one large narrative that tells the Big Story of Promise. 

Then there is the second narrative of the Christian New Testament with its Jesus who simply operates from Day One in not giving people what they deserve. From the call of the fishers and others with no credentials to be religious or spiritual leaders (actually, quite the opposite) to the acceptance of the death penalty from Rome, aided by the Jewish Religious Elite, without violent resistance or revolt, Jesus is just one big outlaw, one who works outside of the law,  who kept giving people space, forgiveness, the benefit of the doubt and freedom from the curse of the Law. 

So, to reiterate, where do we come up with the idea that our relationship with God depends totally upon God’s actions and initiative and this God activates and initiates only a promise to all of creation (not just an exclusive clan of ancient or contemporary Middle Easterners, or, to extend that, to any exclusive 21st century Christian group)? We get it all from the written narrative we now call Scripture.

[By the way, too, the whole highly elevated and popular maxim of 16th century Reformation theologians of “Sola Scriptura” (Scripture Alone) is Luther’s way of saying not that we exclude reason and experience in our total enterprise of doing theology (as if we are to neglect good science. No! Science is part of doing good theology as well as part of our way of doing smart living!) but that, rather, when it comes to the component of doing theology that is “revelation” (direct communication from God) that we use in addition to reason and experience, we do not turn to Tradition (which means the teachings surmised and espoused by ecclesiastical authorities (in Luther’s Day: The Pope and Curia or Ecumenical Councils). For revelation directly from God we can and should solely (sola!) rely on Scripture. Whether you buy that or not, it's what Luther meant.]

Again, we get the big story of giving and having mercy, without merit from start to finish and for all, from where and when the Christian Old Testament and New Testament (aka Bible) declares and delivers Gospel. This Gospel, this unconditional promise of God, pushes back against and then destroys all legalities. This Gospel defangs and defeats law (the New Testament book of Romans (chapter 10 verse 4) states it: Christ is the end of the law). Not all of the Christian Scripture contains or delivers Gospel [In fact, Luther famously said the New Testament book of James, for example, should be removed from the Bible because it doesn’t clearly present Jesus Christ as the one who does the saving].

So I will read Psalm 62 plainly and realize that either way, whether the Psalmist got it right, deeds matter in the salvation equation when the Law speaks, but there is another Word from God that destroys that Word from God (call this stronger and last word from God Gospel and you have just been liberated). Or, whether the Psalmist got it wrong and simply missed the mark with bad theology that was not using the law to drive us to confession and dependence on God but rather using the law to further our attempts to take God out of the decision-making position and insert our own beliefs and behaviors as determining salvation. Either way, the text says what it says but the Promise of God rules the day.

We do not get what we deserve. We get what God decides. And God has decided to never give up on us and never give in against the curse of the Law but rather put it to rest, put it to death.  And in so doing, profoundly and directly, God hands over to us the freedom to live and the freedom to love, both now and eternally.