We’re a peculiar bunch, church. We are the ones who strive to experience that which is eternal, infinite, that which lies beyond all human possibility. In one sense, it’s a fool’s errand. But we can’t imagine any other way to be human, can we? We read in 1 Timothy that Christ “dwells in unapproachable light.” Unapproachable, but we hunger and thirst to approach anyway. Yet, the means we have to do so are entirely finite. Meeting times. Paper hymnals and Bibles. Buildings. Language, which, even at its most intelligent, eloquent, and poetic, still cannot hope to truly articulate the Divine. On top of all this, we make systems of rules, values, and practices by which we can make a tangible effort to participate in the Divine and live lives of holiness. In Romans, Paul refers to this as “the law.” You and I typically call it religion.
Religion can be treated like a bad word. I understand why that is, but I think all this is a deeply good thing. It’s good that the Church (and Israel before it) has found a multitude of ways over the millennia to attempt to participate in the Divine. However, the problem comes when we fall in love with the religion itself, instead of the God toward which our religion was designed to point us. We like religious law because it gives us ways of measuring ourselves and each other. It makes us nervous to truly give ourselves over to the Divine, because the Divine will sweep us up into a reality where our religious measurements don’t compute the way we think they should (like the prodigal son’s older brother trying to calculate what each of them deserves, and in the face of an outrageously, scandalously generous father).
But there’s good news. “You died to the power of the law when you died with Christ. And now you are united with the one who was raised from the dead.” (Romans 7:4) When we died with Christ (see also 6:3-11), we died to the power that “the law,” that is, observable and measurable righteousness, has over us. At the end of it all, our desire is not to get an A+ on our religious report card; we often think so because we don’t mind settling for things that can be measured. But the actual desire of the human heart is to be one with Christ, which is exactly what our new baptized reality is. It’s impossible and true at the same time: we have been made one with the one who dwells in unapproachable light, because sin and all its mechanisms were destroyed on the cross with Jesus and with the old human self. Our religion must get us, sooner or later, to ask, what is it that actually makes us one with Christ? Hint: it’s not being a good rule follower. It’s the grace of God, and only the grace of God. “And now, we can serve God, not in the old way of obeying the letter of the law, but in the new way of living in the Spirit.” (7:6) This new oneness now means that holy living is not a strenuous effort at being observably righteous, but the organic overflow of what Christ has put in our hearts.
The one who is eternal, infinite, and lay beyond all human possibility – he has approached us. He communes with us. He has made himself one with us, and us with him. So we will not engage in the game of judging one another, of measuring each other’s observable righteousness, because we don’t actually care about winning that game. What we really want is what Christ has already given us – oneness with him.
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