GRACE
by
Henry Hasse
The thoughts and words in italics below must be credited to Robert Brinsmead, an avocado farmer in Duranbah, NSW 2487, Australia. The rest are my own embellishments, all of which I have made my own and which also tell of the growth and development of my personal faith, even from as little as a few months ago. I believe what follows, and I am very thankful for Mr. Brinsmead’s offerings. I also find myself compelled to share this with you. Important: None of what follows is shared with the intent of convincing you of anything. What you make of them is entirely up to you. I merely urge you to read and consider the gracious news that has taught me to love you as you are.
Henry Hasse, reviewed and revised September, 2007.
Growth
Please! Destroy all earlier versions that I shared with you. They indicated in several places that I was still hanging on to the life and death of Jesus as a substitute and as a payment for my less-than-perfect life; this, while hoping that God’s grace would impute his perfect life to me. But finally, a simple belief in a gracious God, trusting his loving justice; namely, his unconditional offer of family status in his Paradise, has won my life over and freed me from the justice of the law that was taught to me by the church. For 40 years, my concentration was on serving God through meticulous obedience to his “word” and to the church. For all that, I was expelled and became an angry, bitter man for the experience. But little by little, while in a new career, I learned to serve people instead of God. Obedience to his “word” and to the church was put aside completely for another 25 years. In spite of mistakes, my concentrated effort of serving people was recently rewarded with an Administrative Commendation in front of all the Hospital Leadership. It came as a complete surprise to me because, I thought, I was just doing the right thing, and had no idea that it was so unusual among 2500+ employees. Then it dawned on me. This is what it’s all about: not obedience to a supervisor, not working for a reward, not making a show of it, but quietly caring about and serving people (patients, healthcare professionals, other employees, and members of the local community). All that really matters is loving and serving people. It’s God’s way! Jesus believed that, and being human, made mistakes as well (disobeying his parents, dishonoring his mother, cursing a fig tree, dishonoring church leaders, losing his cool and probably hurting caged animals in the temple, etc.), but he also lived out his compassion for others more than anything. Most important of all, in spite of experiencing the justice of the law, both civil and religious, he was surprised by his resurrection and then his treatment as a son of God!
Scandal – Justice - Faith
“Easter,” as it began to be called, declares to us the scandal of God’s justice. (The use of the term “scandal” will soon become apparent. Just think of it in terms of what the church leaders, the teachers of the law and tradition, thought of Jesus, his treatment of the poor, sick and oppressed, and his teachings of the kingdom of God as compared to their own oppressive teachings.)
The historical Jesus of Nazareth used his real Hebrew name Yashua (Joshua). In his native Aramaic he called himself bar Nasha (Hebrew: ben Adam), not a title, meaning son of man (Adam), human one, or this man. This alone should tell us what he knew about himself.
Every important feature of Joshua ben Adam’s life was a scandal to the Jewish leadership. His conception and birth was surrounded by very irregular, tragic circumstances. He was a Galilean whose rugged and independent spirit was despised by Jewish elite in Judea because no prophet, much less Messiah, could ever come from that northern hillbilly province. And although he was later accused of the same, he never did make claims to be the Messiah the Jews hoped would come to save them from their foreign oppressors.
His public ministry was likewise a scandal, having a reputation as a glutton and a drunk (He enjoyed many good times eating and drinking with friends and anyone else who enjoyed his company.), while ignoring the holiness code (unbefitting the high place assumed by a typical Rabbi/Teacher in Israel), living and eating with unclean folk, ignoring the canons of honor and shame by his non-discrimination, even baptized by John, a baptism of repentance! He knew he was no better than any other human.
Worse, he was put to death, condemned and executed as just another Galilean rabble-rouser hanging on a tree and scorned by God. He died utterly discredited, abandoned by all and apparently forsaken by God. At least it appeared to be so. But at the end, he rejected his fears of being forsaken and turned his life’s breath over to his God whom he trusted as a loving and gracious God.
Everything about this unfortunate man would soon have been forgotten if it were not for “Easter,” (The church of Constantine began to call it that in 325 A.D.) His resurrection convinced his dispirited little band that Joshua had been honored by God as a sign that God himself was keeping his promise to the human race; namely, that in spite of their humanity, they did, after all, possess the breath of his life, a precious gift, a spark from his fire, which was not about to disappear without a trace after the decease of their mortal body and its returning to the elements of the earth.
Yes, everyone is human and does not always do the right thing, but God does always do the right thing, and he kept his promise to save and set free all mankind from their hopeless, self-chosen wrong ways of oppressing others, including their diseases, aging, and death, a separation from their Creator-God. This man, bar Nasha, experienced the worst of mankind’s oppressive religious and civil authority, including their condemning and deadly judgments. But he showed us the way into God’s Paradise. He simply trusted a gracious God, and he was right! God graciously provided him and all mankind a life of peace with no strings attached. God weighed the justice of men and found it to be unjust. He raised bar Nasha from the death that had falsely penalized him and instead invited him into his “kingdom” of life to be his right-hand man, as a son. We too are graciously invited into his presence to live as his sons and daughters, members of his family. Can you believe it? Surely you can! Surely you can trust such a gracious God. Compared to mankind’s justice under the law, is not this justice of God scandalous?
Unlike the historical cross event, the resurrection into God’s presence and eternal life is an article of faith just like the existence of God. Neither one (Resurrection and God’s existence) is historically provable. Faith trusts and depends upon what cannot be seen or proven.
Pressure to Explain the Scandal
Unfortunately, the pressure to embellish his story and explain away the scandals of his life was too much for his followers. At first, the Word of God was the word of the resurrection. It was the “Easter” gospel news pure and simple. They taught that mankind’s authority and justice under the law was powerless. They spoke of the promise of his peaceful kingdom, the elimination of all oppressive behavior, the responsibilities of family membership as children of God. Does not this good news of God’s gracious love for you make a difference on how you view and treat others? They spent no time arguing about Joshua’s divinity, his virgin birth, his providing a salvation by blood atonement, his incarnation (God becoming a man in Jesus), not even the Trinity or the sacraments. Each of these was added to their message by church leaders generations later, along with endless other doctrines and traditions, all based upon these embellishments. In fact, it is interesting to note here that nowhere did Joshua ben Adam ever say, “Write this down,” and none of his followers ever recorded their own experiences with him as eye-witnesses. No doubt he was wise enough to know how people would use written words against others. Of course, we must also remember that these followers only shared the stories of what they had seen and heard. We must not assume their literary abilities in Aramaic, Hebrew, or Greek.
The four Gospels were written between 70 and 100 A.D. and contain the traditions of second and third generation Christians. There is only one solitary eye witness in the entire New Testament: Paul, who wrote only two brief statements: “I saw the Lord,” (I saw a lordly person.); and “He appeared to me.” Eight words are all we have, not from a witness of the so-called Easter event, but from a witness who actually saw the risen one much later, no longer shrouded with a mortal body – and that experience supposedly blinded him for three days, focusing his attention and concentration on the meaning of his encounter. Second and third generation reports say: Peter said that he saw him and Mary said that she saw him, but not a word directly from Peter or Mary. These reports also say that the rest of his band also saw him and that a large group saw him, but not a word from any of them either.
The hush of awe and wonder remained with the movement for 40 years. The later the accounts, the longer the explanations; the further we get away from the event, the more embellished and fantastic the stories became. To be sure, after the Roman Legions destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 A.D. and began a systematic destruction of surrounding Jewish settlements, killing or dispersing their inhabitants throughout Europe, Christians were thereby encouraged to separate themselves and their religion from anything Jewish. The New Testament Gospels and Epistles reflected this need.
The lawyer-scholar, Paul, closest to the event, takes only four sentences to express his faith in the resurrection, but then proceeds to pass on the embellished stories and explanations told to him. Mark, decades later, needs eight. After him, Matthew expands the report to twenty. Luke, later still, reports in fifty-three. And the fourth Gospel, two generations after the event, long after the last eye-witnesses were deceased, expands the account to two full chapters, describing what the author could only know by hearsay. The further the distance from the event itself, the more colorful was the description, admittedly, not all that different from the embellishments and stories told by many preachers today in order to make their point while attempting to convey the meaning to their listener’s current lives and experiences.
The good news of the resurrection did not remain central in the church’s life for very long, and was instead relegated to its appointed place in the church year and rarely mentioned during the rest of the year. In time, the central issues became Joshua’s divinity and his blood atonement to pay for the sins of the world. Although each embraced both concepts, in history, Catholicism’s center became the Incarnation (Jesus, the God-Man) and Protestant’s center became the blood atonement by substitution. One had to explain away the embarrassing circumstances surrounding his birth and the other returned to the old Jewish traditions of bloody sacrifices as payment for wrong doing and regaining acceptance from God via substitution in order to explain away the disappointing circumstances of his horrible death. (The cross event became the sacrifice of the sinless Son of God as God’s Lamb given up to pay for our sins.)
The whole (carefully written) Christian theological system began with the supposed premise of God having a law which required mankind’s perfect obedience. God’s law decreed zero tolerance! One strike and we were out! Therefore, our disobedience required a perfect bloody substitute or ransom-payment. And our salvation then became the vindication of this justice of the law. “Faith” was then centered on this event and the cross became the central symbol in all Christian churches.
Unfortunately, and more importantly, this view of the cross event diminished the scandal of God’s REAL resurrection justice and surprising generosity, and instead returned mankind to subjection under the justice of the law. Worse, it transformed the risen one into the Deity himself and put an infinite gulf between him and the rest of humanity.
Historical Stories
Over thousands of years, historical stories of God’s relationship to men had been written and rewritten and rewritten again and again by fallible men, then translated over and over again, each attempting to make these stories relevant to the people of their times, many even gleaning from stories of surrounding cultures. These should not be argued over or used to divide and oppress people. When we consider how these traditions and “holy” writings came about and how they were used to divide the church later, and how they still do, perhaps bar Nasha, who was wise enough to see how the Jewish writings and traditions of the past divided and oppressed his people, was especially careful not to have any of his teachings written down and later misused in like manner. He used the Jewish writings and traditions to tell the stories of a gracious God, not as burdensome rules and regulations…and he even told more outrageous stories of his own in order to describe the ways of such a God! Never-the-less, hundreds of years later, followers no longer concentrated on God’s gracious ways and did not recognize this dangerous misuse of “holy” writings. Instead, they proceeded to choose “new” writings which added more burdens to the “old” Jewish writings at Rome in 382 A.D., then reaffirmed their choices of authenticity in 1563 at the Council of Trent. Some 330 years later, it was again reaffirmed that they were all “holy,” and authored by God via inspiration (Pope Leo XIII). This was only about 114 years ago! We can only ask: What will church authorities and religious scholars oppress us with next?
The misuse of “holy” words is all about taking power over God’s people! So, the condemnation of mankind’s justice of the law over-shadow’s the loving justice of a gracious God.
But “take care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater!” There is no need to throw out your unholy Bible, Koran, Torah, Book of Morman, etc. Discover the stories of a gracious God which are still hidden there, stories that reveal his true relationship to you, and how you too might love your “neighbor.” And DO forget about using these writings to establish a “doctrine” that divides and proves others wrong. Your place is to comfort his sons and daughters with what you have learned about him, not impress and oppress them with ancient writings of fallible men. Using them to exert power over your spouse, children, and neighbors is NOT God’s way or will.
Back to Basics – Justice: Doing the Right Thing
First, a few words on the faceless laws of nature, or natural laws of the universe, which rain and storm and flood, or erupt and quake and burn, perhaps even collide with or explode, but do not distinguish who may be in their path. In fact, they usually require a survival of the fittest …… unless one has a “mustard seed faith” that trusts its Creator-God to somehow save us from such fury of nature. An evolving, developing, and ever active universe has no interest in justice or doing the right thing as if it were somehow thoughtfully godlike or human in order to bring out the best in survivors. Therefore, we need to be wary of blaming God or mankind for very natural disastrous scientific events (e.g. storms, global warming). It misrepresents God and assumes far too much power over nature by mankind.
There is a legal kind of justice or pay-back justice, which has a useful purpose in a civil society where minimum standards of discipline have to be maintained. Such legal justice or civil law, contrived by men, may or may not be fair when legal courts judge as best they can with the only information available. This may also be misused by a despot dictator or a greedy shylock lawyer. But its primary and useful purpose in a civilized society is to protect citizens from those who would do them harm, whether they are domestic or foreign enemies. All too often, this type of justice can be misused by power-hungry legislators and demagogues as they oppress their constituents unjustly while thinking only of their lucrative positions. Fortunately, in a free society, we can work to expose and unseat such men and women from their positions of authority.
According to religious church law, another form of pay-back justice, Joshua was found guilty of blasphemy for questioning and challenging its assumed authority and oppression over mankind; therefore, the church’s leadership claimed that he should be put to death for his teaching because it undermined and threatened their authority. According to Roman civil law, such charges of blasphemy were meaningless; however, his teachings certainly were causing local arguments and even riots among the Jewish leadership and disturbed the peace of Roman rule, a situation the local Governor could not condone because that threatened his position of authority. Under this threat to Roman “peace,” Joshua was sentenced to death to put a stop to a possible insurrection.
My personal experience was not a death sentence, but first a “cease and desist” order from teaching, questioning, and challenging my church’s authority and oppression over its membership. Later, that was followed by a withdrawal of the hand of fellowship. But being “outside the camp” has been a blessing to me. Above all, I knew that their actions did not represent the gracious God that I trusted. It has given me an opportunity to live as a growing member of his “kingdom” ever since. I have been forgiven for my participation in oppressing others, and for my anger and bitterness as well; and I have asked that that church’s leadership be forgiven, because they too did not know what they were doing and were only following orders from higher church authorities and doctrines based upon their “holy” writings.
But there is also another kind of justice which is featured in the Old Testament’s stories of God’s acts on behalf of his people, embellished as they may have become over several millennia. They tell of experienced salvation events from their enemies and express the need to explain to next generations how unusual and amazing they were. While filled with questionable adornments, especially those describing God’s brutal treatment of their enemies, possibly to cover up or excuse their own brutal behavior toward their pagan neighbors, they do portray God as doing the right thing in terms of being faithful to a relationship, loyal to a personal commitment, faithful to a personal promise, and showing fidelity to personal obligations. It is a justice of love, based on unconditional acceptance, on being there for the other in time of need, for better or for worse.
From the enemy’s perspective, God’s act on behalf of his people was either seen as foolishness, in which case they did experience their own demise as their choice, or perhaps they experienced it as beneficial when they chose to recognize that God’s act of justice could include them as well. The most important thing was that their pagan neighbors with homemade gods (idols) of their own were NOT to lead God’s chosen people astray from giving him alone all worth and praise as their gracious God or from treating each other with love and compassion. If anything, God’s people were to be examples of faith and love to their neighbors, drawing them into God’s family as well. In 2007 A.D., nothing has changed this objective of our gracious God. And, according to bar Nasha’s resurrection, we too are invited to call him our Father.
Misrepresentation - Inhuman Behavior – Being Human – God’s Justice
When the law is allowed to intrude as the mediating agent in human relationships, it not only keeps us at arms length from God, it keeps us at arms length from brother, sister, father, mother, wife, husband, child, friend, relative, neighbor, or stranger. Worse, it misrepresents God and his ways as being terrible, unfair, and unloving, as if he were some angry ogre playing recklessly with his creatures and creation. Even a natural disaster is called “an act of God.” Unjust treatment, even declaring a jihad, is excused as “doing God’s will.” We cannot help but be judgmental, unforgiving, discriminatory, and above all, fail to be caring and compassionate. The justice of the law makes us inhuman and controlling. Our ideas and explanations of God make him appear to be a supernatural being filled with a vengeance toward all mankind who cannot do anything right. A “faith” based upon religious laws, writings, and traditions breeds inhuman behavior toward others, and misrepresents a loving God, the very opposite of its intention.
Being human is just like having two arms. With one we receive and with the other we give. We not only need God; we need others and cannot live without them. Being human means being dependent on God’s blessings through others on the one hand and rich in ability to do good and right (God’s way) to anyone on the other hand. Being human can also mean choosing to be independent from God by refusing his goodness from others and to not do good or right toward them as well; that is, choose not to receive goodness and/or not to give goodness. Such behavior continues to blame adversity on surrounding circumstances or on other folk rather than accepting possible responsibility for it or recognizing it as preparation for greatness and an opportunity for practicing loving acts.
According to Joshua ben Adam, we give God’s justice a human face by being forgiving, unconditionally accepting, and graciously non-judgmental toward others while thankfully receiving the same from them, thereby also recognizing the source of all goodness. It means living without looking down on any person as inferior or up to anyone as superior. Such behavior mirrors the loving justice of God, whether willingly given to others or gratefully received from others, always done graciously and freely, without strings attached or expectations for returned favors.
Paradigm for Justice of the Law
However impressive the Galilean teacher may have been to his little band of supporters, he appeared pathetically weak as he was quickly arrested and hurried off to a brutal execution. He not only died totally discredited in the eyes of the highest judicial authorities in the world, both religious and civil, but as it appeared, he was totally discredited in the eyes of God because, after all, the law said: Anyone hanged on a tree was cursed of God. It may also be quite likely that his body endured the usual and ultimate insult of Roman crucifixions – no decent burial, but thrown into pits to be scavenged by dogs and carrion. We rather hope that there was some truth to later accounts of his actual burial.
The world seems to be ruled by idiots and bureaucrats who, the moment they get behind the wheel of this juggernaut called “the justice of the law,” they run people down. And they do NOT need an outside “devil”-ish source for instruction either! Religious authorities have certainly not been exempt from grinding up their share of human bones as well (Papal Inquisitions, Protestant Crusades, Moorish Invasions, treatment of Native Americans and slaves, etc.). The death of Joshua ben Adam stands as a paradigm for the justice of this world, the justice of mankind, the justice of the law, civil or religious.
Scandalous Gift of God’s Justice
The God who has called the human race from the evolutionary mud of creation into consciousness and awareness of himself also has a destiny for this creature, a likeness of himself, one which will not be abandoned. His justice is a scandal to the judgment of the world. It is not calculated, measured out, and does not pay tit for tat. It’s the justice Joshua ben Adam tried to illustrate in his outrageous stories and act out in his compassion for the oppressed. It was this justice he depended upon when he was overwhelmed by utter failure and total disaster as he experienced the injustices of his religion and this world.
The good news of “Easter” is that death is not the final answer. Like life itself, the justice of God is a gift of inconceivable generosity. “You will be with me in Paradise,” because God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. The justice of God is based on his unconditional divine love and promise which never at any time even contemplated locking anyone away from an unbrokered fellowship with himself. Since the beginning of mankind’s consciousness and awareness of God, humans have had a choice to trust this love of his for them, or not, and to treat others accordingly. We still have the same choice in 2007 A.D. Nothing has changed, all the Old Testament Jewish traditional writings and explanations, based upon even older Babylonian writings, concerning our origin, not withstanding. God’s justice will always outweigh the justice of mankind.
The fact that powerful and religious men have selfishly misrepresented God and covered up his generosity for centuries is not the issue any longer. The issue is that their horrific behavior is no longer reason to close one’s mind to the truth of such a God’s existence and to the truth of his gracious justice found in the resurrection.
Future of Humanity
Joshua ben Adam, a true human, capable of human errors, mistakes, and unloving trespasses, for which he was baptized by John, and for which he prayed to be forgiven while teaching us how to pray to our Father-God, chose to trust God’s promise of unconditional love and then act accordingly. (e.g. “Forgive them. They’re just mindlessly following their rules and orders.”) His resurrection, in the face of his scandalous life, was God’s assurance to us that this unconditional love of God is true. We can depend on being with him in Paradise, a new life that will not require the use of this mortal body of ours, certainly not with the space-time limitations it has now, and no longer subject to harmful bacteria, viruses, diseases, aging, and the universal laws of nature, nor oppressed by the laws of this world, but just like Joshua and the thief who died next to him, humans who are now treated like family, sons and daughters of God, who will then experience sharing endless explorations, possibilities, opportunities for service to each other, growth and development, within infinite universes, but without mortal limitations. An awesome future, indeed!
Whoever lives and trusts God’s loving justice, as Joshua ben Adam did, will never really cease to exist in spite of what others may witness, in spite of a lifeless body buried for worm fodder, to be eaten by carrion, drowned in the depths or burned to ashes and returned to the earth. Our life is attached to his living breathing life and will continue to exist and enjoy his fellowship and that of others in his Paradise, his expanding universe(s), under considerably different circumstances.
Finally, I must also add that to assume to know what God will do with his breath-of-life in those who have mocked this faith; that is, to say that the life of the one who refuses to trust God and his love may simply cease to exist, or may even experience a hellish punishment far worse for an eternity, takes Old and New Testament embellishments, all based upon the justice of the law, to the extreme, still does not yet realize how scandalous God’s loving justice really is, and also presumes to lend instruction to God.
The more we recognize that Joshua ben Adam was truly human and only human, the more we will appreciate that the account of his resurrection is God’s word of love to the entire human race without distinction of race, religion, gender, or anything else. The more we realize how scandalous the real message of “Easter” really is, the more we will be wowed and overwhelmed by God’s justice, and the more we will have reason to celebrate and enjoy our life, including the experience of loving relationships and fellowship with any and all others. We can already enjoy the first fruits of his “kingdom” to each other’s mutual benefit.
Mine is a simple faith: In spite of my human faults and in spite of any dire circumstances I may experience, I believe in a gracious God, and I trust his loving justice; therefore, I anticipate the enjoyment of his Paradise. Very many religious notions must be given up to come to the conclusions I have written about here. (I dare say that the atheist who may still do what is right to others has much less to give up than the most religious person does, because an ogre-god does not exist!) What follows? Awe. Relief. Tolerance. Understanding. Forgiveness. Generosity. Love. Thankfulness. Celebration. Anticipation…and more. I promise! Very much more than is given up, and all of it freely given and freely received! Can you even begin to imagine what would happen if Christian pastors, teachers, and priests, Jewish rabbis, Islamic imams, Hindu and Buddhist priests, teachers and leaders of the LDS, teachers of Chinese and Japanese folk religions, and the many others put aside their precious “holy” books and traditions and began to concentrate on sharing the free and loving justice of God?
