Rising up to heaven: the awful sickness of being right all the time.
“And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.” (Matthew 11:23)
Jesus, when he brings condemnation, he brings down the house. There is a way of wisdom, he says, and then there’s being right all the time.
Judgment texts in the Bible are hard to preach, mostly because the audience never thinks the Bible is talking about them. The person whose tattoo says, “only God can judge me,” is the least-likely person to believe God will judge them. But I want us to see this differently. Wherever you see Jesus proclaiming judgment, he is trying to open our eyes to great darkness. An oppressiveness, the works of the devil, for which we need to be aware and prepared. Jesus proclaims a darkness so thick that it makes the hyper-sexual residents of Sodom blush. It’s a darkness so hungering that it makes the materialistic residents of Tyre and Sidon give up their possessions. Somehow, Jesus says, the sinners in sinful lands can see the works of God and hear the good news, but those who are right all the time cannot see, and cannot hear.
How are they opposed to wisdom? The people in these cities live to be right. So right that their rightness will help them ascend to heaven. It is the kind of self-assured rightness that believes that if anyone is going to heaven, if anyone is to be healed by their own goodness, it is them. Or us. Could there be any more of an appropriate descriptor for our age than this kind of sickness? It is not enough to have the facts, we must own our opponents. Disagreements become tribal identities. Churches, God help us, split due to issues far less than orthodoxy. Pastors are run out of town for applying the Scriptures personally. Sadly it makes no difference, in our day, if one claims the name of Christ; our aim is just as true as the irreligious person. Oh that we would ascend to the heavens already, we say! What else is left to do on earth, having vanquished our enemies?
Jesus tells us that you can diagnose the sickness of heart by their words, so what are some of the words we should be on watch against, indicators of a deep pathology of arrogance? I’ll make a list of two, as long as the reader understands that it takes one to know one:
“I don’t understand how someone… .” This is easily the most common, and damning, of all the indicators. You don’t even need to finish the sentence. If you can’t understand how someone sinned this way, or voted this way, or didn’t understand what you understand, or lied, or cheated, or said something so asinine, the way of wisdom is clear: learn. Ask questions. Have a conversation if it isn’t enough to know this: the most stunning ignorance in human history isn’t what your neighbor did, but the unwillingness of human beings to trust a God who made them and loves them. An ignorance common to each person’s everyday life. We’re too dumb to live, you could say. Somehow God doesn’t obliterate us for that stupidity. We have to comprehend it, for our own good.
“I despise/hate/cannot with [this person].” There are several reasons why the Christian isn’t free to set apart a person as condemned to un-love, but one above all: if we nullify the Law of Love by our hatred of others, we lose the protection of it. If we champion a kind of love that is dependent on our neighbor’s loveliness, that standard will suffocate us. Failure by failure, blemish by blemish, we will bury ourselves in self-righteous self-condemnation. Or as Jesus puts it: if you live by the sword you will die by the sword. I despise so-and-so cannot be a fire by which we warm ourselves, but a confession that works us raw for the grace of God.
Jesus says the great darkness is that we are so right, so sickeningly, assuredly right, so powerfully obviously, unbelievably, joyfully right, so lifted up by our own high opinions of ourselves, that God’s loving kindness cannot reach us. When God calls our name while we're lost in the weeds, we refuse to turn our head. We refuse to be found because to be found is to be lost, first. The great danger is that the one who’s always right has no framework for knowing when we're wrong. And it gets worse: without knowing how to be wrong, we won’t have the skills to operate the grace of God in His church. How wrong are you and how often? Can you remember the last time you really had to own your own ignorance or fear or inconsistency?
Every week God engages the conscience of the guilty in the worship gathering. (And by the way, God help us if we ever worship in a church without differing opinions on things that matter; we should have to look our opponents in the face, as we receive from God our pardon for how we’ve sinned against them.) He forgives sin by the pardon, he applies the healing balm of his Word that both diagnoses our sickness and applies healing. God gives us sacraments, grace that cannot be applied without a willingness to be wrong. If we are right all the time, in our sickness we will not be familiar with a meal for sinners. We will eat it like fast food, thankless, mindless. A meal of convenience, which costs us so little, cannot nourish the soul.
If we are right all the time, if we sharpen our skills of debate and meme, if we live by the sharpness of our wit to slay our adversaries and distance ourselves from our own failures, we will not know how to operate the means of grace in God’s church. Grace will be on the Table and preached from the pulpit but it will be a frequency we no longer hear, because we are tuned to our own insufferable rightness. God will call out for us in the weeds but we will hunker down, and sleep.