“I am always saying ‘Glad to've met you’ to somebody I'm not at all glad I met,” admits Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J. D. Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye. To justify his conduct, Holden explains that, “If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”
Do you have to lie to live?
That’s the question Paul takes up as he anticipates the ultimate coming of God’s Kingdom. The answer to the question depends on who’s holding our note, who’s underwriting our lease on life. He uses the metaphor of debt: The New American Standard translates the word in verse 12 as “under obligation,” but the old King James comes through, rendering it “debtors.” It’s the same word Jesus teaches us to use when we pray about forgiveness “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” (Mt 6.12)
We don’t have a choice about spiritual debt; only about who carries the paper.
The First Bank of the Flesh makes an understandable bargain: a little more death now in exchange for a little more life now. Call is a Caulfield Loan – sacrifice a slice of your integrity on the altar of a lie and polite society will continue to give you access to a job and money and a certain amount of social acceptance. The problem with this deal is the balloon payment at the end: ultimate, eternal death when we have bargained away our last sliver of true self.
This moral economy makes us spiritually stingy because we need every bit of our minimal resources to beat back the inevitable for just a little longer. Alexander Solzhenitsyn records that the Russian mafia had a saying about death: “You today, me tomorrow.” Sure I have to die someday, but if killing you now buys me even one more sunrise, it’s a price I’m willing to pay. Or, as Scott Bader-Saye puts it, "Disordered and excessive fear has significant moral consequences. It fosters a set of shadow virtues, including suspicion, preemption, and accumulation, which threaten traditional Christian virtues such as hospitality, peacemaking, and generosity."
Jesus Savings and Loan sets different – and rather bizarre – terms: Kill everything (including possibly your own claim to life) up front and hope it pays off at last. “If by the Spirit you are putting to death” – The present-tense verb denotes ongoing action: tell the truth and die the death in order to live what is truly life. And in the end, instead of a balloon payment that bankrupts you, you receive a dividend that sets you up for all eternity.
This is not works salvation but how salvation works. Enslaved Israelites bargain tomorrow’s grave for today’s leeks and garlic while freed Israelites trust for tomorrow’s manna and make the down payment of today’s pilgrimage. Orphaned children scavenge scraps while adopted daughters depend on their unseen Abba. Unredeemed creation fights a duel to the Darwinian death but redeemed creation insists these are labor pains that lead to life.
Of course, nobody can prove any of this. Proof belongs to the delayed-death kind of debt. Hope deals not in proof but in patience, and brings the excitement of the unknown to the ventures of life.
You Pays Your Money, and You Takes Your Chances.
Doug
Collect
Holy Spirit, assure our spirits that we are heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ, so that in our sorrows we may take present comfort in sharing the sufferings of the Son and future hope in the promise of sharing His glory. In the name of God our Father, Christ our Brother, and the Holy Spirit our Comforter, Amen.
Benediction
May you put to death the deeds of the flesh,
Because God gives you life in the Spirit.
May you cry out to your Abba Father,
Because God’s Spirit speaks in your spirit.
May you seek to soothe creation’s groanings,
Because you bear first-fruits of the Spirit.
In the name of
God our Father,
Christ our Brother,
And the Holy Spirit our Comforter,
Amen.
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