Tough Faith

Tough Faith

“‘They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young’—this is how Israel tells it—‘They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young, but they never could keep me down.’ ” The people of God are tough. For long centuries those who belong to the world have waged war against the way of faith, and they have yet to win. They have tried everything, but none of it has worked. They have tried persecution and ridicule, torture and exile, but the way of faith has continued healthy and robust: “They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young, but they never could keep me down.”

Do you think of Christian faith as a fragile style of life that can flourish only when weather conditions are just right, or do you see it as a tough perennial that can stick it out through storm and drought, survive the trampling of careless feet and the attacks of vandals? Here is a biblical writer’s view: “He grew up before God, a scrawny seedling, a scrubby plant in a parched field . . . . He was looked down on and passed over, a man who suffered, knew pain firsthand . . . . One look at him and people turned away” (Is 53:1-3). It is a portrait of extreme rejection and painful persecution. What could come of such a poor, precarious beginning? Not much, it would seem. Yet look at the results: “He’ll see life come from it, life, life and more life, and God’s plan will prosper through what he does. Out of that terrible travail of soul, he’ll see that it’s worth it and be glad he did it. Through what he learned, my righteous one, my servant, will make many ‘righteous ones,’ carrying himself the burden of their sins” (Is 53:10-11). The person of faith outlasts all the oppressors. Faith lasts.

We remember the way it was with Jesus. His ministry began with forty days of temptation in the desert and concluded in that never-to-be-forgotten night of testing and trial in Gethsemane and Jerusalem. Has anyone ever experienced such a relentless, merciless pounding from within and from without? First there were the cunning attempts to get him off the track, every temptation disguised as a suggestion for improvement, offered with the best of intentions to help Jesus in the ministry on which he had so naively and innocently set out. Then, at the other end, when all the temptations had failed, that brutal assault when his body was turned into a torture chamber. And we know the result: an incomprehensible kindness (“Father, forgive them”), an unprecedented serenity (“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”) and—resurrection.

And Paul. His life recklessly caromed from adversity to persecution and back to adversity. In one passage he looks back and summarizes:

None of that had the power to push Paul off his path. None of it convinced him that he was on the wrong way. None of it persuaded him that he had made the wrong choice years earlier on the Damascus Road. At the end of his life, among the last words he wrote is this sentence: “I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back” (Phil 3:13-14).

Stick-to-itiveness. Perseverance. Patience. The way of faith is not a fad that is taken up in one century only to be discarded in the next. It lasts. It is a way that works. It has been tested thoroughly.

Cut Cords, Withered Grass

An interesting line in Psalm 129 provides a detail that is both fascinating and useful. The sentence is “Then GOD ripped the harnesses of the evil plowmen to shreds.” The previous verse provides the context: “Their plowmen plowed long furrows up and down my back.” Picture Israel, the person of faith, lying stretched out, prone. The enemies hitch up their oxen and plows and begin cutting long furrows in the back of Israel. Long gashes cut into the skin and flesh, back and forth, systematically, like a farmer working a field. Imagine the whole thing: the blood, the pain, the back-and-forth cruelty.

And then, suddenly, the realization that there was no more hurting. The oxen were still tramping back and forth, the oxherds were still shouting their commands, but the plows were not working. “GOD ripped the harnesses of the evil plowmen to shreds.” The harness cords, connecting plow to oxen, have been severed. The plows of persecution aren’t working, and the oxherds haven’t even noticed! They plod back and forth, unaware that their opposition is worthless. They are wasting their time and energy. The wicked oxherds are comic figures, solemnly and efficiently doing their impressive work, proudly puffed with selfimportance, thinking of what they are accomplishing historically on the back of Israel. If they ever looked behind them (which they never do—their stiff necks make that exercise too painful), they would see that their bluster and blasphemy are having no results at all: “GOD ripped the harnesses of the evil plowmen to shreds.”

The concluding illustration in the psalm tells a similar truth. Opposition to the people of faith is like “grass in shallow ground.” Palestine is a rocky country; in many places there is only a thin layer of soil over bedrock. Seeds would sprout and grow from this dirt, but the grass didn’t last; the thin soil couldn’t support it. By midday the grass would wither. No harvest there. No reapers wasting their time there. No one going along the road would ever look and shout out, “Great harvest you have there. God’s blessing upon you!” The illustration is a cartoon, designed to bring a smile to the people of faith.

The life of the world that is opposed or indifferent to God is barren and futile. It is plowing a field, thinking you are tramping all over God’s people and cutting his purposes to ribbons, but unaware that long ago your plow was disengaged. It is naively thinking you might get a harvest of grain from that shallow patch of dirt on a shelf of rock. The way of the world is peppered with brief enthusiasms, like the grass on that half-inch of topsoil, springing up so wonderfully and without effort, but as quickly withering. The way of the world is marked by proud, God-defying purposes, unharnessed from eternity and therefore worthless and futile.

The Passion of Patience

There is one phrase in this psalm that good taste would prefer to delete but that honesty must deal with: “Oh, let all who hate Zion grovel in humiliation.” Anger seethes and pulses in the wounds. A sense of wrong has been festering. Accumulated resentment wants vindication.

However much we feel the inappropriateness of this kind of thing in a man or woman of faith, we must also admit to its authenticity. For who does not experience flashes of anger at those who make our way hard and difficult? There are times in the long obedience of Christian discipleship when we get tired and fatigue draws our tempers short. At such times to see someone flitting from one sensation, one enthusiasm, to another, quitting on commitments, ducking responsibilities, provokes our anger—and sometimes piques our envy. No matter that we are, on other grounds, convinced that their adulteries are an admission of boredom, that their pleasures are the shallowest of distractions from which they must return to worsening anxieties and an emptier loneliness. Even when we know we are doing good work that has a good future, the foolery and enmity of these others make a hard day harder, and anger flares.

We can’t excuse the psalmist for getting angry on the grounds that he was not yet a Christian, for he had Leviticus to read: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart . . . . You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:17-18 RSV). And he had Exodus: “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, you shall bring it back to him. If you see the ass of one who hates you lying under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall help him to lift it up” (Ex 23:4-5 RSV). And he had Proverbs: “Don’t laugh when your enemy falls; don’t crow over his collapse” (Prov 24:17). When Jesus said “Love your enemies,” he added nothing to what this psalmist already had before him.

So we will not make excuses for the psalmist’s vindictiveness. What we will do is admire its energy. For it is apathetic, sluggish neutrality that is death to perseverance, acts like a virus in the bloodstream and enervates the muscles of discipleship. The person who makes excuses for hypocrites and rationalizes the excesses of the wicked, who loses a sense of opposition to sin, who obscures the difference between faith and denial, grace and selfishness—that is the person to be wary of. For if there is not all that much difference between the way of faith and the ways of the world, there is not much use in making any effort to stick to it.

We drift on the tides of convenience. We float on fashions. It is regarding the things we care about that we are capable of expressing anger. A parent sees a child dart out into a roadway and narrowly miss being hit by a car, and angrily yells at the child, at the driver—at both. The anger may not be the most appropriate expression of concern, but it is evidence of concern. Indifference would be inhuman.

And so here. The psalms are not sung by perfect pilgrims. The pilgrims of old made their mistakes, just as we make ours. Perseverance does not mean “perfection.” It means that we keep going. We do not quit when we find that we are not yet mature and there is a long journey still before us. We get caught yelling at our wives, at our husbands, at our friends, at our employers, at our employees, at our children. Our yelling (though not all of it!) means we care about something: we care about God; we care about the ways of the kingdom; we care about morality, about justice, about righteousness. The way of faith centers and absorbs our lives, and when someone makes the way difficult, throws stumbling blocks in the path of the innocent, creates difficulties for those young in faith and unpracticed in obedience, there is anger: “Oh, let all those who hate Zion grovel in humiliation!”

For perseverance is not resignation, putting up with things the way they are, staying in the same old rut year after year after year, or being a doormat for people to wipe their feet on. Endurance is not a desperate hanging on but a traveling from strength to strength. There is nothing fatigued or humdrum in Isaiah, nothing flatfooted in Jesus, nothing jejune in Paul. Perseverance is triumphant and alive.

The psalmist lived among prophets and priests who dealt with his vindictive spirit and nurtured him toward a better way of treating the wicked than calling down curses on them, learning what Charles Williams once described as the “passion of patience.” We are in a similar apprenticeship. But we will not learn it by swallowing our sense of outrage on the one hand or, on the other, excusing all wickedness as a neurosis. We will do it by offering up our anger to God, who trains us in creative love.

God Sticks with Us

The cornerstone sentence of Psalm 129 is “GOD wouldn’t put up with it, he sticks with us.” When the Bible says that God sticks with us, the emphasis is on his dependable personal relationship, that he is always there for us. The phrase does not mean that he corresponds to some abstract ideal of what is right; it speaks of a personal right relationship between Creator and creation. “Righteous” is a common translation for the Hebrew term. “Righteous is out and out a term denoting relationship, and . . . it does this in the sense of referring to a real relationship between two parties . . . and not to the relationship of an object under consideration to an idea.”1

That “he sticks with us” is the reason Christians can look back over a long life crisscrossed with cruelties, unannounced tragedies, unexpected setbacks, sufferings, disappointments, depressions—look back across all that and see it as a road of blessing, and make a song out of what we see. “They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young, but they never could keep me down.” God sticks to his relationship. He establishes a personal relationship with us and stays with it. The central reality for Christians is the personal, unalterable, persevering commitment God makes to us. Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness. We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God is righteous, because God sticks with us. Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and motives and morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasms. It is out of such a reality that we acquire perseverance.

This is what the writer of the New Testament letter to the Hebrew Christians did. He sang a litany of people who lived by faith, that is, people who centered their lives on the righteous God who stuck by them through thick and thin so that they were able to persevere. They lived with uncommon steadiness of purpose and with a most admirable integrity. None of them lived without sin. They all made their share of mistakes and engaged in episodes of disobedience and rebellion. But God stuck with them so consistently and surely that they learned how to stick with God. Out of that litany comes this call:

Some of those early Christians this writer was addressing had been complaining, apparently, that life was too rough for them. They couldn’t hold out any longer (complaints that are, from time to time, heard in every congregation). They didn’t see the use in believing in a God they never saw, serving a God who didn’t give them what they want, trusting a God who let babies die and good people suffer. There is a no-nonsense slap of reality in the words their pastor addressed to them: “In this all-out match against sin, others have suffered far worse than you, to say nothing of what Jesus went through—all that bloodshed!” (Heb 12:3). Quit your complaining. Take a look at the pilgrim road and see where you have come from and where you are going. Take up the refrains of the great song. “ ‘They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young’—this is how Israel tells it—‘They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young, but they never could keep me down.’”

Purposes Last

The reason my childhood was one enthusiasm after another was that I hadn’t yet found an organizing center for my life and a goal that would demand my all and my best. The Christian faith is the discovery of that center in the God who sticks with us, the righteous God. Christian discipleship is a decision to walk in his ways, steadily and firmly, and then finding that the way integrates all our interests, passions and gifts, our human needs and our eternal aspirations. It is the way of life we were created for. There are endless challenges in it to keep us on the growing edge of faith; there is always the God who sticks with us to make it possible for us to persevere.

In Charles Williams’s delightful, brief drama Grab and Grace, there is a dialogue between Grace and a man who is dabbling in religion, trying out different experiences, “into yoga one week, buddhism the next, spiritualism the next.” Grace mentions the Holy Spirit. Grab says, “The Holy Spirit? Good. We will ask him to come while I am in the mood, which passes so quickly and then all is so dull.”

And Grace answers: “Sir, purposes last.”