Wheeler dealer
The leading women and men of the Bible are not unwaveringly consistent, nor clean cut either, for the most part. In telling us their stories, Scripture portrays most of them as highly effective people with some questionable habits. No airbrushing treatment for them, they are shown as they were, deep flaws included. They were cut from flesh, not paper. Turning to the pages of Scripture, I remember the strict instructions Oliver Cromwell gave to his portrait painter: ‘Remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it’. I’ve seen some of those canvases and Oliver was no pretty boy. In one, he sports a wart so big, it threatens to take over his face.
Scripture paints its heroes with similar honesty. Their strengths and weaknesses are shown with unflinching clarity.
There’s Noah, famous for faithful boat-building, who exposed himself in a drunken sprawl. His son, Ham, peeks into his father’s tent and at best, some nudge-nudge-wink-wink finger pointing follows. At worst, there’s a hint of incestuous sex. Not exactly the way for humanity’s new first family to behave. But the message is clear. Even after the flood, when humans are around, things are messy.
And the warts-and-all chronicles continue, as fugitive Jonah preaches the most effective (and brief) sermonette in history, then stomps off in an outraged sulk when an entire city repents. He loathes those wicked people of Nineveh and then whines at God about his lack of a sunshade.
Father of faith Abraham and his geriatric wife Sarah hear of impossible blessing - they are as good as dead, but suddenly expecting - and then laughs in the face of the blesser. Sarah suggests a quick fix to their childlessness and leads her husband to her servant’s bed.
Elijah, skilled at summoning fire from heaven and good at stirring corpses to life, runs for his life and then prays for death.
Peter swears and denies knowing his best friend. Three times.
From the Garden at the beginning to the City at the end, Scripture tells the story of God getting his will done through some very dubious characters.
Consider humanity. There are some who are stunningly evil, who deserve the description monster. They abuse and maim without compunction, gouging their way through life. Some even delight in the carnage, relishing every moment, hungry for more. They are very bad.
Jack the Ripper, who crept through the billowing Whitechapel fog, surgical bag in hand.
Fred West, who raped, tortured and murdered at least eleven women, (including one of his own children) and then took the cowards way out, ending his own pain by knotting a hangman’s noose in his cell, his last act of domination and control. A vile man.
But then, there are the epically good souls. Great in their silent selflessness, they pour out their lives for others. With the greatest respect to Mother Teresa, don’t allow her image into your mind for a moment. There are countless others who have never stepped near the foul pavements of Calcutta and have never been celebrated for their goodness, but in the shadows, their kindness continues, even more remarkable because it is unknown.
And then there are the rest of us, the vast majority. Capable of good and bad, sacrifice and selfishness, we spend our days hovering between good and evil, neither monsters nor saints.
Consider the Old Testament infamous bad boy, Samson. He was not a heartless psychopath and he certainly wasn’t a saint. I think that he just wanted what we all want, but looked in the wrong place for it. His life has so much to teach us all.
In an address given at a pastors’ seminar at Northwest Theological Seminary, Robert Starke reminded all there - and us too - that we have much in common with Samson:
‘Samson's story is our story as well. Again, not in some moralistic sense, that somehow we must avoid the ethical pitfalls that Samson could not. But rather, we, like Samson, in union with Christ, stand between two pillars, between two ages. In Christ, we have been endued with the Spirit of God and yet struggle with the flesh. Like Samson, in Christ, we drink from the living water that flows from the Rock, all the while dwelling in Philistine territory. Spiritually blind, we have been made to see through faith. Like Samson, our strength is made perfect in weakness. Like Samson, we cry out in faith to him who is able to deliver us. We too look in faith to the One who is able to save us completely. We embrace Jesus Christ by faith, just as Samson embraced those pillars. We participate in the glories of the age to come, even now. No longer shackled by the power of sin, death and hell, we, who were brought down, have been raised up in glory through the death and resurrection of our Judge—Jesus Christ. Like Samson, we cannot "be like other men.’ We are even now, being conformed to the image of Samson's Judge and our Judge. We have entered into the age to come. Together, we long for that final day when "we will be like Him, because we will see Him, just as He is.’
Surely the image is of us, too. Let’s not decide that we are so good that we are not capable of great evil. Those who exclaim with horror at the sins of others and insist, ‘I could never do that’ worry me deeply, because then we forget that we are all cousins to the Nazis. Given the right pressures and influence, we are capable of what seems unimaginable.
Yahiel Dinur, an Auschwitz concentration camp survivor, was called to testify against Adolf Eichmann at the Nuremberg trials in 1961. When Dinur saw his old oppressor in the courtroom, he fainted. He later said that his shock was caused by the realisation that the Eichmann who stood before him at the trial was not the godlike army officer who had sent millions to their death. This Eichmann, he said, was an ordinary man, an unremarkable man. And if this Eichmann was so ordinary, so human, said Dinur, then he realised that what Eichmann had done, any man could be capable of doing - even Yahiel Dinur. Dinur asserted, “I saw that I am capable of doing this. I am as capable as him.’
Evil can have a very ordinary face. Alexander Solzhenitsyn sums up our condition succinctly:
“One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood.”
You and I are capable of great evil – or great good.
There is a contradiction within us; an internal civil war that can and must be won.
Paul put it like this:
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Adapted from There are no strong people, Jeff Lucas, CWR.