A story I often tell to parents struggling with discipline for their children is this: A psychologist was a leader in efforts to stop corporal punishment of children. He was very logical and persuasive in his reasoning for choosing some means other than spanking when children deserved punishment.
This psychologist also loved to do construction projects around the house. As spring came, he decided to create a new sidewalk to his front door. He dug it out, built forms for the concrete, and waited for just the right Saturday to pour the cement and smooth it off with a trowel. The man’s five year old son had helped him some with the project and had many questions about pouring the concrete. He wanted to help and “leave footprints to see forever” in the sidewalk. That was not the dad’s idea of beauty, so he decided to let his wife take the son to the zoo that day.
The cement truck couldn’t come in the morning as the father had hoped. In fact, they didn’t get there until about 2 in the afternoon. Consequently, he had just finished making the walkway perfectly smooth when his wife and son came home. As both parents yelled, “NO!” the boy jumped out of the car and ran the length of the sidewalk in the wet cement—leaving his footprints in the now hardening concrete–forever.
Without stopping to think, the very upset father grabbed his son and whacked him on the backside several times. His wife was appalled. “How could you do that, considering what you believe!” she gasped. Her husband thought a minute, shook his head, and replied, “Well, I just learned it’s one thing to love and discipline a child in the abstract. It’s another thing to love and discipline him in the concrete.”
When things get practical, sometimes they get messy. Then it’s hard to love in the concrete.
Trouble Loving and Disciplining the Israelites
In today’s readings, God is having trouble loving his people in the concrete. The scene in the Old Testament reading is God has just given Moses the 10 Commandments. Moses and God are talking up on Mt. Sinai. It is early in the Israelites journey from Egypt to Canaan. God can see what is going on down below. It’s pretty bad. The people have taken off their jewelry, melted it, and made a golden calf to worship as their god. God is ready to give up on the Israelites. He is angry, “I see how stiff-necked this people is. Let me alone, then, that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them. Then I will make of you a great nation.”
Moses pleads for the people to God. He stands in the breach for them as intercessor, “Why, O Lord, should your wrath blaze up against your own people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with such great power and with so strong a hand?…Let your blazing wrath die down; relent in punishing your people.”
God relented. Now, it is interesting what happened when Moses went down the mountain and actually encountered the people reveling in the golden calf god of their own hands they had made. He took the calf, melted it, ground the gold into a fine powder, spread it on water and made the people drink it.
He had trouble loving people in the concrete, too.
Jesus Struggles in the Gospel
When I read the very complex passage from the fifth chapter of John today, I hear an edge in Jesus’ voice. This is a continuation of the Gospel readings from Tuesday and Wednesday. John’s Gospel is different from the synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). The first eleven chapters are often called “The Book of Signs.” They build the very strong case for seeing Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. Then the story of Holy Week and the Resurrection follows as the “Book of Glory.”
In the middle of the “Book Signs” of Jesus’ Divine-as-well-as-human nature is Chapter Five. It begins with the healing at the pool of Bethsaida of the man who had been ill for 38 years that was the Gospel on Tuesday. Then follows the complex “high Christology” passages of the Gospel yesterday and today.
The Pharisees had objected to the man carrying his mat after Jesus healed him on the Sabbath. As Jesus responds to them, the author of John gets at the heart of the “Book of Signs.” Jesus speaks of how he and the Father are one—he is not doing anything in opposition to the Father. Indeed, he is expressing what the Father wants expressed.
Can you hear Jesus’ frustration when he says, “these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me. Moreover, the Father who sent me has testified on my behalf. But you have never heard his voice or seen his form, and you do not have his word remaining in you, because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent.”
Jesus is saying in essence, “I do not do what I do because of what you think, say, or do. You are working from human values. I am literally marching to the beat of a different drummer—the heartbeat of love of my Father. See what I do and believe in him and in me.”
Love in the Concrete Now
When I tie this story with the Old Testament reading, the message I get from Mother Church today is: “When we make so very much of compliance with details that we forget what’s really important, we make a golden calf that is not a god to be like a god, so we can think we worship without truly bending our necks and wills to God.”
I can do that. Probably you can, too. I read some research once that was studying “Good Samaritan” behavior. When people see someone in need on the side of the road, do they stop and help or not? The setting was right outside a seminary. Did people stop to help? Some did. Some didn’t. When the researchers interviewed the people who did or didn’t stop, what made the difference was whether they were on the way to an appointment/timed responsibility or not.
Those who needed to be at chapel or work did not stop. Those who had some free time did stop.
How interesting! The Pharisees were focused on making sure THEY obeyed the law—and told others to do it. They did not want to get in trouble with God. They were like the psychologist who wanted his sidewalk perfect. They were like the seminarians focused on their own appointments. They were focused on themselves.
As Moses reminded God, God reminded Moses, Jesus reminded the Pharisees, the wife reminded the psychologist, and the seminarians who stopped remind us of Jesus words today: “How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God?”
Yet the praise that comes from God is about more than following rules.
Today’s readings leave me much to think about. It is hard not to think of human praise. It is hard to love in the concrete where love is messy and complex. Yet love in the concrete is really the only love that is practical.
So what is the point today? At present it is a realization that even God the Father, even Moses, even Jesus had a hard time loving when people were “depraved” or tediously argumentative. But they did not STOP loving. They did not give up on people. God the Father relented. Moses stayed with the Israelites in the desert God sentenced them to for forty years. In the next chapter Jesus fed the 5000 and prefigured the Eucharist. As humans, sometimes we have a hard time, too. This week as a therapist I have heard some family stories of some pretty awful stuff. In those families, some of the people have stopped trying to love. It isn’t a momentary failure. They are done. So lots of people hurt.
In the end, we as Christians are called to be followers of Christ: we are called to pick ourselves up and keep trying to love–even in the concrete. As Christians we are also called to repent if we are the problem (or part of it).
Message not so simple today. In a word: persevere. As Catherine said well, “Love is patient. Love is kind….”
Prayer:
Lord, help me to love in concrete today. Help me to love when I see people doing evil. That means doing what is in their best interest—that might include being hard on them, but, if it is your love, it does not include condemning them or rejecting them. Help me to love when people mess up my plans—like the child walking on wet cement. Help me to love when people don’t understand and give me a hard time. Help me to love when I am busy. Help me to see Your Face, Lord, in all I meet today. Help me to pause to think how you would respond—and then become Your Hands, Your Feet, Your Voice. In the concrete.
