"Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.”" (Matthew 9:20-21)
Our church was burglarized this weekend. Twice, actually. When the thieves failed to open the safe on Friday, they returned the next night better equipped, and were more successful. I simply don’t know what to say about that.
It got me thinking about robbery. It got me thinking about how so often we take what is not ours, about the unsatisfaction that marks our lives every day, about the envy and the greed and the hunger for power that makes us grasping, violent.
Harold Camping predicted that Jesus was returning at 6:00 p.m. this Saturday past, and the world, easily distracted by shiny and meaningless objects, paid much attention. People spent their life savings promoting his convoluted (and absolutely wrong) biblical analysis, they cancelled plans, they hoped falsely. And were disappointed, while the rest of us laughed at their expense.
And the children asked, didn’t Jesus say you couldn’t know the hour or the time? So why did Harold Camping think he did?
Yes, children, that is exactly the point.
Not “you can’t know” because the mystery is too opaque, because your intellect too dull, your math too imprecise. Not “you can’t know” because the key to the vast scriptural symbology is reserved for a select, chosen few and you are not pure enough or right enough.
NO! “You can’t know” because God does not want you to know, because this is wisdom God reserves for his own self. It is the sole prerogative of the creator to count the days of the creation, the divine freedom to reserve the end of history to his own time and not ours. It is not just the gullible and vulnerable followers who have been robbed. To claim this holy privilege is the greatest act of thievery itself, to try to steal away from God what he chooses not to give.
He desires we live by his grace alone, by his gifts, that we live his life and not our own. He desires that we live by what he gives, and not by what we take.
But we do it all the time.
We claim authorship of our faith for ourselves, we attribute salvation to our “decision” for Christ, we take pride in our good works, we smirk at the rest of the world through the lens of our own piety. We are the keepers of our own salvation, by virtue of our superior chastity and holiness and dogma.
As the great reformer once said, we have robbed the Cross of all meaning.
And that attack is our great crime against God. Not a couple of fools with a sledge hammer smashing apart a safe to steal a few hundred dollars from an emergency assistance fund, but the great mass of daily thefts of grace, the sinful unwillingness to accept that what we have, what we need, for this life and the next, comes completely and only from the hands of Christ, through no desire or deserving of our own. The greatest sin is the pretense that faith is ours for the taking, while it is only Christ’s for the giving.
Which is particularly foolish on our part, since he gives it away for free.
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