(Colossians 3:1-4)
Recently I was watching a documentary on PBS about the Nurnburg trials. The allied leaders all had different ideas about what to do with the eight highest ranking members of the Nazi regime. The United States, under an ailing Roosevelt and then Truman, appointed associate judge of the Supreme Court, Robert Jackson, to prosecute. Jackson replied thus: “Only appoint a court if you will entertain the idea that these men might go free. If you want to simply execute them, make that a matter of policy, but don’t hide it behind a court.”
This reminded me of Abraham Lincoln, who impressed me greatly when he said that the Union must finally be all slave, or all free, but it could never stand divided. Perhaps he had Jesus’ words in mind from Luke 11:17 “Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them: “Any kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and a house divided against itself will fall.”
As Christians, we constantly have what I call the ‘risk of faith’ at hand. We cannot be lukewarm. Jesus declares as much to John of Patmos in Rev. 3:16 “So, because you are lukewarm –neither hot nor cold –I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” What that means is that we have to apply God’s grace to the difficult decisions and the easy decisions each and every day. We don’t have a human trial or a nation over which we must preside; we have something infinitely greater: the kingdom of God and our own souls.
Jesus, Roberts, and Lincoln understood the risk involved in the possibility of letting those who are undeserving go free and those who are innocent remain slaves. But only in Jesus’ case do we find an answer that passes all human understanding, and that answer is this: That we are undeserving of freedom and yet Jesus came to set us free and that Ωwe are undeserving of being saved through the body and blood of Christ and yet God never turns us away from the table. When we are cleansed through that blood we become slaves to Christ and are commanded to follow the way of love which “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1Cor 13:7).
If, for our sakes, Jesus made himself nothing (Phil 2:7-8) and God did great things through him for us, what should our response to such love be when we are called to give a Christian witness as Christian disciples to those we may think are undeserving?
May we be willing to take the risk of faith and trust God’s grace for every need of the day, knowing “What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear! What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer! O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.”
God bless,
Scott Griffith