Sometimes
the metaphor makes me do things that are a bit stupid.
So a
while ago, almost a year now, I was walking home from church on a
Sunday night and I saw an old guy sitting in a shop doorway with a
cup, asking for money. Part of me had a quick fish around in my mind
for a good excuse to just keep walking, but there really wasn't any,
I had nothing at all to get back to. So I said hello and I sat down
next to him. (Digression: I prefer sitting down with someone to
talking to them from a height, sort of because of the metaphor. If
you get down to be on a level with a person it feels much more like
you're interested in them, you've kind of physically committed to
listening to them, and it shows your not ashamed to be seen alongside
them, so the conversation can become a more genuine one; the metaphor
being that Jesus is God getting down to our level to have a genuine
conversation with us, #funmetaphortimes.)
Anyway,
after we'd been chatting for a bit, struggling slightly because he
was evidently not quite sober, another man came towards us. He was a
big, burly, dark-haired Scotsman, dressed pretty smartly but shouting
angrily at the man I was with (Steven) and not seeming sober either.
He was shouting at Steven about the money that he owed to this man,
for some cans that he'd bought him the other week or something like
that – really aggressive. I didn't really know what to do so I
tried to just engage the guy in conversation, I got up and shook his
hand and introduced myself, at which point I think Steven told this
guy I was a Christian. My memory of it is a bit blurry now but the
conversation for the next few minutes was really stressful and quite
disturbing, as this man alternated between boasting to me about how
he was a 'born-again Christian' who had read the whole bible and knew
that there was no other God, and turning on Steven again and again,
shouting at him about giving him the money, threatening him. I tried
to say something about Jesus forgiving us our debts, and asking us,
out of gratitude for that, to forgive the debts that others owe us –
but he responded quite viciously, telling me about how you can't
forgive the devil, and this man Steven was the devil, and he had to
get the devil out of him, or something like that. I kept trying to
keep the man talking to me about theology instead of threatening
Steven but at some point Steven stood up to our level, and the man
turned to him, shouted at him, and when Steven once again said he had
no money to give him, he suddenly struck him, very hard, with an open
palm on the side of his head, knocking him to the ground.
I really didn't know what to do now, and this guy was shouting at Steven, threatening to kick his head in, and I tried to stand in between them, not really knowing what else I could do but just desperate for him not to hit Steven again, and tried to keep talking – and after a while the man just looked at me and said, “Well are you going to pay it for him then?”
I said, “What?”
He said, “Are you going to pay me back for him then? He owes me twenty quid.”
And I didn't want to give this man £20 so I thought of something to say and tried to divert the conversation again but before long he realised I was just trying to distract him and came back to the question, “Are you going to pay me back for him? Or am I going to kick his head in?”
And I felt pretty sure that those genuinely were the only two options. And I decided to pay the price. So I gave this man £20 and after a few more sickening minutes of him shouting about his twisted version of Christianity and asking me to also buy him a burger, he walked away, burger-less, and still shouting, down the street and out of sight.
The rest of the night was an eventful one – seeing if Steven was OK, chatting to a young doctor who'd seen it happen, chatting to the police when they came and trying to explain to them why I'd been sitting on the street with a homeless man; and then a whole different episode where I saw (or rather heard) the scottish man again and went to get the police to arrest him. No one pressed charges in the end and I never heard anything more about it.
I really didn't know what to do now, and this guy was shouting at Steven, threatening to kick his head in, and I tried to stand in between them, not really knowing what else I could do but just desperate for him not to hit Steven again, and tried to keep talking – and after a while the man just looked at me and said, “Well are you going to pay it for him then?”
I said, “What?”
He said, “Are you going to pay me back for him then? He owes me twenty quid.”
And I didn't want to give this man £20 so I thought of something to say and tried to divert the conversation again but before long he realised I was just trying to distract him and came back to the question, “Are you going to pay me back for him? Or am I going to kick his head in?”
And I felt pretty sure that those genuinely were the only two options. And I decided to pay the price. So I gave this man £20 and after a few more sickening minutes of him shouting about his twisted version of Christianity and asking me to also buy him a burger, he walked away, burger-less, and still shouting, down the street and out of sight.
The rest of the night was an eventful one – seeing if Steven was OK, chatting to a young doctor who'd seen it happen, chatting to the police when they came and trying to explain to them why I'd been sitting on the street with a homeless man; and then a whole different episode where I saw (or rather heard) the scottish man again and went to get the police to arrest him. No one pressed charges in the end and I never heard anything more about it.
The
police told me I was really stupid to give the man money – and they
were probably right. But the thing is, I couldn't help thinking about
the metaphor, and I just couldn't resist it.
See the thing is that I would like to think that I'm fundamentally, in and of myself, better than Steven. I'd like to say, 'Look, he's got himself in trouble with this man because he's addicted to things that aren't good for him, he can't make the effort to get himself out of it, and now he's got a debt to pay. I'm not like that.' But actually Steven isn't fundamentally worse than me or any of us. We're all addicted to things that aren't good for us – whether it's that we need to criticise others silently to give ourselves a sense of superiority, or we need people to depend on us so we feel valuable, or the more typical addictions – power, success, money, sexual conquests – even if we can't pin any of those things down I think that all of us are in a very deep sense addicted to selfishness – to caring more about ourselves than anything else. And it traps us. We don't have the strength to just get ourselves out of it, it goes too deep for our self-control to fix.
See the thing is that I would like to think that I'm fundamentally, in and of myself, better than Steven. I'd like to say, 'Look, he's got himself in trouble with this man because he's addicted to things that aren't good for him, he can't make the effort to get himself out of it, and now he's got a debt to pay. I'm not like that.' But actually Steven isn't fundamentally worse than me or any of us. We're all addicted to things that aren't good for us – whether it's that we need to criticise others silently to give ourselves a sense of superiority, or we need people to depend on us so we feel valuable, or the more typical addictions – power, success, money, sexual conquests – even if we can't pin any of those things down I think that all of us are in a very deep sense addicted to selfishness – to caring more about ourselves than anything else. And it traps us. We don't have the strength to just get ourselves out of it, it goes too deep for our self-control to fix.
Maybe
a lot of people would agree with that in a sense; but what most of us
might not believe is that it means we've got a debt to pay. But I
think we do. We don't owe £20 to some spiteful, angry man, who's
just lending us money to manipulate our weakness; no, we owe a debt
of pain to a good Father who loves us. A Good Father who is more
grieved, more hurt by our rebellion, our running away from him and
our addiction to selfishness, than we can ever properly imagine. A
Father God who created us and gave us everything good that we have
and to whom we owe every drop of our joy and our love and our
obedience, but who gets instead at best apathy, and at worst
downright disdain. We owe him a debt far greater than our very lives
are worth.
But instead of just allowing our selfishness to destroy us, instead of compelling us to bear the pain that we've created, God comes and sits next to us in Jesus. He became like us, showed us that he cares. And then as people began to reject and despise him, he didn't resist, but knowing it was what he'd come to do he allowed them to condemn him – and he payed our debt for us. We owed far more than our lives were worth and he gave his perfect life, freely, for us. He let them break his body and drain the life out of him, so that we could be put back together and filled with his life. And then he rose from the dead, which is so good that it would require a whole different set of metaphors!
But instead of just allowing our selfishness to destroy us, instead of compelling us to bear the pain that we've created, God comes and sits next to us in Jesus. He became like us, showed us that he cares. And then as people began to reject and despise him, he didn't resist, but knowing it was what he'd come to do he allowed them to condemn him – and he payed our debt for us. We owed far more than our lives were worth and he gave his perfect life, freely, for us. He let them break his body and drain the life out of him, so that we could be put back together and filled with his life. And then he rose from the dead, which is so good that it would require a whole different set of metaphors!
My
reluctant £20 feels pretty feeble when I talk about it as a picture
of Jesus giving his whole life willingly – but I'm still glad that
in that brief moment, I got to walk like Simba with my tiny little
feet, inside the huge footprints of my King. It was a pretty nasty
night overall to be honest, it felt pretty dark. But I guess it's
easy to get sheltered from that side of human reality when I'm
spending all my time being a nice happy student and with a nice happy
family; and that makes it easy for me to prefer shiny happy metaphors
for who God is and what he's done. But I'm glad that actually, he
isn't just a shiny happy God who loves us in a Sunday-school kind of
way, he's a real God in the real world, and he pays our real debt,
and it really hurts – and I reckon that's real love.