“Life” is the sermon from which this blog reflects. It is another of MacDonald’s beautiful bookends. This chiasm begins with “The Last Penny,” which is all about our debt of love, then “Life” as the reflection on Penny, which is all about the Divine’s debt of love to us, the cost of freedom. And transformation right there in the middle as the way forward for Them to share Their Life with us. This transformation is “Abba, Father!” sandwiched right there as both the book’s thesis and the series’ theme, with how this all will come to pass through our becoming what we are! We need Their help to pay the Penny, and our transformation is how we manifest Their Life in us. What we need is more Life, Their Life in us!
It is clear that resurrection Life was Their way forward as well. They knew the cost from the first and were more than willing to pay Their last Penny. Resurrection is the doorway through which Life destroys darkness and death as we enter into Their fulness through it! Life is what They wanted in the beginning for us to share, which is far beyond our concepts of heaven and is what we were created to have!
Life
We often say, “I am tired of living.” But what we are really saying is, “I am tired of dying.” Dying in all its forms mentally, physically, and spiritually. The darkness and death which erode the quality of our lives day today. We really want and need Life, and this Life comes from the Divine Life within each of us!
The problem was one of union and distinction in making a creation that would be, by necessity, dependent on Them, yet distinct in choice and will as individuals. Distinct as real persons, able to turn to Them and choose to have a real relationship with Them. “I will arise and go to my father.” Oh the beauty of creation in relationship with the intricacies of mutuality built into all of it! The created being utterly dependent on its Creator, but its Creator determined to have only real and genuine relationships reflecting Their own Life as a Trinity of Beings. If only we could see and understand the beauty of our union and distinction experienced in the interdependency built into Life.
It would have been far easier to create a predetermined world of known and predictable outcomes. Even a small and selfish god could make such a world, but that is not the God we encounter in the Father, Son, and Spirit! This Divine Life conceived a Universe so beautifully diverse that it created the possibility of total chaos without all of us, including Themselves, working together for its Divine destiny. This creation points to a truly BIG God!
The deist god of much of our religion pays no price for its decisions in creating. Incredibly, the god most religion promote, the god of evolution, if it presents one at all, need not even be involved in the Universe for it will evolve on its own. Or the God of contracts, who only responds to those who perform. However, the Trinitarian God whose irreducible truth is relationship can only satisfy Its’ own heart in providing both the possibility of and way to this Life and freedom in the giving of Themselves for Their creation!
Cost of Freedom
They knew what it would cost from the beginning! It was not just the energy of will alone, or the original creation and distinction from Themselves, even though this could have been painful. But the suffering that could only be Theirs, that we cannot imagine, in our transformation into what we are in Christ. In the ongoing suffering of Their labor opposed by us at every turn. Our resistance is causing them to continue to suffer through the painful process and costly experience, which is the only means left to them by us.
We find it hard to get what we want because what we want is not the best or good for us. The Divine find it hard to give because They give what is only good for us, and we don’t want it. What Jesus did, is what They have always been doing. The suffering He endured is the suffering They have experienced from the foundation of the world—the misery reaching its climax in the Son’s life. The Divine was providing the sacrifice, the sacrifice of Himself. He is always and forever has been sacrificing Himself to and for HIs children. This giving lies at the very heart of Their creation of us as distinct and free beings bound in union!
Besides dividing religion from its love and righteousness from its debt, the worst heresy is to divide the Father from the Son, separating Them in any way, in thought, feeling, actions, or intent, or to represent the Son doing anything differently from the Father. Jesus said and did only what His Father said and did. When Jesus suffered for us, it is because the Father suffers for us. Only Jesus came closer to us through a body and its senses so that He could bring us closer to His Father and our Father, and by His sacrifice give us Life, and losing what could be lost of His own.
Jesus is the Divine Savior. It is because They came to save us that Jesus is our Savior. The God and Father of Jesus Christ could never be satisfied with less than giving Himself for His children! An unbeliever could easily imagine a better God than what most theology and religion offer them. But the loveliest the human heart is capable of can barely reflect the length, breadth, depth, and height of the Divine love expressed in the Son who is of one mind and heart with His Father!
Free Will
Many of us undoubtedly mistake the joy of life for Life itself. This mistake leads to the love of things and their pursuit. We must remember that the Trinitarian Life of the Father, Son, and Spirit preceded the existence of things. We know little of this Life, and our maddening pursuit of things in life only goes to proves the depths of our deception! We kill, creating death in a Universe of Life, in obtaining mists and shadows! Things that already belong to all who can hold them lightly, enjoying them in our common life and love. The Joy of Life is found in LIFE Themselves and in ourselves!!!
We look out for life, when we should be looking in! Real-Life, Divine-Life, flows out! This Life generates in us righteousness, peace, joy, love, grace, and truth, which feeds our hungry souls and creates more than we need, overflowing Life so that we can share it with others! This Life, God’s Life, only exists in union, oneness with the Father, Son, and Spirit and all of Their children, everyone and all things in Their Universe filled with Life!
We must take Their costliest and most precious gift of all, free will, and exercise it in the pursuit of this gift of Life. This gift is not a work for us to perform or a contract for us to make or keep, because we cannot make this so, or keep it on our own, but a Life for us to live with Them moment by moment!
Obedience is the path of the will! This obedience is not the religious one we were handed. It is not even predominately about the absence of the negative, but the presence of the positive in a life expressed in yielding to the Life of Love. It is giving when we are prompted to give, loving when we see an opportunity to embrace, and always looking out to see the face of the Divine in all the faces of humanity before us!
Cost of Freedom is an introductory reflection on the Unspoken Sermon linked below:
Life and Design – Is Genesis History? (YouTube)
A beautifully insightful look at creation through the lens of Mutuality.