Last week’s Evangelical Word of the Week was, “far from the Lord”. The term refers to a saying heard in many churches. Generally it was used by some people to describe other people who by way of belief or behaviour demonstrated (at least in the judgment of the person using the term) that they did not have interest in God or had made choices against a moral code agreed upon within that religious community. It is a curious thing to ponder that one person would ever refer to another person being far from God. Super judgy for sure.
My consternation over the term includes criticism over such judgement, but my deepest critique of the term has to do, not with what people think about other people, but with what people think about God. Using the term “far from the Lord” shows a kind of disdain (even if it is “loving”) for other people, but it also shows a kind of disdain for God.
Theologian Karl Barth presents that the glory of God is exactly that God has chosen not to be God without people. God has turned towards us. God has moved towards us. The term “far from the Lord” seems to imply that God’s holiness is a kind of fixed perfection that keeps God apart from humanity. Barth argues, instead, that God’s holiness, that what makes God God, is that God is willing and able to move and does move towards humanity. This means that “far from the Lord” is at best an uninteresting term, and at worst a term that is decidedly non-Christian. As a pastor in an evangelical church I came to see that the many non-Christian ways of seeing God and the world came from distorted theology of Christians and the church. We ought to do so much better. We ought to respond with sorrow at the notion that anyone ever could have an idea that anyone else could be “far from the Lord”. If God has freely chosen to not remain distant, then, however far we might think that anyone is, it is inconsequential compared to the willingness of God to move, to make even the greatest distance no distance at all.
A prayer:
Dear God;
For anyone who has ever been told that they are “far from the Lord”, I pray that they would know that they are not.
For anyone who has ever accused another of being “far from the Lord”, I pray that they would be moved to repent over such ignorance of Your love. I pray that those who have used such words of cursing and confusion would know Your love in such a way themselves that they would not be able to use such terms again. I pray that even they would be overwhelmed with love for all people.
I pray for reconciliation and healing. I pray for a better faith than one that divides the world up. I pray that we would be continually astounded by Your glory which is Your refusal to be God without us.
Amen
Barth’s famous term for how God moves towards humanity is summed up in the words, “The Son of God in the far country”. It turns out that this move of God, in Jesus Christ, is the best and most new and most foundational story ever anywhere, ever. I will describe it more in the final part of this trilogy.
For now, I encourage you to read a little bit of theology, a section in which Barth describes how, in Jesus, none of us are far off.
“He also goes into the far country, into the evil society of this being which is not God and against God. He does not shrink from him. He does not pass him by as did the priest and the Levite the man who had fallen among thieves. He does not leave him to his own devices. He makes his situation His own. He does not forfeit anything by doing this. In being neighbour to man, in order to deal with him and act towards him as such, He does not need to fear for His Godhead. On the contrary. We will mention at once the thought which will be decisive and basic in this section, that God shows Himself to be the great and true God in the fact that He can and will let His grace bear this cost, that He is capable and willing and ready for this condescension, this act of extravagance, this far journey. What marks out God above all false gods is that they are not capable and ready for this. In their otherworldliness and supernaturalness and otherness, etc., the gods are a reflection of the human pride which will not unbend, which will not stoop to that which is beneath it. God is not proud. In His high majesty He is humble. It is in this high humility that He speaks and acts as the God who reconciles the world to Himself. It is under this aspect first that we must consider the history of the atonement.
He chooses to go into the far country, to conceal His form of lordship in the form of this world and therefore in the form of a servant, He is not untrue to Himself but genuinely true to Himself, to the freedom which is that of His love.”