There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil. C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce
Trending: trading the transcendent for the trivial.
This is the essence of idolatry – to embrace a deflated form of or wholesale alternative to divine love in a futile attempt to satisfy the inner longings of the soul.
And when the idol doesn’t deliver, our thirst drives us to double down. We either increase our obeisance or turn to another and settle for whatever fleeting hint of satisfaction we can find before we are back where we started.
Parched. Desperate. Bereft.
So pervasive is this paradigm that it permeates our entire purpose and everyday practice.
We trade transcendent truth for trivial trinkets. We exchange the presence of the God for the study of God, leaving the landscape of our souls littered with crumbling idols of dogma. And eventually, when all conceivable idols fashioned in the image of God fail to satisfy, we abandon all hope in God altogether and wander even further into the desert.
And in that desert, as we encounter other divine beings created in the image of God like ourselves – we create idols of them as well.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in our pursuit of a husband or wife to share a lifetime of love.
Rather than embrace the presence of the divine one created in God’s image, we spend years developing an idol that potential candidates must conform to. And when they don’t – we send them away, whether literally or metaphorically. We cancel them. We disassemble the relationship with them in favor of maintaining the relationship we have with the idol.
Today, we will seek to escape this paradigm, casting aside our idols so that we may instead embrace the divine God of the Universe himself, along with the one he brings to us in the relationship of marriage.
Source Scripture
Matthew 5:27-32; Mark 9:43-48; Luke 16:18
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
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Read Malachi 2:10-16. How does this Old Testament passage, written 400 years earlier than the Sermon on the Mount, compare to Jesus’ words?
Read Mark 10:1-12. What was the motive for the Pharisees asking Jesus this question? What motive did the disciples have for following up Jesus’ response with their own questions privately?
If you have suffered loss due to divorce, there is hope. Read Psalm 147:3. What is God’s attitude toward you? What does he intend to do for you?
Once you experience being loved when you are unworthy, being forgiven when you did something wrong, that moves you into non-dual thinking. You move from what I call meritocracy, quid pro quo thinking, to the huge ocean of grace, where you stop counting or calculating. Richard Rohr
We live in an age that philosopher Charles Taylor describes as an immanent frame, or, a state of disenchantment that eliminates the spiritual realm and reduces us to biological beings with five senses and no more. In such a context, it is only reasonable that our motivations and goals – indeed our very lives – become preoccupied with the manipulation of objects and people into an optimal order that maximizes our sensual pleasures.
In such a state of attention, then, we inevitably slip into the dualistic mindset of meritocracy. Because there’s nothing in this world for me to do other than seek sensual pleasures, and I am aware that you, too, are engaged in the same pursuit, then the only way for us to move forward is to agree that if I do something for you, you do something for me.
If I work for you, you pay me. If I do you a favor, you owe me. If you harm me, I will take revenge.
This mindset is so pervasive that even those of us who would reach beyond the eminent frame to seek the God of the universe who exists both beyond and within it allow us to be caught up in a spiritual meritocracy. If I do a good deed, God smiles on me and must bless me. If I suffer, God must be disappointed in me. If something bad happened to that poor chap over there, he most assuredly deserves it for something he has done.
There is no escape from this dualistic mindset without the divine, a new dimension of being, that exists apart from the immanent frame of disenchantment at worst and spiritual meritocracy at best. We need metanoia or repentance that leads to a new quality of attention, an entirely new way of thinking, that rises from the ashes of sensual orientation and seeks presence with the divine God of the universe and those around us that he has created in his image.
In our story today, Jesus confronts this immanent frame and invites us to live beyond it in the realms of love and enchantment and joy and peace.
How Jesus does this is the subject of today’s episode. He uses three metaphors that initially seem separate. Isolated. But when you allow them to coalesce, the result is a startling, overarching metaphor hidden in plain sight that stretches as far back as Genesis 1 and as far forward as Revelation 22.
Come and see for yourself.
Source Scripture
I Have a Proposal Matthew 9:14-17; Mark 2:18-22; Luke 5:33-39
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras