Black and White and Stone

As practically everyone has noticed, this was a rough week for news. Anger and violence between black and white are growing to be as ubiquitous as terrorism. Or that’s what it feels like, and what our twenty-four hour news cycle has wrought. Every day America descends into ever greater tribalist division. You pick your group and you stick with it, no matter what.

And because the average American feels pretty enlightened, this kind of factionalizing is a surprising turn of events, and many of us like to look at others out there and think that they are the problem. The politicians, maybe, should pull it together and provide a real political solution. Or maybe schools. Let’s fix the schools. The church is bad. Let’s sort out the church. The inner city community needs help, let’s go deal with that. And always each of us stretch out our hands towards some other help, someone else to blame.

So, as I was trying to pry my eyes open through all the Corinthians, which normally I love, but right now I am more than usually tired, I was hit as if by a great whacking brick by this verse:

And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. – 2 Corinthians 3:3

The vision is of Moses, lumbering down the mountain, great heavy stone tablet held aloft in his ancient arms, beard splayed apart by the hot, dry, desert wind, eyes narrowed to see what folly lies before him. The stone tablets are the law–the simplest, clearest expression of God’s own character. If you want to understand the perfection of God, trace your finger over these hard ten lines and wonder at the perfect order, the perfect humanity they would surely create, should even one single person keep them all.

James likens the Law to a mirror. If you could look into it and do it, well, you would be blessed, abundantly, in all your doings. He seems breezy hopeful. And that is why I always have such a hard time with him. Because what happens when you really look into the law?

It really is a mirror. A stone mirror. You look in, you see God’s perfection, and your heart hardens up into the stone that it really is. The law is written on stone. Your heart is made of stone. It’s a match made in Sheol. A stone heart can’t think and feel and “fix anything”. A stone heart is a dead heart, unfeeling, unknowing, unable to do anything other than be stone.

And so, when each of us in our ordinary way looks out at the troubles of the world, perhaps being anxious, thinking that someone should do something, it is not to turn the innocent into the guilty to say that we are part of the problem. I didn’t go out and shoot anyone yesterday. I am not guilty of a particular crime. But the stone cold nature of my humanity, reflected back to me by the perfection of God’s character, is indictment enough. I am an idolater. I am blind. I am deaf. I cannot do what I ought. I assume that I know more than I actually do. And not me only, but the whole fractured human race together.

And there would the matter sit, except that Paul has made an extraordinary claim. He says of the Corinthians that God has written with his Spirit on the tablets of their hearts. The allusion is to the law, the stone, the death. But he joins it together with Ezekiel’s foresighted vision that God would take away Israel’s heart of stone and give her a real, beating, fleshy heart–the kind of heart that goes pitter patter and feels tragically woeful when things are going badly for another person. Alive, in other words.

The Corinthians have this heart. God is writing his own character on it. When other people look at the Corinthians, they will see a reflection of God’s true self. I stop short of using the word ‘perfection’ of course, because we’ve all heard of the Corinthians, haven’t we.

But what happened to the stone? Where did it go? Did it magically turn from one kind of thing into another?

Magic isn’t the word for it. The word is miracle. The single Word, the stone that Moses would later bash with his staff, the rock of offense, the stumbling stone that the builders rejected, the one single man who would keep the whole law and perfect humanity in himself. Jesus identifies with us in our troubles, all the way up to the point of being the Stone that our stone hearts are broken open against.

And, being the only one to keep the whole stone tablet to perfection, to embody the order and beauty established by God in creation, when we are members of his fleshly body, the tribal factions can melt away. No longer one stone beating against another, the fleshly life can take over, the Word can be written on the heart, the folly of idolatry can fall away.

Have a blessed Sunday.