We Act and Surrender Simultaneously

If all causes and effects--all things that happen, including everything done by us--are ultimately determined by God, then just what is it that we ourselves do?  The difficulty that we have had in answering that question arises from our failure to account for the fact that nothing we do involves a discrete instant.  We make a decision not because we have accounted for every factor, but because our accounting for factors has run a course which--for better or worse--has involved the exhausting of every means that we have to bring to bear on the situation.  We feel time pressing on us, or the competing claims of other matters on us, or the feeling of being ridiculous in working a situation beyond its importance.  At some point we decide, but that involves both an action on our part and a surrender on our part.  We exhaust ourselves, and we determine to let our determination ride.

We have, as described above, experienced the arc of roused-readied-reaped.  The experience is the key--or perhaps we should say the experiences collectively are the key--because we have known ourselves in the moment of decision to act and surrender simultaneously: reaped.  This sort of thing is described to us--to the extent that the Gospels can relate it--in some of the most harrowing experiences of Jesus.  In the Garden Jesus prays both for release from the awaiting agony and for God's will to be done--Jesus surrendering to the agony.  Jesus decides to stop asking.  In Luke an angel appears to give Jesus strength, and Jesus prays still harder.  If the repetition of Jesus' prayers in Matthew and Mark are to hold here, then the angel's appearance put Jesus through the agonizing cycle all over again.  Yet Jesus surrendered to the decision before him.

Then there is the final moment on the cross.  The accounts are blurred in that Jesus, who told his disciples at the Last Supper that he would not drink wine until after the Resurrection, apparently succumbs to the desire at the last in John to drink sour wine.  Who wouldn't, if that person were really dying in agony?  And then we have Jesus, who we might imagine would extend his suffering to the inevitable exhaustion of his body, crying out loudly and behaving at that moment as though that draining action would precipitate his demise.  Was Jesus, after all he had suffered for the glory of God, committing suicide?  Or was he not, for all his perfect divinity, embodying how human experience really works--cycles and repeating courses and arcs that end not with our decisions or definitive actions, but rather with the inevitable, innumerable surrenders of our existence?