We Cannot Think Ourselves

We were all created like Adam.  The idea of our being in communion with God is the greatest idea that we might try to hold, yet everything about ourselves stands in opposition to that idea.  And I mean everything.  This is indeed an important point—so much of Christian history has been focused on the notion of a pervasive “sin nature” that pollutes our (apparently, according to the theologians) entirely satisfactory states in other regards.  In other words, there is nothing wrong (other than forgivable limitations) with our minds and our bodies—there is only something wrong with our moral natures.

This contention stands in utter opposition to Jesus’ formulation of the matter.  He tells us that anything can be achieved by the person who believes.  The flesh may be weak, and yet anything is possible for the person who believes.  Inescapably, then, our limitations in terms of physicality and mentality are as much our moral failings as anything we would imperiously decree to be “moral failings.”

This is why Jesus, at the point of the Crucifixion, says, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”—leaving theologians to contend about who might be innocently ignorant (the pagan soldiers?) and included in Jesus’ statement, though the statement’s presentation in the gospel is on its face generally directed.  The statement is indeed generally directed, in the largest sense.  None of us knows what we do—none of us knows anything—and the reason for this, according to Jesus, is that we do not ask for knowledge.

“Forgive them, for they know not what they do” is not an exculpatory statement.  Ignorance is no excuse for sin, for ignorance is a sin.  We could know everything, if we would only ask for such knowledge.  It is not, unfortunately, in our nature to ask sincerely.  Jesus is highlighting the sin of ignorance, and asking the Father to forgive that sin.  Jesus is not arguing away the Father’s rightful wrath against those who—in any capacity—participated in the torture of his son.

Only when we realize that sin is not that unsettling “doing nasty things” that we pretend it is, and realize that all of our limitations (as against the Father’s original intention for us) is a complex of sin, can we begin to address our real moral condition before God.  We sin when we do horrible things, and we sin when we fail to do good things, and we sin when we fail to think good things.  In all of our doings and thinkings we are limited, and Jesus says that is our fault.

This now has let me understand what Jesus meant when he described the Sheep and the Goats.  It seems illogical—as I have written before—that Jesus would tell how people at the final judgment would ask “when did we do (or not do) thus and such to thee”—illogical, that is, once Jesus has told the story in advance.  Would not his hearers and succeeding generations know the “punch line,” and therefore refrain from saying it?  The answer is that we will always think in the us-versus-them fashion that causes us not to see our Savior in our fellows.  We will always fail in our thoughts, and at the point of judgment that set of mental failings which is really part of our set of sins will be with us still.

Even at the end, we will think in terms of “Lord, when did we see you hungry, and not feed you?”  Such is our sin nature, and we cannot think ourselves out of it.