Nightmares

I had nightmares last night; it's always scariest when it's man's inhumanity to man.  The creatures of our most lurid imaginings have nothing on us.  Oddly one of my first thoughts as I rolled over reaching for my Bible was what I had read a few short hours ago when I couldn't fall asleep.  Pardon my lengthy excerpts from C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves (this is from the last few pages of the book), but I shall build upon it.

"In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.  The doctrine that God was under no necessity to create is not a piece of dry scholastic speculation.  It is essential.  Without it we can hardly avoid the conception of what I can only call a 'managerial' God; a Being whose function or nature is to 'run' the universe, who stands to it as a head-master to a school or a hotelier to a hotel.  But to be sovereign of the universe is no great matter to God.  In Himself, at home in 'the land of the Trinity,' He is Sovereign of a far greater realm.  We must keep always before our eyes that vision of Lady Julian's in which God carried in His hand a little object like a nut, and that nut was 'all that is made.'  God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them....."

"......No sooner do we believe God loves us than there is an impulse to believe that He does so, not because He is Love, but because we are intrinsically lovable.........  As Bunyan says, describing his first and illusory conversion, 'I thought there was no man in England that pleased God better than I.'  Beaten out of this, we next offer our own humility to God's admiration.  Surely He'll like that?  Or if not that, our clear-sighted and humble recognition that we still lack humility.  Thus, depth beneath depth and subtlety within subtlety, there remains some lingering idea of our own, our very own, attractiveness.  It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.  Surely we must have a little-- however little-- native luminosity?  Surely we can't be quite creatures?"

In my dream there was no doubt about our lack of "native luminosity."  What was so frightening was that though I have never seen or heard of man doing what was done, I knew it was perfectly likely.  Probably has been done, somewhere, somewhen.  But again, one of my first thoughts was, "And God loves even this?  These fearsome perpetrators of deeds that I can see even with my eyes closed?"  And then for an awful moment I remembered the wars of the Canaanite Conquest, and David's use of a measuring line to decide who lived and who died and that these were done in the service of God.  My God.  Who loves me.

Leaving aside some obvious theological tangents, I dove for Jesus.  I picked up where I'd left off in John 8-- the woman caught in adultery.

²Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. ³The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, ⁴they said to Him, "Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. ⁵Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?"

⁶They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. ⁷But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, ^"He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."

 ⁸Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. ⁹When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court.

 ¹⁰Straightening up, Jesus said to her, "Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?"

 ¹¹She said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said, "I do not condemn you, either Go From now on sin no more."

A couple of things: I do not remember realizing before that this whole event occurs in the Temple. I'd always placed it in some street.  I also unconsciously ascribed some "native luminosity" to the woman-- usually beauty, sometimes a back story of an abusive marriage-- anything that made her intrinsically sympathetic.  To me and to Jesus.

But even in my half-conscious state the Lord began to connect the dots.  She may have been beautiful.  She may have been well past the bloom of youth.  She may have had a terrible husband.  She may have been the worst of wives.  The point is that, standing in the Temple, the very sign and seal of the Old Covenant, Jesus stoops down and shows a new covenant written in the very dust of which He made His new Tabernacle.  A Covenant that for the first time does not depend on the "native luminosity" of we the created.  With one conversation He turns the whole system on its head.  "Here is the worst offender: a female adulteress.  Caught in the very act, doubt impossible.  And instead of demanding the death penalty--"  He loves the unlovable.  And the intelligentsia of the day begin to slowly drift away as they see the justice of His mercy.