Let's start the week with the ending piece of Friday's quote from James Alison.
It becomes clear that God is not only capable of forgiving us for such things as we might have done, but the shape of (God's) forgiveness stretches further than that, into what we are: we are humans tied into the human reality of death. We need no longer be.
This is an anthropological discovery of unimaginable proportions. At exactly the same moment as God is revealed as quite beyond any human understanding marked by death, entirely gratuitous love, so also it is revealed that the human understanding marked by death is something accidental to being human, not something essential. Here we have the linchpin of any understanding of original sin: that what we are as beings-toward-death is itself something capable of forgiveness.
God as entirely gratuitous love leaves no room for any other additions to who we are and how we are to be. We are shaped by God's love that is ours - forever and without exception. It therefore becomes the power that can shape our character. So rather than fear the power of death and how it plays with us each and every day - we bow to this entirely gratuitous love that leaves death in an empty and stone-cold tomb that cannot win the day or steal away our lives. I don't hear this as a mere philosophical understanding that can be undercut by another point of view. This love is that mind-boggling affirmation without condition or without a timeline attached to it. I suppose we can say that death is quite real. Then again, it is not what makes us who we are. We are children of this eternal source of love that forgives all things in order that we will live outside the bounds of death's illusion of control.
Connection: More and more I find myself unable to to hear about a love of God that has limits or one that short-sheets some people. That is not the God of a loving creation - that is rather, death speaking. And death,is no longer how we define ourselves. We are children born and bred on a forgiveness that does not even listen to death's demands and condition - because they are lies.
O God of life, as your love takes hold of us and turns us around to see the brilliance of your ways, you open us up to a freedom that liberates us from all the many hands of death that play with us. To you we offer thanks and praise . Amen.
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