One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (5 page)

Steve Brown once told me something I will never forget. He said, “Children will run from law, and they’ll run from grace. The ones who run from law never come back. But the ones who run from grace always come back. Grace draws its own back home.”

I ran from grace. It drew me home.

NOTES

CHAPTER 3

CONFESSIONS OF A PERFORMANCIST

Legendary college football coach Urban Meyer tells a remarkable story about his father. During his senior year of high school, Urban was drafted by the Atlanta Braves to play major league baseball. Soon after arriving in the minor leagues, however, he realized he didn’t have the necessary talent and called his father to tell him he was quitting. His father informed Urban that if he quit, he would no longer be welcome in their home. “Just call your mom on Christmas,” he said. Needless to say, Urban finished out the season and ended up embracing the incredibly conditional world of his father, a world in which failure was simply not an option and
reflection
another word for “weakness wrapped in nostalgia.”

Urban went on to win back-to-back national championships as the coach for the Florida Gators, and some would chalk his success up to his uncompromising attitude and work ethic. It certainly helped. But it turns out that these victories were short-lived, at least as far as Urban was concerned. The screws only got tighter; once he had won those titles, anything but perfection would be viewed as failure. After the 2007 season, Urban apparently confessed to a friend that anxiety was taking over his life and he wanted to walk away. He was quoted in 2011 as saying, “Building takes passion and energy. Maintenance is awful. It’s nothing but fatigue. Once you reach the top, maintaining that beast is awful.”
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In that same interview, the reporter described him as a “man who destroys himself running for a finish line that doesn’t exist.” Soon the chest pains started, and then they started getting worse. A few hours after the Gators’ winning streak finally came to an end in 2009, Urban was found on the floor of his house, unable to move or speak. He had come to a breaking point. Soon he would resign, come back, and resign again.

Urban Meyer’s story may be a bit extreme, but perhaps you can relate. Perhaps you had a demanding father or mother, for whom nothing was ever good enough. Perhaps they are long gone, but you still hear their voice in your head. Perhaps you have a spouse who never seems to let up with the demands, for whom successes are not really successes; they’re simply nonfailures. You see, as gifted and driven as Urban Meyer was and is, no one can live under the burden of perfection forever. It may work for a while, but sooner or later, we hit the wall. Even when Urban was fulfilling all righteousness record-wise, he wasn’t doing it out of love of the game or the joy of shepherding young men, but out of fear of weakness and fear of what it would mean if he lost. If righteousness is a matter of motivation as well as action, as we talked about in the last chapter, then even when he was meeting the standards of performance set by his father, he wasn’t really meeting them.

Urban had fallen victim to a vicious form of performancism. He had become a slave to his record, where the points scored on the field were more than just a proud part of his team’s tally but a measure of his personal worth and identity.

I got my first tennis racket on my seventh birthday. And because we had a tennis court in our backyard, I played every day. By ten I was playing competitively. Everyone around me marveled at my natural ability. I would constantly hear how great I was for being so young, how much potential I had to “really go somewhere.” All of this made me feel important. It made me feel like I mattered. Without realizing it, I began to anchor my sense of worth and value in being a great tennis player.

I had a problem, though. Whenever I would hit a bad shot or lose a point, I would throw a John McEnroe–like temper tantrum. I would yell, curse, break my racket, etc. Numerous times, my parents and coaches would counsel me, telling me I had to get myself under control. But I couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t. I didn’t know why back then, but I do now. Every lost point, game, set, and match threatened my identity. I unconsciously concluded that if I didn’t become the best, I’d be a nobody. If I didn’t win, I didn’t count. If I wasn’t successful, I would be worthless.

I was experiencing what one of my favorite teachers calls “the law of capability”—the law that judges us wanting if we’re not capable, if we can’t handle it all, if we don’t meet the expectations we put on ourselves or others put on us:

If I can do enough of the right things, I will have established my value. Identity is the sum of my achievements. Hence, if I can satisfy the boss, meet the needs of my spouse and children, and still pursue my dreams, then I will be somebody. In Christian theology, such a position is called justification by works. It assumes that my worth is measured by my performance. Conversely, it conceals a dark and ghastly fear: If I do not perform, I will be judged unworthy. To myself I will cease to exist.
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IT’S A LEGAL MATTER, BABY

Before we can really talk about one-way love, we need to understand its inverse: two-way love (which isn’t really love at all). Performancism is, after all, essentially a two-way street. Conditionality, through and through: If you perform well, then you are a person of value. If you don’t, then you aren’t. If you stick with the team, you can still call yourself my son. You do your part, and you’ll get what you deserve. Performancism speaks the language of earning, rather than the language of giving. It is a secular expression of what the Bible calls the Law.

Law
, of course, is a word with which we are all familiar. It refers to the code of rules and regulations that govern our society, outlining what is permissible and what isn’t. Our conduct, both individual and corporate, is judged according to it. The Law of God is similar but more comprehensive. It dictates more than just proper behavior; it dictates morality itself. In it, we find the definition of what is right and wrong, good and bad, what “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.” One way to think of the Law of God would be as the divine “Ought.” It goes without saying that the author of the Law is God Himself—not us—and as such, the Law is good and perfect and true. I’ll say it again: the Law is good!

A few important notes on the nature of the Law before we continue. First, the Law carries an imperative. The most famous iteration of the Law in the Bible is the Ten Commandments—the commandments that God gave to His people, through Moses, that they are to follow if they want to be in right relationship with Him.
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When the apostle Paul speaks about the Law in the New Testament, he routinely speaks of it as a command attached to a condition. In other words, Law is a demand within a conditional framework. This is why he selects Leviticus 18:5 (both in Gal. 3 and Rom. 10) as a summary of the salvation structure of the Law: if you keep the commandments, then you will live. The promise of life is linked to the condition of following the commandments and a corresponding threat for not following them: cursed is everyone who does not abide in all the things written in the Book of the Law, to do them (Gal. 3:10, citing Deut. 27:26). It is the condition that does the work of condemnation. Ifs kill!

Importantly, while every expression of Law contains an imperative, not all imperatives are necessarily Law. Let’s say you’re a pastor, and a college student comes to you for advice. He’s worn-out because of the number of things he’s involved in. He is in a fraternity, playing basketball, running track, waiting tables, and taking sixteen credit hours. The pressure he feels from his family to do it all and make something of himself is driving him crazy and wearing him down. After explaining his situation to you, you look at him and explain the Gospel—that because Jesus paid it all, we are free from the need to do it all. Our identity, worth, and value are not anchored in what we can accomplish but in what Jesus accomplished for us. Then you issue an imperative: “Now, quit track and drop one class.” Does he hear this as bad news or good news? Good news, of course. The suggestion that he can let something go brings him much-needed relief—he can smell freedom. Like Galatians 5:1, the directive you issue the student is a directive not to submit to the slavery of a command with a condition (Law): “if you do more and try harder, you will make something of yourself and therefore find life.” It is not a conditional imperative; it is an invitation. This is good news!

Or take an example from the Bible—that of the woman caught in adultery in John 8. Once the woman’s accusers left, Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more” (v. 11) Does this final imperative disqualify the words of mercy? Is this a commandment with a condition? No! Otherwise Jesus would have instead said, “If you go and sin no more, then neither will I condemn you.” But Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” The command is not a condition. “Neither do I condemn you” is categorical and unconditional; it comes with no strings attached. “Neither do I condemn you” creates an unconditional context within which “go and sin no more” is not an if. The only if the Gospel knows is this: “if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1).
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Next, like any standard of measurement, the Law measures. Meaning it provides a basis for sound judgment. If a scale tells us how heavy we are, the Law tells us how good we are. It quantifies. It ranks. It identifies. That is, because it makes a distinction between the righteous and the unrighteous, it has the power to tell us who we are. God’s Law is like a mirror: it shows us who we really are and what we really need.

Third, the Law of God is inflexible. Jesus goes so far as to tell people to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Perfection is perfection. It does not compromise. Just like Urban Meyer’s father, it accepts no excuses. It is written in stone—all or nothing, pure demand. We did not write it, so we can’t revise it, much as we may like to. (It hasn’t stopped us from trying!)

Fourth, the Law is universal. Lest we think it is something that applies only to Christians or people who take the Bible seriously, the Law is something that applies to all of creation, not just the ones who doff their hats to the Creator. And as we mentioned in the last chapter, Christ taught that the Law applies to motivation as well as action, our internal as well as our external lives.

Furthermore, and this is really important: the apostle Paul claimed the Law is written on the “fleshy tables” of the human heart (2 Cor. 3:3
KJV
). What he meant is these shoulds and shouldn’ts are both instinctual and inescapable, part of our DNA. They are a psychological reality. We may justify our actions away, but deep down, we know when we’ve done something wrong.

BIG L’S AND LITTLE L’S

The great leader of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, characterized the Law as “a voice that man can never stop in this life.” What he meant was that the voice of the Law expresses a demand that we, as sinful men and women, can never appease. It has a power of its own. Regardless of the form it takes this side of heaven, the function of the Law remains the same: it accuses.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.
What does this have to do with one-way love and the exhaustion of life?
“I haven’t committed adultery,” you say. “I’m on good terms with my parents.” Well, bear with me. Judgment and expectation lie at the bottom of much of the resentment, alienation, and rebellion we experience every day. What keeps you up at night may not be something you would classify as religious or spiritual; it may be the nagging fear of what another person thinks of you. Why haven’t they called you back? Do they not like you? Are you not likeable? Do you not measure up? Perhaps you stay awake worrying about your job and all that you have to get done in the morning. If you don’t get it done—and look good doing so—you won’t get that promotion, and if you don’t get that promotion, what will that mean about you? Are you a failure? A loser? So you run yourself ragged all day, making sure that your bases are covered.

Are you beginning to see? Our relationship with judgment and demand occupies an inordinate part of our headspace and lies at the root of so much stress and conflict. But this is also where we need to make a distinction, what I like to call the difference between big-L Law and little-l law. Big-L Law is the Law of God that we read about in the Bible. This big-L Law lies at the very heart of creation. It is so central to our existence, so ingrained in our hardwiring, that we see and hear echoes of it all over the place. We call these more everyday varieties little-l law. Paul Zahl puts it this way:

Law with a small “l” refers to an interior principle of demand or ought that seems universal in human nature. In this sense, law is any voice that makes us feel we must do something or be something to merit the approval of another … In daily living, law is an internalized principle of self-accusation. We might say that the innumerable laws we carry inside us are bastard children of the Law.
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Don’t let the little
l
fool you—in impact, there is very little difference between the Law of God and the law we find in our culture. Just ask the teenage girl who feels that her body doesn’t look like it should. Or the thirty-something woman torn between the simultaneous pressure to be a perfect mother and a successful career woman. These double standards are just as daunting and severe as the commands we find in the Bible. The only difference between big-L Law and little-l law is that one comes from the immutable mouth of God and the other arises out of the shifting sand of human enterprise. The masculine ideal that my sons are growing up with is different from the one I grew up with, but it is no less demanding.
If the big-L Law is good and holy, then little-l law is almost always arbitrary and cruel.

I have tried my best to be consistent in usage throughout the book, with big-L Law referring to God’s Law and little-l law the innumerable oughts of life. But the innumerable oughts of life often include big-L Law, so it is not always as cut-and-dried as it might seem. Not only do we, like the Pharisees in the Bible, tend to conflate the two in all sorts of subtle ways, we also tend to experience both forms in the same way—namely, as accusation and judgment. So while the content of one may be good and holy, and the content of the other may be fickle and demeaning—one may even be an inversion of the other—it seldom makes much of a difference to the one not measuring up. In other words, the point is not
how
we fall short of this standard or that standard, but
that
we invariably fall short.