A Foreskin in the Night

The purpose of this post is to answer a question put to me by a friend: "Exodus 4:24-26. What is that all about?" What you are about to read is what I came up with. I didn't consult any other sources. I just looked at the Bible and did some searches for related passages based on the words in the text, and I used my own theological/biblical understanding to fill in the gaps. Feel free to disagree. Feel free to push back. Here we go.

²⁴ At a lodging place on the way the LORD met him and sought to put him to death. ²⁵ Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin and touched Moses' feet with it and said, "Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!" ²⁶ So he let him alone. It was then that she said, "A bridegroom of blood," because of the circumcision. (Exo 4:24-26 ESV)

At the point in history described in Exodus 4, the full Torah had not been given yet. No Mosaic Covenant existed. The Israelites did not have a whole legal code to live by and complex social and religious rules to keep. All they had was the Abrahamic Covenant. The biblical account reads as follows (all of it is significant but I put in bold the focal points for our discussion):

⁹ And God said to Abraham, "As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. ¹⁰ This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. ¹¹ You shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. ¹² He who is eight days old among you shall be circumcised. Every male throughout your generations, whether born in your house or bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring, ¹³ both he who is born in your house and he who is bought with your money, shall surely be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. ¹⁴ Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant." (Gen 17:9-14 ESV)

While that is not the only time circumcision is mentioned before Moses’ incident, it is the one that provides the cultural, theological, and literary background to the passage in question. God chooses Abraham mostly because he can. He’s a decent guy, but he is certainly not perfect. He has faith in God, and the Bible makes it clear, that’s the real redeeming quality he has. So God chooses him as the one man (along with Sarah, his wife) who will be the beginning of a whole chosen people. God promises to give them prosperity, provide the land for them to live in, and make them into a nation. The one thing they have to do—the one and ONLY condition—is they have to be circumcised. They have to circumcise anyone who wants to be part of it all, to receive God’s gift. And what happens to anyone who doesn’t do it? He is to be cut off from his people. He has to leave. He isn’t allowed to hang out with the rest of them anymore. It’s serious business. Even if that means being sent alone into the desert (because maybe that’s all there is around), they’ve got to go. They can’t just disregard the one condition and still get to benefit from the agreement, and the people are part of the benefits of that agreement.

Keep that in mind now, and follow me forward. The Israelites are with Moses in the desert. He went and led them out of Egypt (having survived the weird ordeal of being a bloody bridegroom). Now, he is giving his last sermon, and he is making it one for the record books. It is nearly the entire book of Deuteronomy. The story in question is now 40 years in the past. The Mosaic Covenant is in place, and they are supposed to obey the law, which still includes circumcising everyone. It is the distinctive for being part of the people God promised to Abraham. But there’s more. A lot more. Including and even mostly what Moses says in this passage:

¹¹ And the LORD said to me, 'Arise, go on your journey at the head of the people, so that they may go in and possess the land, which I swore to their fathers to give them.' ¹² "And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, ¹³ and to keep the commandments and statutes of the LORD, which I am commanding you today for your good? ¹⁴ Behold, ^to the LORD your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. ¹⁵ Yet the LORD set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day. ¹⁶ Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn.

¹⁷ For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. ¹⁸ He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. ¹⁹ Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. ²⁰ You shall fear the LORD your God. You shall serve him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear. ²¹ He is your praise. He is your God, who has done for you these great and terrifying things that your eyes have seen. ²² Your fathers went down to Egypt seventy persons, and now the LORD your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven. (Deu 10:11-22 ESV)

In the covenant with Abraham, the sign was to be physical, so there could be no denying who was part of the people. In this later covenant with Moses and the nation of Israel, they still had the physical component, but an outward designation for God is never enough, as was shown in nearly every story about Abraham's descendants all the way through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and now Deuteronomy. They didn't get it. For a people dedicated to God and by God, they weren't very godly. They lied, cheated, stole, sold their family members into slavery, murdered, took advantage of each other, and challenged everything God told them along the way. Only an inward change would make any difference. They needed to dedicate themselves, their hearts, who they were inside, not just undergo some physical ritual when they were too young even to remember it. Notice the range of implications this inward circumcision is supposed to have. It is supposed to mean they humble themselves before God and each other, stop oppressing people and start standing up for justice, change their attitude toward God, and make them more like him, recognizing what he has done for them and wanting to pass it on to others.

And summed up, what is the result of all this transformation? The following passage from later in Deuteronomy sums it up nicely:

⁵ And the LORD your God will bring you into the land that your fathers possessed, that you may possess it. And he will make you more prosperous and numerous than your fathers. ⁶ And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live. (Deu 30:5-6 ESV)

They will live. They will live, and they will love God with all of themselves, but that will happen only after God circumcises their hearts for them because they won't ever be able to pull it off on their own. All this should be sending vibrations of "that sounds like New Testament!" through your brain, because the gospel starts in Genesis and doesn't stop.

But what does that have to do with Moses and his son and a creepy ritual in the middle of the night? Everything.

Moses has just been sent to go back to his people. He is to act as God's one representative (in partnership with his brother), and as of yet, all he has to do to keep up his end of God's agreement with Abraham's family is to be circumcised and circumcise all the males in his household. He would have been circumcised when he was a baby before he took his fateful cruise down the river, so no problem there, but as it turns out, for whatever reason, he didn't circumcise his son. Maybe he didn't consider himself as part of the covenant people anymore since he left 40 years earlier and had married into a family of Midianites, not Israelites. Whatever it was, He is supposed to be the example for all the people, and he is already failing. The penalty is to be cut off from the people, but he is in the process of returning to his people. His son probably doesn't know anything about circumcision. It's Moses' responsibility. He didn't the one thing they were supposed to do. And that is right after he is told to threaten divine judgment on the Egyptian firstborns, but he hasn't taken care of his own firstborn. God shows him he is serious. Deuteronomy shows that God is concerned with the heart, but if you disobey what God has clearly told you, how right can your heart really be?

And Moses is Mr. Israel? The Chosen People poster child? Not if he doesn't fix this problem.

That's the real question about this passage. Why the sudden and harsh reaction to the state of his kid's genitalia. The rest is weird but not so crucial. I also am less confident as to what it means. First of all, why did she touch the foreskin to his feet? I have a thought, though I can't say for sure. Notice the following two passages:

² And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. ³ And Moses said, "I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned." ⁴ When the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, "Moses, Moses!" And he said, "Here I am." ⁵ Then he said, "Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." ⁶ And he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. ⁷ Then the LORD said, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, ⁸ and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. (Exo 3:2-8 ESV)

 And

¹⁸ "You shall also make a basin of bronze, with its stand of bronze, for washing. You shall put it between the tent of meeting and the altar, and you shall put water in it, ¹⁹ with which Aaron and his sons shall wash their hands and their feet. ²⁰ When they go into the tent of meeting, or when they come near the altar to minister, to burn a food offering to the LORD, they shall wash with water, so that they may not die. ²¹ They shall wash their hands and their feet, so that they may not die. It shall be a statute forever to them, even to him and to his offspring throughout their generations." (Exo 30:18-21 ESV)

The first passage takes place just before the story in question. His feet seem important. They carry the dust of the road, which as indicated by Exodus 30 symbolizes the uncleanness of the person. In the ritual system of Israel, most of the time, uncleanness won out. If something that was ritually clean touched something that was ritually unclean, they both became unclean. But when the clean thing is God, or something especially full of God's presence, God cleanses whatever it is. She anointed him with the blood from the foreskin--blood being a central part of how they ceremonially removed guilt--and she did it on the part of him that most represented his uncleanness, his being at odds with God. She ceremonially took away his guilt and made him right with God at the same time she corrected what the problem had been in the first place--the uncircumcised state of his son.

The rest gets even more speculative. I believe it was acceptable for her to be the one to fix the problem for two reasons. The first is that she is his wife, and Genesis is clear that husband and wife become intimately united. I think the truth of that concept runs far deeper than we really get, especially in our individualistic culture. The second is that in the communal culture of this people, guilt doesn't really belong to just one person, and neither does goodness. People are responsible for each other and contribute to each other's lives.

As for what she meant by a bridegroom of blood, I'm guessing it was something along the lines of lashing out at him as her husband for forcing her to have to cut off part of her son's penis, which I'm sure was very bloody. Any more than that, and I would trying to speculate on what a woman from another part of the world over 3000 years ago had going through her head. I just don't think I'm ready to go there, nor do I have any idea how she knew what to do, or how they even knew God was going to kill Moses. The text doesn't say, so I can't either.

There are certainly other ideas out there. Some people think the reference to blood points back to his murder, meaning that what God was mad about was the murder that was never atoned for, but nothing in the context suggests that to me. I believe the best interpreter of the Bible is the Bible, so the best approach is to find what it has to say about related ideas in other places, not reading in things that aren't there. Of course,  I could have spent a lot more time researching, and maybe it would have turned up other ideas. Feel free to compare this to what commentaries and other sources have said about it and let me know if I'm wrong!

Learning from Eve - Part 2

As I continue to share my thoughts about women and God, I want to clarify my intentions. I am writing about the beauty of God to be found in women and the wonder inherent in all daughters of Eve. I am not trying to lay out the different roles appropriate for men or women, biblical or otherwise. I am not brave enough to take on that topic at this time, and it isn’t really relevant to what I have been thinking about. Also, many of the characteristics I will attribute to women may not be—or even probably not—true of every woman. As with all groups of people, certain characteristics are generally true but cannot be forcibly applied in every case. Thank you for your patience with my observations, not my absolute model for what a woman has to be.

There are many things I appreciate about the Eastern Orthodox Church that I prefer over the way the church has developed in the West, but the foremost of all of them is how they view the image of God. I’m not an expert on their beliefs by any means, but they view the history of humanity through the lens of imago Dei in a way the Western Church has neglected over the centuries. Humanity has the utmost value. We are the image of God, the physical representation of God on the earth. Everything we were when we were created was a direct reflection of who God is. That, of course, was marred when we sinned, but that does not lessen its beginnings or its eventual restoration.

The fullness and wonder of the image, the likeness of God in humanity, is not only in Adam. Nor is it in exclusively in Eve. It can only be fully expressed in the interaction between the two. Each is a partial picture of God’s nature and character, and they fit together perfectly to paint God’s likeness.

Much thought has been devoted to how men are like God or how God can be seen in manhood. He is Father, warrior, protector, provider, king. I would like to take the time to find out what the feminine can teach us about who God is. The value of the image found in both man and woman is immeasurable.

Eve’s legacy, though dimmed, is not lost. It still resides in all her daughters, and someday, it will be restored to its fullness once more.

In my experience and observations, along with reading Captivating have shown me the wonder of women. They are meant to beautiful, and indeed, they are all beautiful, showing God’s glory in who they are. My wife is gorgeous, and I hope I don’t embarrass her by writing that she is. She is truly captivating, both outwardly and in who she is. I have known that for a long time, but in thinking about it lately, I have also come to understand certain things about it better. Women, including my wife, not only provide beauty in themselves, but they usually also desire to create beauty around them. It is how they were made; it is how they reflect God.

Women are enamored with loveliness. They delight in the beauty of their friends and their surroundings. How many women do you know that don’t try to make their home a beautiful and comforting place? When my wife (and my mom, when I was growing up) want the house to be clean, and the décor to be just right, and everything in its place, it’s not about being OCD or overly controlling (though some may turn it into that) it’s about an innate desire to create and maintain beauty in life. I didn’t get that growing up, so I was irritated by insistent commands that I make my bed every day (it just got messed up again that night, after all!). I finally understand that women (and some men) desire order not to irritate the people who are not naturally neat, but to create beauty.

And what is more comforting than being a child held by his mother after being hurt or scared, or a husband resting with his wife after a stressful day? Women are meant to offer the comfort God offers. They are here to tell us that everything is going to be okay. They are here to offer their softness and tenderness and make us feel better when the world turns ugly.

Of course, not all women do those things as well as others, and the desire for order can become about control, and the soothing comfort can be lost to demands for respect or allowing herself to be used as a doormat. Worry takes over and obscures the message that all will be well, and fear of rejection covers what beauty there is to offer. That is the toll taken by the Fall. But the spark of divine beauty resides in every woman, and if she lets Christ work in her, he will begin to restore what has been lost.

As a man, I am grateful for the half of the image of God found in women. Life would be dreary without it. I am grateful for the women in my life, for my mother, my sister, my wife, and now my daughter who I am so excited to meet.

Next time, I will elaborate on how I, as a man, can be the best husband, father, son, brother, and friend to the women in my life, and how they can help me be the best man I can be.

Learning from Eve - Part 1

As many of you know, my wife and I are about to meet our first child, a little girl, any day now. I can’t really imagine how my life is about to change, but I can only think it will be for the better. As her arrival has come closer, I have been thinking about girls and women and how I can be the best father possible for our new daughter.

One of the storylines of Scripture is of the image of God. Humans were created as God’s image, and the fullness of that image happens when the cumulative of both men and women is combined. The full story of the imago of God includes falling into sin and marring the image, God taking on the image of humanity in Jesus, Jesus restoring the image of God in his work, and humans being transformed to the image of Christ, thereby restoring the image of God in humanity. As I look into that narrative, I discover something about humanity, something about God, and something we have often overlooked in the church. I discover Eve.

For too long, we have looked at Eve, and instead of seeing the mother of all who live, and instead of seeing one of only three people who have ever lived as sinless human beings (if only temporarily in her and Adam’s case), and instead of seeing the glorious likeness of God in all the beauty of womanhood, we have seen the stain of the first human sin. The first failure as a human being. The first temptress. The first person to side with evil against God. By seeing only the failure instead of the beauty, we have missed something essential, and we have forfeited much understanding of women, humanity, and God.

Typically, we learn from Eve that women cannot be trusted. We learn from Eve that woman are dangerous. We learn from Eve that men need to be protected from the temptation women offer. We have ignored the fact that God confronts Adam after the fall. God sees Adam as owning his own responsibility, but for some reason, we have fallen for Adam’s lame excuse that it was Eve who gave him the fruit.

I reject that view of Eve, which has been unconscious for some and painfully conscious for others. I take responsibility for my own sin, and that frees me to look for the beauty of God to be found in Eve and in all of her daughters.

I believe women have tremendous insight into God, hugely important contributions to our theology. Unfortunately, theological inquiry and teaching has been predominated by the masculine. Of course, I appreciate all the study men have done regarding our Creator and all they have shown us, but if we neglect what women can teach us, we lose more than we can afford. I do appreciate that the body of theological teaching produced by women is growing. I look forward to how we view God grows as the long ignored feminine perspective on the divine begins to come to light.

In the meantime, I would like to share what women have taught me about God, not by their careful study and teaching, but simply by being women.

I will have more to say about that soon.

Goforth's Journal - Celebrate Portland Week

Goforth's Journal, a fellow Portlander's blog, is in the midst of "Celebrate Portland Week," and each day he is featuring the writing of a different Portland blogger.

Today's post is by me and is titled "The Adventures of Being a Man: Hiking the Trails through Portland's Diverse Terrain." I hope you enjoy it!

66 Books in 33 Days: Sprinting through God's Story

I recently completed a journey that covered quite a distance. As I drove around the Portland Metro area making deliveries, I also experienced Eden, the Exodus, David’s rule in Israel, Exile in Babylon, the coming of Messiah, and the spread of a small sect of passionate Jews throughout the known world.

How did I accomplish all this? Well, I wish I could tell you I was making my deliveries in a DeLorean, but our flux capacitor burned out a couple months ago. I also wasn’t reading my Bible while driving. I feel like that wouldn’t be the greatest witness when the cops question me about why I ran over an old lady at a crosswalk.

I decided to make use of all the driving time I have while I’m at work, and I invested in the ESV audiobible. I loaded it on my iPod and started to journey through scripture as I drove across Portland. I ended up listening to the whole thing in about six weeks. 33 days of actual listening to get through all 66 books of the Bible. I’m writing about it not to brag (it was super easy, just listening as I drove), but to share what it meant to me and what I learned from it. Several things about this new experience surprised me. I’ve read through the Bible several times, at least a couple of them being required reading for classes, but I’ve never listened to the Bible before. It was a radically different experience, one that I thought might be worth sharing. I probably won’t do it justice, but it’s worth a shot.

Listening to the Bible is like sitting at God’s feet and listening to him tell his story. Reading it is, of course, wonderful too, but hearing it really delivers in a wholly new way for me. While this is not the primary reason for my infatuation with listening to Bible, I love the fact that it is the way most of God’s people throughout the ages encountered Scripture before the last few hundred years.

Listening deprives me of my ability to stop and think about a word or phrase in isolation. Of course, meditating on a small passage has amazing benefits, but there is something about being forced to continue the thought process, about not being able to remove a sentence from its context that highlights new and powerful meaning. It also shows me how much of the Bible I haven’t totally mastered: a lot of it. Books like Matthew, for instance, are so familiar to me that I hardly even notice the details as I read, but when I’m inundated with a huge, unrelenting dose, I realize how much of it is super challenging and how much of it I don’t really know what to do with.

I began at the beginning.

Genesis proved a wondrous tale of faithfulness, intrigue, pain, and redemption. Moving quickly from creation to betrayal, promise and redemption, and with all the bumps in between, it’s an emotional roller coaster that really amazes me at the ridiculousness of how the heroes of faith choose to live and how immense is God’s patience and faithfulness for his children. Moving from there through the rest of Torah (Genesis-Deuteronomy) one might assume that listening to long lists of rules and genealogical records might be enough to make me want to drive into the Columbia, but instead, I found new beauty in it all. Reading each individual law in Leviticus can be overwhelming—or at least overwhelmingly boring—but quickly moving from one to the other allows you to hear God’s heart. When you encounter the body of what it looked like for Israel to obey God, you see his desire for purity, goodness, order, justice, and right relationships. He cared about his people and wanted their lives to be characterized by wholeness, not violence and betrayal of what should be loving relationships, not sickness and selfishness. The Law reveals God’s love.

Reading books that told the story of Israel further through history provided the opportunity to notice repetition. Listen really allowed me to hear when words, ideas, phrases, events came up over and over again. They caught my attention. I noticed in the prophets how much life and vitality was important to God. Ezekiel in particular is a shining beacon of life in the darkness of sin and death. God really wants to impart life in us, revivify us, taking us from the mundane and destructive and implanting something powerful and new in us that will carry us forward in passion in his grace.

You can't see the big picture without all the pieces, each telling its own story

 I also realized how much about Hebrew poetry and rhetoric I don’t get. I don’t know what to do with Proverbs as a whole. I thought I knew, but encountering it again (in one sitting) made me think about what I’m supposed to do with it.  The proverbs aren’t promises. In fact, they sometimes seem to suggest values that go against Jesus’ teaching.  Should we or shouldn’t we plan ahead, save, provide for our futures? Proverbs says ‘yes.’ It seems like Jesus says we should leave it to God and focus on more important things, like the kingdom of God.

What in the world is Song of Songs talking about? I don’t really know. Do you? Ecclesiastes? Are we supposed to ignore everything but the last chapter? Is there more in there we can learn from? Again, I have no idea.

So much of Hebrew style and technique is simply foreign. It’s just not how people write in current, Western culture. How do I read apocalyptic? There is nothing like it being written now. I’ve learned the basic characteristics: it’s written by communities under oppression, it’s symbolic of battles between good (God and his people) and evil (the oppressing rulers), it’s about struggle, it’s about hope of future liberation.

I don’t get it.  I know those things, and I could probably point out the recurring features in whatever text, but it doesn’t resonate with me. It doesn’t touch my soul. I wish I could connect with it, really understand it. Maybe some day I will.

In general, I’m a Hebrew Bible guy (which is why I say “Hebrew Bible” instead of “Old Testament”), but listening to large chunks really began to accentuate the patterns, the larger thought processes of the New Testament (Greek Bible?). I ended up listening to the epistles in a matter of two days. They are really short! The entirety of the New Testament took only about a week and a half, listening to about two and a half hours a day (weekdays only). It’s kinda amazing to hear what James has to say, and within the same half hour, to hear what Paul says about the same thing from a totally different perspective in Romans. It really provides a fullness and richness to these ideas that is almost impossible to pick up if you read a few verses here and a few there over the course of like five years.

I noticed this interesting occurrence because the repetition of words stood out to me so clearly:

“For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Romans 3:28 ESV).

“You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24 ESV).

Ha! What do you do with that? If you read them alone, not in the larger contexts of their books and the whole Bible, they sound entirely contradictory, don’t they? But since I listened to them both in their full contexts in the same day, it made complete sense. They work together beautifully, and if you take one without the other, you have a deficient view of what the Bible says.  This was one of the huge encounters I had that was so different of fulfilling about listening to the Bible rather than reading it.

I love the Bible, and I hope to be able to share some of that love with other people. I hope this post has been able to do that, at least a little bit. Maybe you won’t all go out and journey through the whole Bible in a month and a half like I did (not all of you have two to three hours a day to make use of like I do), but I hope you will at least think of the hard parts, the boring parts, the interesting parts, the stories, the letters, and I hope you will find some interest in encountering them and finding the value in them, whether it be by listening or reading, taking on large chunks or diving in to the details, or any way at all. I will continue to read and listen, both to the big picture and studying the minutiae, always expanding my understanding and encountering knew things, and I hope you do too. God has spoken to us, and it would be shame if we never took the time to find out what he said.

The Season of in Between

My spring semester ended two weeks ago, and with the birth of my first child coming up next month, I decided not to take classes this summer.  That means I have about four months without any school related responsibilities! Normally, my classes and homework consume a considerable portion of my time, so it is a welcome respite.

My issue now is not trying to fit in everything I have to do, but prioritizing the things I want to do.

How do I spend my summer in a way that allows me actually to take a break, relax, and recuperate but at the same, doesn’t just waste it?  I don’t really want the summer to end with the only things I accomplished being beating six Xbox games and watching eight TV shows beginning to end on Netflix.  What does it look like to use my time well during a summer break?

My wife always knows about the things I want to do.  I share them with her, to the point that I think she gets annoyed because I share endless aspirations and rarely actually do anything about them.  Unfortunately, I have so many things I want to do that actually doing them all would be impossible.  So how do I choose which ones to pursue?

I do want to play some games.  I do have a show or two I want to watch.  Mostly though, my hopes for the summer involve reading and writing. 

I have two books tumbling around in my head, one a novel and one non-fiction.  They are dying to come out and find life in the pages of a completed book.  It would be great if this could be the summer of their birth.  I’ve been thinking about the non-fiction book and talking a lot about it with my partner in crime, Aaron.  I’m hoping since it’s team effort, having the sense of accountability will motivate me actually to make progress on it.  I’m pretty excited about it.  The next step, I think, is to do some interviews.  It’ll be fun.

As far as reading, my list is about a mile long and keeps getting longer.  I have plenty of time for reading now, though.  I read every day on the bus to and from work, and I listen to books on my iPod while I work, so I’ve been getting through about three books per week that way, not counting any reading I do at home.  Right now I’m listening to Desiring God by John Piper, reading The Finale by Calvin Miller on the bus, and reading Love Wins by Rob Bell at home.  It’s a great time to be a reader.

I also want to spend time with my wife, friends, and dad and sister, and I want to be prepared for our baby.  I might even start exercising (but I’m not holding my breath on that one…).

I just hope I can get into the mode of making progress in all those areas without feeling stressed and stretching myself too thin, as if I weren’t taking a break.  That’s a challenge.  I tend either to overload myself with responsibilities and projects or slip into a sluglike pattern of laziness and apathy.  Neither state is super fun for very long, so I really need to get that balance right. 

Anyone out there have the magic formula to help me get it just right?

The One Where Love is Always Self-interested

It’s been a long time, but I remember high school discussions about whether altruism is possible.  We wrestled with the question of “Is it really possible to do anything without being motivated by self-interest?”  There is an episode of Friends that deals with it as well.  Phoebe wants to believe it with all her might, and she spends the episode trying to discover a way to make it work.  She finally stumbles on donating money to PBS, which she hates, and simultaneously gets Joey on TV by doing so.  She thinks she has finally done something that does  not benefit her in any way and is quite pleased about it.  Joey points out that she is gaining pleasure from doing a totally selfless act, and therefore, is gaining something by it. 

So the question is “Can we ever do something good and/or loving for someone else without ANY self-interest, without gaining anything at all by it?”

I can take care of my pregnant wife, doing things like rubbing her feet, bringing her drinks of water, doing chores, staying with her when she is sick.  None of those things are directly beneficial to me, so is that altruism? No, probably not, for each of those things reinforces her love, strengthens our relationship, and if nothing else, allows me to spend time with her.  I definitely gain from anything good I do for my wife.

What if I do something for a stranger?

I can give money to someone who asks for it, or buy a meal from the grocery store for the guy sitting outside, or donate to a charitable cause.  I can volunteer to serve food at the Rescue Mission.  I am now sacrificing time and money to help a person I don’t even know.  Surely that must be altruistic, completely selfless.  Alas, I gain recognition for doing selfless acts.  I may even gain social benefits by talking with them and interacting with them and finding a little of who they are.  I benefit.

What if I help someone anonymously?

What if I send cash to someone who needs it anonymously, or I drop money in a donation box, or do any number of things that would help someone else, but no one would know I did anything?  I still find satisfaction in knowing I did something good.  I gain.

We can up the ante a little bit and concede, ‘ok, I can’t do anything selflessly, but what about Jesus?’ What of his crucifixion?  Surely, Jesus, the perfect god-man, must have been capable of completely selfless action.

Picture the garden at Gethsemane.  Jesus is there, desperately wanting the support of his disciples (which he doesn’t get because they keep falling asleep) and falling to his knees, pleading to the Father to take away the wrath he is about to receive.  He asked that if there were ANY other way, God would show it to him, but since there was no other, he would do God’s will.  Luke describes him as being in agony over what was about to come.  His mental anguish was so great he needed an angel to comfort him and he began to sweat drops of blood.  Surely, he got no pleasure from his sacrifice, no gain by his death.

But really, there are two problems with this example.  The first is this: “Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:2).  Notice the phrase “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.”  Jesus allowed himself to be killed because it would bring him joy! I don’t think the suffering itself was high on his list of favorite things, but he knew the results would bring him joy.  His motivation was not altruistic at all!

The second problem is that his saving work allowed his children access to him; it allowed millions of people to know and love him, establishing relationships with him.  Again, he experiences good because of the good he did for us.

So, really, is completely selfless good, pure altruism, something we would even want?  If the only perfect human who ever lived couldn’t pull it off, is it really a good thing to be entirely disinterested in the good you do?

Ask your loved ones.

I think a simple question to my wife would reveal very quickly what she would think about it.  What if I only told my wife I love her because it would make her feel good.  What if I only give her gifts because she wants them.  If I find no happiness in her presence, no genuine joy at her touch, but I only spend time with her because she wants it, would she appreciate it?  I think not.  She would be hurt that I did it mechanically, not out of my own love for her, my own emotional desire to be with her and please her.  True love rejoices at others’ joy.  True love finds pleasure in pleasing others.  True love finds no cost too great in order to bring good to the objects of its affection.  True love, while not merely self-interested, finds great gain in providing benefit to others.

Remember, when Jesus commands us to love one another as the second part of the greatest commandment, he does not say “Love your neighbor and deny yourself.”  He says “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  The two are not mutually exclusive.  They are necessary pairs in the endeavor to spread love. 

Going back to the original question, “Can we ever do something good and/or loving for someone else without ANY self-interest, without gaining anything at all by it?” I would have to say the answer is “no.” But that isn’t something to mourn, as if humanity has failed, and no real love can be known.  We can rejoice that true love is beneficial for everyone involved, even when we sacrifice, and especially when it is grounded in the only pure source of love, God himself.