Related articles and links |  1 of 4

Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

--Jude 24–25 (NRSV)

"The road to hell," someone said, shortening the familiar aphorism, "is paved." It's been made smooth and seductively easy to travel, that is, unlike the road that leads to a more desirable end. That other, narrower road is not paved but is full of rough spots and threats and hazards. The letter of Jude paints a picture of an environment beset with hazards. Before the wonderful ascription of praise that closes his letter, Jude presents a horrendous picture of heresy and moral failure--the two go together--threatening those he writes. In images piled on top of one another, he warns of those who are blemishes on your love-feasts, while they feast with you without fear, feeding themselves. They are waterless clouds carried along by the winds; autumn trees without fruit, twice dead, uprooted; wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars, for whom the deepest darkness has been reserved forever. Not a reassuring portrait. Don't be deceived, says Jude, it's not safe out there! The road to hell is paved, but not the road the church must travel before the Lord returns, not the road you must travel in this world. Be a little wary if the road seems too smooth! Cheery words, indeed. Yet that context of danger gives urgency to Jude's reference to the One who is able to keep us from stumbling (that's the sense of the word translated falling). Face it: apart from an urgent situation, we do not tend to turn first to that One for stability and security. Instead, we have our own favorite ways of achieving a measure of presumed safety. For instance, I did a search on the Internet for the word stumble. Among other hits, I came up with the "Safenet Menu" of approved sites for children, and a collection of exclusively Christian sites where one could feel confident of not stumbling upon anything compromising.There is something to be said for avoiding temptation, for not going looking for trouble. But the real world, the world where we are called to minister, does not come equipped with content filters. We cannot sidestep the pebbles on the sidewalk, even the little ones, the ones too small to notice until your feet go right out from under you--not to mention the big boulders.We know that. So, mostly we tend to hang onto something that looks as if it can keep us up, something that seems to offer security and, preferably, seems to testify to our virtue and God's favor in our lives. Mostly we hang onto to the usual stuff--the tall-steeple or fast-growing church, the prestigious corporate job, the number of people we convert, high-achieving kids, fame, money. Anything will do, provided that to us and to the group we identify with, it demonstrates we are doing the right thing.Maybe those you most admire reject the usual symbols of achievement and assume that any genuinely faithful Christian will be poor and will show no signs of earthly success. Don't be deceived: relying on a criterion like that is dangerous too. Relying on any criterion of our own is dangerous.Theologian Myron Augsburger told a story many years ago about this fellow slaving away over his desk in his sixth-floor office, struggling to see what he was doing after the seven-foot fluorescent light above his desk stopped working. Calling maintenance produced no help, so he decided to scramble up on the desk and take a look himself. Sure enough, the tube was burned out. He unscrewed it, measured it carefully, and went off to the hardware store for a new one. Success! He replaced the tube and the office was flooded with light.When five o'clock came and he was ready to leave, he saw the burned-out tube standing forlornly in the corner. Leaving it there didn't seem like a good idea. So he decided to take it with him; he thought he remembered a construction site on the way home where he could dump it. He carried the seven-foot tube down the street, into the subway station, onto the train. But how do you sit down with a seven-foot tube in your hand? So he remained standing, holding the tube upright.When the train stopped at the next station, five people got on, and four of them grabbed hold of the tube. Now what? Pretty soon it occurred to him that all he needed to do was get off at his station and leave the pole. Picture, then, the last person left holding that wobbly pole.When a number of people have all grabbed hold of something, it looks as if it really can hold us up. But don't count on it. In the end, there is only One who can keep you from stumbling. Let the rest go, no matter how many people may be clinging to it. This One can indeed keep us from stumbling. But does he? Really? Don't we all stumble, not just occasionally but over and over again? The testimony of ordinary Christians and of great saints has been everywhere and at all times the same. We stumble, we are marked by sin, we are blemished.As a prayer from India puts it, "Like an ant on a stick, both ends of which are burning, I go to and fro without knowing what to do and in great despair. Like the inescapable shadow which follows me, the dead weight of sin haunts me."As Gregory of Nazianzus wrote in the fourth century, "I did indeed pray, and I thought to stand blameless at eve, / But someway and somewhere my feet have stumbled and fallen."We too have stumbled and sinned. Maybe not in dramatic fashion, where we go down like the Titanic hitting an iceberg (though those who get to be Titans can count on having a lot of icebergs around). Usually it's more the little pebble under the shoe, not worth paying any attention to except that it turns out to be in just the wrong place at the wrong time. And stumble we do. To claim otherwise, or to suppose we will eventually be triumphant in this life, is to deceive ourselves or to set ourselves up for despair.So, what of Jude's affirmation? Is it void? Or a cruel taunt--God can keep us from stumbling but actually doesn't? No. I rather think that we need to read Jude's words along the lines of Paul's in Romans 11:11, where he uses a similar term to speak of the Jews' not having stumbled so as to fall: in spite of everything, we will not in the end go down completely. The context in Jude is eschatological: in the end, we will know that God has indeed held us up and kept us safe, despite all the times we've tripped.That's good news. And yet there remains that awful, oppressive knowledge of sin and our repeated defeats by it. It's done and cannot be undone, and there will be yet more of it, as John Donne once said. It clouds our vision, and the more it makes us feel helpless, the more it can make us cynical and crassly pragmatic: what difference does a little more compromise make under the circumstances?Martin Marty in The Promise of Winter wrote of a kind of grayness that plagues the soul--a grimy, dingy, cheerless state in which we look in the mirror and know that the slate of our life is stained. Clarity and purity are gone, perhaps chased away not so much by something horrible we have done as by the swarm of little goods we have left undone.And then what? For we have no stain remover, no magic way to change what has been done or left undone.

next page... |  1 of 4

July 10 2000, Vol. 44, No. 8