Gracie: Speaking
of illegal, have you ever, like, committed a crime?
Cheryl: Yes.
Yes, I did.
Gracie: Go
on.
Cheryl: One
time, I stole red underwear from the department store. My mother wouldn’t buy
them; she said they were Satan’s panties.
Gracie: So
is that it?
Cheryl: Yeah.
Miss
Congeniality (2000)
 |
| A tasty-looking breakfast. Ooh, I’m hungry now. |
I’m spending a few weeks this summer
staying in a Cambridge college, while I’m working nearby.1 It’s a
pretty good way of getting a little sample of some of the nice bits of the
Cambridge university experience – being surrounded by beautiful architecture, views
over the quadrangle, free access to the college grounds, meals in the impressive
high-ceilinged dining hall, that sort of thing – without having to actually,
you know, study at Cambridge and consequently die from sheer volume of work.2
Taking meals in hall turned out to be a bit more confusing than I had
anticipated, however: when I first went in to breakfast, I was mistaken for an
attendee on the college international summer school, and guided through the
available selection of comestibles under the assumption that I had already paid
for all of it as part of my summer school fees. Not realising at the time that
said mistake had been made, I in turn assumed that breakfast must come included
with my accommodation. It was only later, upon rereading some of the information
I had been given upon my arrival, that I realised this wasn’t the case; I
should have been paying for breakfast after all.
Wow, Anne, what a stupendously
interesting story. No wonder you never blog about things that happen in your
life is this is your latest nominee for Thrilling Anecdote of the Week. Where
the heck are you going with this?
The thing is, it would have been really,
really easy just to keep on acting as if I were on the summer school programme,
taking my breakfast, melting into the crowd, and never handing over a penny. I
didn’t even know how to pay for my breakfast. I would have to ask
someone, and that was bound to be awkward, and frankly I was paying enough for
my accommodation already, and if I was ever challenged on the matter, I
could claim, quite truthfully, that I had been told I didn’t need to pay for
anything except the special extra snazzy items in the fridges at the sides of
the room. Nobody would be able to convict me of anything.
It would have been really, really easy.
And that’s why I fell asleep praying fairly fervently that God would enable me
to overcome the temptation.
Really? All of the massively important
things you could have been praying about – all the much, much more serious sins
to which you capitulate on a daily basis – and the subject of your desperate
entreaty to your almighty Lord was that he would empower you to resist taking a
couple of quid’s worth of food you weren’t technically entitled to?
Well, that’s kind of my point. It would
have been really easy to shrug the whole thing off as no big deal. It would
have been really easy to tell myself that my sinful desire to keep hold of my
cash rather than rendering it to whom it was owed, and my equally sinful and
probably more potent fear of coming across as a bit of an idiot (i.e. to
whomever I had to ask about the correct payment procedure), didn’t actually
have that much of a hold on me, that I could deal with the issue by myself and
it wasn’t worth bothering God with it; he wouldn’t care. It would have been really
easy to assure myself that yeah, I’d try to pay for my breakfast, but if I
chickened out, it didn’t really matter; it was only a few quid, after
all.
 |
| We’re talking under a fiver. Not that I could have paid with the one in this picture now that the new plasticky ones have come in. |
But look here, if I’m not committed to
obeying what God has commanded in a matter as small as stealing breakfast, how
on earth can I imagine that I’m really committed to obeying what God has
commanded in any weightier matter one cares to name? And he has commanded me:3
You shall not steal. – Exodus 20: 15
You shall not steal … but you shall love
your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord. – Leviticus 19: 11, 18
And you shall not steal. – Deuteronomy 5:18
And putting that in context (because
there are other commands in the Torah that I wouldn’t claim to be under any
obligation to obey on account of the whole new-covenant thing):
Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes
to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom
respect is owed, honour to whom honour is owed. Owe no one anything, except to
love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the
commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall
not steal, You shall not covet”, and any other commandment, are summed up in
this word: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” – Romans 13:8-9
This wasn’t an issue of a few quid. It
was an issue of whether I was going to look my King and Captain in the face,
knowing full well the orders he had given me, and say ‘no’.
You know those Bible stories that never seem
to get told in Sunday school, where someone commits some apparently minor crime
and, on God’s initiative, suffers an uncompromising punishment as a result? I’m
talking, for example, about the guy who gathered sticks on the Sabbath and was
stoned to death (Num 15:32-37); Achan, who nicked a few bits and bobs from the
sack of Jericho and was stoned to death along with his whole family (Joshua 7);
Saul, who kept hold of some live animals from Amalek and was deposed from the
throne of Israel (1 Samuel 15).4 These were people who heard what
God commanded, pledged themselves to obey him, and then promptly turned round
and decided it was more important to them to take something they wanted than to
adhere to God’s commands. It wasn’t an issue of a few sticks, of a few bits and
bobs from Jericho, of a few sheep and oxen. It was an issue of people looking their
King and Captain in the face, knowing full well the orders he had given them,
and saying ‘no’. It’s no big deal, they decided. It doesn’t really matter. I
don’t need to worry about it. I don’t need to ask God to help me obey him; he
doesn’t care. I can work things out myself – my way.
It’s probably worth my mentioning,
incidentally, that even if someone has got the wrong end of the stick about
what is or isn’t a sin, to do something one thinks is disobedient is,
pretty obviously, still a form of disobedience, as Paul writes with regard to
the matter of unclean foods: “whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats,
because the eating is not from faith. For whatever does not proceed from faith
is sin.”5
But it would be laughable, wouldn’t it,
if I set about following that other God-issued command to confess my sins to
fellow-believers,6 and the big confession I made was that I’d stolen
a couple of quid’s worth of breakfast in the aforementioned manner. Or, say,
that I’d taken advantage of the open barriers at the railway station to avoid
paying a quid or two in train fares. Or that I’d illegally downloaded
something, or failed to give due credit to a content creator whose work I’d
used. I would come across as hilariously or perhaps unbearably holier-than-thou to confess to something like that as if it were some sort of major transgression. It would be like that scene in Miss Congeniality that I quoted above,
where our FBI-agent heroine Gracie is trying to assess whether Cheryl might be
the terrorist threatening violence at the Miss United States beauty pageant,
and the worst crime Cheryl can recall having committed is the theft of some lingerie.
Cheryl’s great confession is so trivial that she surely can’t be the culprit;
she’s clearly far too good and sweet and innocent. Gracie was expecting some
far more dramatic admission.7
I wonder whether we, as a Church, too
often have the same kind of attitude: we get excited, for instance, about the
testimonies of former murderers and mob bosses who have now come to serve Jesus,
and shrug our shoulders at those of nice middle-class kids whose former, unregenerate
selves never committed any crime more dramatic than, say, stealing breakfast. Similarly,
when our brothers and sisters confess their sins to us, we are keener to
reassure them that everybody does that than we are to remind them that in
Christ they are not only fully forgiven for doing that, but empowered to stop
doing that by the same power that raised Christ from the dead. And as
regards matters like getting away with not paying for stuff, we sometimes even
talk in the same way as the spiritually-dead world around us, as if getting the
absolute most for ourselves and avoiding shelling out any more cash than
strictly necessary is a normative and thoroughly admirable aspiration.
That’s not, I think it’s fair to say,
the kind of atmosphere that facilitates the pursuit of holiness. What would we
today have said to the guy who gathered sticks on the Sabbath, or to Achan, or
to Saul? Would we have assured them that everybody does that sometimes? Would
we have shrugged our shoulders and called it no big deal? Would we have
internally (or externally) laughed at the triviality of their confessions?
 |
| Sticks. And consequently, stones... |
I hope not, because the end of each of
those stories demonstrates quite indisputably that, as far as God is concerned,
knowing his commands and yet disobeying them is a massive deal. “Has the
Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,” said the prophet Samuel
to Saul after the latter’s disobedience, “as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams.”
And after Achan stole the stuff from Jericho, God caused his people to be
defeated in battle, declared that they had put themselves in the same category
as the people on whom they were supposed to be enacting his judgement, and stated
that he would no longer be with them if they did not kill and burn the culprit
and all he had.
Oh, brilliant. The most laughably
trivial sin you can think of amounts to disobedience worthy of defeat,
abandonment, and destruction. If that’s the case, how exactly does any of us
stand a chance?
But that, of course, is precisely it.
None of us stands a chance, be we former mob bosses or nice middle-class kids.
The only human being who was never disobedient to what God had commanded was
Jesus. He was obedient to the point of never committing even a sin as trivial
as stealing breakfast. And moreover, he was obedient to the point of dying on a
cross, experiencing every ounce of the defeat, abandonment, and destruction we
had earned by our disobedience – our sins of all sizes – so that we might be
spared it, and treated as if we had been just as obedient as Jesus was. We don’t
need to be afraid that we’ll be subjected to punishment for our seemingly
trivial sins – but we do need to remember that that’s only true because our
King and Captain was already subjected to that punishment.
So next time a seemingly trivial sin
suggests itself to your still-imperfect heart, please don’t shrug your
shoulders and dismiss it as no big deal. If you are aware that God has
commanded you otherwise, take the issue to him, because disobedience is always
a big enough deal to be worth bothering him about. Pray that you would be
able to resist temptation. Pray for a good while if you have to. Look over
relevant bits of scripture and meditate on them. Remind yourself that Jesus
died to free you from sins like this, that he has won a spectacular victory
over them, and that he has sent you his Spirit to empower you to fight them. I
can recommend this stuff because I did it and it worked: the next day, I had
the necessary awkward conversation and paid for my breakfast.
A tiny victory over a tiny sin, perhaps,
hardly worth mentioning. But from my perspective, it was an answer to prayer; a
significant weight off my conscience; and a tangible manifestation of God
fulfilling his promise to make me, little by little, more like Jesus.
Footnotes
1 I’m doing a summer programme at Tyndale House, http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/, which
is basically the best place ever if you’re an evangelical academic.
2 If you fancy doing the same thing yourself, start here: http://www.visitcambridge.org/accommodation/college-rooms.
3 All the links: Exodus, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20&version=ESVUK;
Leviticus, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+19&version=ESVUK;
Deuteronomy, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+5&version=ESVUK,
and Romans, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+13&version=ESVUK.
4 Even more all the links: Numbers, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=numbers+15&version=ESVUK;
Joshua, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=joshua+7&version=ESVUK;
1 Samuel, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+samuel+15&version=ESVUK.
5 Just the one link this time: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+14&version=ESVUK.
6 That’s in James 5: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James+5&version=ESVUK.
7 I can’t find a clip of that scene, but you can have this
one that also features an unexpected answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3st-Hai1y54.
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