Month: March 2024

The empathetic Judge

The empathetic Judge

I came down sick with COVID a few weeks back and (sadly) missed the funeral for a friend of mine named Charlie.

Charlie was a retired judge, a longtime member of our church, and a constant encourager to me. I came to know him, first, by email. Charlie was wont to send me lengthy emails after one of my sermons or blog posts. And like most pastors, I have some latent anxiety that spikes whenever I open a message to see not sentences but paragraphs. Paragraphs are bad. All preachers know it, even if we only tell our therapists.

But Charlie’s emails weren’t critical. They were funny, encouraging, and (above all) marked by signs of a first-rate mind at work. Invariably, when I referred to an author in my message—Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Ernest Becker—Charlie would approach me afterward to chat. He’d read them, even the not-so-churchy ones. And I came to relish his long emails.

At the funeral (which I watched on video), Charlie’s wife shared openly about the prior chapters of his life: the ones I didn’t know. The Navy. His years as an avowed atheist. And the alcoholism that might have killed him. Miraculously, Charlie eventually found sobriety and Christ. And at a mid-stage of life when most men sink into the comfortable ruts of a long-held career, Charlie went back to school to become a lawyer.

Eventually, he became a judge.

One legal story from the funeral struck me. It was of a young mother in Charlie’s jurisdiction who faced serious charges stemming from her opioid addiction. Instead of sentencing her to prison as he might have, Charlie got her help, he provided her a path to drug court, and her life was transformed just as his had been.

He was a just judge. But he was also an empathetic one, partly because of his own battle with addiction. He had been there, and it helped him help others.

On Holy Week especially, Charlie’s story reminded me of another reason Christians find the Jesus-story so compelling. The Messiah is indeed the Judge of all humanity, before whom we must stand (2 Corinthians 5:10; 2 Timothy 4:1). Yet Christ is also empathetic. To be sure, merciful understanding was never absent from the life of God. (Thus it is wrong to say Jesus somehow transformed the Father from a vengeful tyrant to a kindly grandpa.)

Long before the time of Christ, the psalmist wrote the following:

13 As a father has compassion on his children,
so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;
14 for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.

(Psalm 103:13–14)

Yet Jesus’s unique empathy flows from his firsthand experience of suffering and temptation. Though Christ was sinless, he experienced the full weight of human frailty, abuse, and death itself.

The Book of Hebrews thus picks up this empathetic thread when speaking of our great high priest:

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.”

(Hebrews 4:15)

On Good Friday, this message in especially important.

In a way, my lesson from Charlie is that justice is not only about retribution. It is also about a battle-hardened empathy that leads to restoration, and—if you’re lucky… —long emails.

Click the green “Follow” button to never miss a post.

And see here for my own books.

The beautiful book

The beautiful book

I’ve been on the family farm the past few days, with my wife’s folks in central Kansas. On Tuesday, we woke before dawn to watch a nearby “little house” of lesser prairie chickens (that’s what they’re called, apparently) do their colorful springtime dance, which takes place in the same plot of ground each year.

The kids have been riding dirt bikes, checking baby calves with grandpa, and playing in their palatial tree house. I’ve been cutting firewood and generally enjoying some outdoor time away from the indoor office since it’s Spring Break at the university.

Considering all that, I was struck by these lines that I read yesterday from the Belgic Confession of 1561. (I always save my 16th century Calvinists confessions for Spring Break; or as I call it, Presbyterians Gone Wild.)

In a lovely passage, the confession celebrates that we know God not only by Scripture but also

“. . . by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book, in which all creatures, great and small, are like letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God . . .”

The chief author of the statement was Guido de Bres, who was later martyred for his faith. The language of the “two books” (nature and Scripture) is familiar to many Christians. Yet I was struck less by what the Confession affirms than by how it illustrates it.

Creation is God’s beautiful book.

And all creatures, great and small, are like letters that pour forth from his pen.

In the 16th century, with the invention of the printing press not long ago in recent memory, the accessibility of books was skyrocketing. Thus, the confession locates us in a world that is no longer ancient or medieval; yet not quite modern, mechanized, and disenchanted. In that space between antiquity and the modernity (papyri and iPhones) sits the book—now in our own day increasingly a dusty museum relic in the age of Tik toc, Tinder, and attention spans approaching the breadth of a sneeze, even as anxiety tracks in the opposite direction (see here).

To liken creation to a book is, in a roundabout way, to venerate the act of writing, and the need for careful reading. The Reformers knew this more than most. Their movement would have floundered without Gutenberg’s invention. And they had seen their favorite texts—including the New Testament—banned in common tongue. In the end, their message depended partly on a public that could comprehend (and would want to comprehend) the written works that folks like Luther, Calvin, and Arminius were churning out with a rapidity to make even a chat bot green with envy.

In the analogy of the Belgic Confession, books matter—as does God’s creation.

Yet it is not just any book to which the world is likened by de Bres. After all, a text may be accurate, informative, useful, or just plain dull. Yet the confession calls creation God’s “beautiful book.” To be fair, this beauty is more apparent in some instances than others. (I wrote a whole chapter in Perhaps on Darwin’s haunting question on what he called “the suffering of millions of lower creatures,” and how he came to think that formed an argument against an all-loving and all-powerful creator. I beg to differ. But one can’t deny the force of Darwin’s “reading.”)

Yet amidst the dancing house of prairie chickens, and the smell of storm-felled and time-seasoned elm, one has a sense that Guido de Bres got that part exactly right, even if Hopkins said it more poetically.

“And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

Click the green “Follow” button to never miss a post.

And see here for my own books.