I accept whatever agnostic tendencies I find in myself by noting that Jesus’ challenging words in Matthew 25:44-46 essentially and simply equate service to, relationship with, and redemption through him to the grit and grime of everyday, person-to-person reality.
(Actually, I’m not sure if I think of myself as having agnostic tendencies. As The Freakwenter writes, “To explain why I’m neither a believer nor an athiest nor an agnostic, consider this: God sits far beyond the power of verbal description. Then, regardless of whether God exists, God also sits far beyond the power of verbal denial, and also beyond the even-handed verbal analysis of agnosticism.”)
While some people see “personal relationship with Christ” as being the focal point of Christianity, with all other relationships and actions crowded under that one umbrella, I suspect that, whether or not there is a heavenly, spiritual arena, it is my immediately tangible world that embodies what really matters and cries out for what little I can do and be.
In Sunday school on a recent Sunday–we were visiting a class about marriage; the day’s topic was how to handle your spouse’s past mistakes–we read the story of David and Bathsheba and then discussed in small groups the resulting Psalm 51 in which David writes in verse 4, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.”
“I think David is in denial,” I said. We were supposed to be talking about David’s handling of his past mistakes, but we’d only come up with things like “He’s remorseful” and “He wants to be pure.”
“In denial?”
“Yes. David did not, as he says here, sin against God only. What about Bathsheba, Uriah, his people, his nation. What about them?”
“Oh, but he’s speaking in hyperbole or something,” one lady said so quickly that I hadn’t even inhaled yet after my daring attempt at creative scriptural interpretation. “He can’t be in denial. Those people are included in his use of ‘God.'”
Due to the intense rejection of what I thought was a remotely plausible idea, I didn’t add that the Psalm also suggests that David took less than complete responsibility for his actions–it was his mother’s fault, after all: “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me”–and that he appears to have been seeking the easiest way out, by calling down divine intervention: “Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.”
Now, I can accept that exclusively God-based forgiveness is sometimes the only conceivable enabler of fresh starts. And maybe that sort of forgiveness is what David really did need, here, since Uriah was already dead and since David by then couldn’t really undo anything regarding Bathsheba. There are times of desperation.
But while my “creative” interpretation of Psalm 51 may be a little too, shall we say, creative, I still suspect that when all that “convicted” people seek are fix-and-forget-it cure-alls, we may find ourselves shirking our own essential, painful steps towards righting past wrongs and restoring joy, person to person.