The Church as God’s Vehicle of Mercy

            The church is called to represent this God, just as Christ did. Indeed, the church is Christ continuing to manifest the true God. As Bonhoeffer said, “The Church is not a religious community of worshippers of Christ but is Christ Himself who has taken form among men.”³ Hence, the church is called “the body of Christ.” Living out this truth is the way we testify to a life and a love that is free from bondage to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It is how Christ manifests the reversal of the fall that he achieved on Calvary.

            God’s love is merciful; so must our love be. If even God does not hold his rightful knowledge of good and evil over us in judgment but rather loves us where we are, how much less can we who are sinners hold our stolen and illegitimate knowledge of good and evil over one another, or even over ourselves? How much more (if that were possible) should we rather extend mercy and love to one another and to ourselves? We ourselves live before God only because we have had our shame clothed in mercy and love.

            God’s love is patient; so must ours be. God’s love does not start with an ethical ideal and then pronounce judgment. God doesn’t start where he wishes we were, condemning us for what we are not. God starts where we actually are and then pronounces hope and patiently and graciously loves us into becoming what we can be and what we, in fact, already are in Christ.

            The body of Christ is to love mercifully and patiently. We are to accept people wherever they are and patiently love them and view them with hope. While we cannot ignore practical considerations of safety, we are to embrace people as they are, trusting that the Spirit of God will use our love to lead them to a place closer to where God wants them to be. We are to love like this because this is how we ourselves are loved.

            Finally, God’s love is accommodating; so must ours be. Unlike ethical principles, which are always abstract, universal, and idealistic, God’s love is always perfectly tailored to the complex uniqueness of each individual’s nonideal life situation in the present. The covering Adam needed was different from the one Eve needed. When we live out our calling and embody God’s triune love, the church does the same thing. We do not live by our knowledge of ethical principles, however good and noble and true they may be. Rather, we live by following the Spirit and by loving people where they are, in the complexity and uniqueness of their nonideal situations. And we do so without judgment.

            As we saw in chapter 5, this is the difference between a genuinely loving husband and a merely ethical one. We are called to live out of love, not out of an ethical system. Of course this does not in any sense entail that we relativize ethical truths, but it does mean that we make them subservient to love. Moral principles are absolute, but only love submitted to the will of God can direct us on how they apply in a particular situation.

            Only by being acutely aware of our own fallibility and sinfulness and making ethical principles subservient to love do we acquire the freedom and boldness to enter into solidarity with people in radically nonideal situations—as Jesus did with prostitutes and tax collectors. People who live in ethical principles cannot get this close to such people. Their knowledge of good and evil filters their relationships and keeps them from fully entering into the concreteness of another’s sinful situation. They can only pronounce what such people ought to do and should have done.

            However, it is only when we enter into solidarity with people as they are that we acquire the wisdom to know how, when, and if various ethical principles apply to their lives. Only then do we learn how to realistically and helpfully adapt ethical principles to the real situations in which people find themselves. Only love, led by the Spirit of God, can discern when (for example) the ideal must be abandoned for a lesser of two evils. And only love, given without hesitation and without conditions, can ever motivate people to trust us enough to invite us to speak into their lives in the first place. This is how God loves us, this is how we are called to love all others, and this is how people are helped in the concrete situations of their lives.