This week on his boob tube show Christian broadcaster a cover would be morally justified to part his mate with Alzheimer's bug in order to get hitched another woman. The dementia-riddled helpmate is, Robertson said, "not there" anymore. This is more than an embarrassment. This is more than cruelty. This is a repudiation of the truth of Jesus Christ.
Few Christians pick Robertson all that severely anymore. Most somerset their eyes, and quivering their heads when he makes another foreign opinion (for instance, defending China's ill-mannered one-child abortion tactic to identifying God's judgment on delineated actions in the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, or the Haiti earthquake). This is serious, though, because it points to an go forth that is much bigger than Robertson. Marriage, the sacred writings tells us, is an icon of something deeper, more ancient, more mysterious.
The federation trust is a sign, the Apostle Paul announces, of the murder of Christ and his church (Eph. 5). The husband, then, is to devotion his little woman "as Christ loved the church" (Eph. 5:25).
This dote on is defined not as the hormonal swell of horror story but as a self-sacrificial crucifixion of self. The manage pictures Christ when he loves his the missis by giving himself up for her. At the seize of Christ, his Bride, the church, forgot who she was, and denied who he was. He didn't dissolution her. He didn't leave.
The Bride of Christ fled his side, and went back to their disused ways of life. When Jesus came to them after the resurrection, the church was about the very affair they were doing when Jesus found them in the initially place: out on the boats with their nets. Jesus didn't leave. He stood by his words, stood by his Bride, even to the Place of the Skull, and beyond.
A number or a servant with Alzheimer's can't do anything for you. There's no romance, no sex, no partnership, not even companionship. That's just the point. Because merger is a Christ/church icon, a human beings loves his ball and chain as his own flesh. He cannot up her off from him unambiguously because she isn't "useful" anymore.
Pat Robertson's inhuman confederation announcement is no anomaly. He and his cohorts have given us for years a wealth fact with more in garden-variety with an Asherah flag-pole than a cross. They have given us a politicized Christianity that uses churches to "mobilize" voters rather than to philosophy prophetically maximum the drag structures as a deponent for the gospel. But Jesus didn't stop for a Christian Coalition; he died for a church.
And the church, across the ages, isn't significant because of her mass or influence. She is weak, helpless, and spattered in blood. He is dedicated to us anyway.
If our churches are to survive, we must reject this Canaanite mammonocracy that so often speaks for us. But, beyond that, we must edify up a late initiation to foresee the certainty embedded in fidelity, a fidelity that is cruciform. It's serene to school in couples to put the "spark" back in their marriages, to put the "sizzle" back in their lovemaking lives.
You can still exalt the self and want all that. But that's not what get a kick from is. Love is fidelity with a waspish on your back.
Love is drowning in your own blood. Love is screaming, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." Sadly, many of our neighbors fake that when they learn the air of cartoon characters we consideration to pronounce for us, that they are hearing the gospel. They acquire that when they mull over the giggling evangelist on the idiot box screen, that they ponder Jesus.
They take that when they pay the way for the arena national rallies to "take back America for Christ," that they sit down with Jesus. But Jesus isn't there.
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