"Good Cop, Bad Cop"
March 11, 2007: 3rd Sunday in Lent, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.unitedchurchonthegreen.org

Scripture:
Isaiah 55:1-9
Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant—my steadfast, sure love for David. See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for the Holy One has glorified you. Seek the Lord while the Lord may be found, call upon God while God is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that the Lord may have mercy on them, and to our God, for God will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Luke 13:1-9
At that very time there were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices [when he had them executed.] Jesus asked them, "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way, they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did. Or those eighteen people who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did." Then Jesus told this parable, "A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, 'See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?' [The gardener] replied, 'Sir, leave it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'"

"May God speak through these words and make from them a holy Word for us today. Amen."

Sermon:
Well, finally, enough shilly-shallying with mangers and angels, stars and ashes, enough of the accessories of faith. Finally we get to the crux of the matter: An earthquake causes a tower to fall in the crowded city, where it crushes eighteen people to death. A governor orders the execution of members of the opposition on the eve of a religious holiday as a warning to the others. This is the real reason we come here, week after week, not just the music, certainly not the coffee. The world is full of sin and evil and suffering, and we want to know why, O Lord, why? and where, O Lord, where are you in all of this?

The technical term for this area of theological inquiry is theodicy, from the Greek for "justification of God," but you need never have studied Greek to have lain awake in the 4am dark with the problem of suffering gnawing in the pit of your stomach. And at 4am it's never an abstract problem, either. It's never "I wonder why bad things happen to good people?" It's "Why did this bad thing—this cancer, this addiction, this downsizing, this divorce—happen to my friend, my sister, my son, to me?" We struggle with these questions because we struggle with our lives. As people of faith walking in the Christian tradition, we struggle to hold together three central propositions: (1) evil is real, (2) God is all-powerful, and (3) God is good and loving.

We don't do a very good job of it. As one of my seminary professors used to remind us, it's hard work, and we almost always end up fudging one of the three in order to uphold the other two, usually either numbers one or two, in order to force an easier answer to our dilemma. Either we downplay the reality of evil, as in "I know this present suffering seems bad, but really it's all part of God's larger plan. There's a lesson here somewhere." Or we downgrade God's omnipotence to something closer to impotence, as in "God wants to make everything better, but just can't. That's not the way the world works." Tell me you've never heard either of those? or been the one saying them...? Whichever way we shortchange it, it still ends up a rickety three-legged stool, indeed.

Sometimes, though we do fudge on God's goodness and we create a deity whose "love" is fierce and cold and judgmental and really rather completely unrecognizable as love. It's "tough love" raised to a higher power, a simple case of heavenly Father knows best. In such a worldview, God could act to end our suffering, but won't, because evil is indeed real... and it's all our fault. It's like that old Saturday Night Live bit, "Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey." Remember? "If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is 'God is crying.' And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is 'Probably because of something you did.'" Can't you just feel the love?

Well, that's the same rationale Job's friends offered him to explain his suffering. "Think back," they encouraged him in their most pastoral tones, "Think hard. You must have done something to deserve this"—to deserve losing your property and your livelihood and your standing in the community and your children and your health—"You must have sinned in some way. Because, after all, since (1) evil is real and (2) God is all-powerful, it only stands to reason that God is doing this to you because the good God loves you so very, very much"—strike three, and you're out. Or, as they put it more poetically:

Does God pervert justice? Does the Almighty pervert what is right? When your children sinned against God, he gave them over to the penalty of their sin. But if you will look to God and plead with the Almighty, if you are pure and upright, even now he will rouse himself on your behalf and restore you to your rightful place (Job 8:3-6, New International Version).

Ah, Lord, deliver us from your well-meaning followers...

But wait, you say, that's the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. It's always like that. That God is always smiting someone for something. I mean, look at the plagues on oppressive Egypt or the conquest of pagan Canaan or the exile of faithless Israel. Is that Old Testament God really our God? As Christians, don't we have better news and a new and better solution in Jesus?

Early Christian communities certainly struggled on just this point. They sought to divorce themselves from what they understood to be the angry, fire-and-brimstone God of Jewish scripture in favor of a kinder, gentler God they saw revealed in Jesus. In the 2nd Century, a renegade bishop, Marcion, went so far as to slice and dice the growing Christian canon in order to excise this evil "Hebrew influence," leaving behind only bits and pieces of the Gospel of Luke and a few of Paul's letters. The recently surfaced "Lost Gospel of Judas" comes from much the same place. It argues that the Old Testament God isn't really God at all, but the true God seen "clothed in the man," Jesus comes from the holy realm of Barbelo, far away.

Of course, both movements were labeled heresy early on and cast out of the canon of scripture by the wider church, but as we all know, ideas die hard, particularly ideas that seem to offer simple answers to life's persistent questions. With the advent of Jesus and the birth of the church, the continuing conflict between a powerful image of God and a loving one was re-inscribed onto God's own internal life, onto the Trinity—or strictly speaking, onto the relationship between the first two persons of the Trinity, the Father and the Son, or the Creator and the Christ, since the Western church has never really known what to do with the Spirit, anyway. That's how Jesus and God came to be cast in a centuries-long run of good cop/ bad cop.

You've seen it a thousand times on every police procedural ever, every Law and Order, CSI, and NYPD Blue. Faced with a suspect reluctant to confess under more traditional methods of questioning, the partnered officers try a new tack. It starts with the "bad cop":

"I'm tired of this, damn tired. I've been out there busting my hump day and night for three weeks to crack this case, and, guess what: Every piece of evidence points right to you, you dirtbag. So we go to all the trouble of getting a warrant to drag you out of that crummy little rat hole you call an apartment to ask you a few questions, all nice and polite, but you, you won't play along. You won't be helpful and talk. Oh, just sit there yammering on about your right to this and your right to that. Well, you know what? That guy you killed, where are his rights, huh? his rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness? and his kids' rights to a father who's not buried six feet under? Gone, all of them, gone the minute you decided to pull that trigger... Honestly, I don't know why we even bother trying scum like you. Law and order's too good for you. If it were up to me, I'd just take you down to the deepest darkest cell in this building and beat the ever-living..."

"Hold it right there, partner." The "good cop" takes over. "Why don't you take a break? Go on, go get some air. Go cool off..." The bad cop steps outside.

"Hey, can I get you a cup of water? You sure? Okay, now listen: I have to apologize for my partner. He's a little crazy, you know? Been working too hard, putting in a lot of hours on this case, and he takes it all real personal. But, as you can see, he's about to snap, and I wouldn't want to be you when he does. That temper of his is real unpredictable, real dangerous. Last year he put a perp in the hospital. 'Course of it was all hushed up, but, well, between you and me, that guy's still drinking his meals through a straw. Now, I don't want to see that happen to you. Heck, I even kind like you. I'm sure you had perfectly good reasons for doing what you did. But you need to help me help you here. You need to talk to me, tell me it how it all went down; otherwise..."

Well, as funny as it may sound out loud, many of us go through our lives imagining Jesus and God acting much the same way as they try to get us to confess our sins and repent. God is the bad cop, of course, the harsh disciplinarian who tells us we had better toe the line or else. This is the angry God, chock full of wrath. That's where all that old-fashioned fire and brimstone went, and that's where it's waiting for us now, waiting for us to slip up just once. It's the bad cop God who tells us we are worthless and hopeless and helpless, that we are destined for hell and deserve it.

Jesus, of course, is the good cop. He's the nice guy, the reasonable one. It's Jesus who takes over while Father God steps out of the room to have a smoke. It's Jesus who loves us and wants to help us. It's Jesus's love, slender as a spider web, that holds us dangling safely just above the flames of hell. Jesus is the good cop who interposes himself between our sin and our just punishment at the hands of his angry partner God. Jesus even went so far as to die in our place on the cross to pay for our sins and appease God's sense of outraged justice, and it worked... once... but, hey, don't push your luck. You need to help me help you here. You need to talk to me; otherwise...

As much as I'm exaggerating to make my point, that's pretty much the same good cop/ bad cop image we find in our reading from the Gospel According to Luke this morning. In the parable—or allegory—there, a certain landowner comes to a certain fig tree looking for good fruit to justify the tree's continued existence in his vineyard. Disappointed year after year for three years, finally the master instructs his servant to cut it down to make room for better, healthier, more productive plants. But at that point the lowly gardener pipes up on behalf of the feckless fig tree. "Please, sir, leave it alone for just one more year," he pleads. ":Let me dig around it and put manure on it, and if it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, well then you can cut it down; after all, it is your tree, to do with as you see fit." Does anybody not get the message here?

Except, you see, there's a problem with that easy reading, because there's a problem with the story. There's a hole in the story: It doesn't end. Think about it. The landowner threatens, the gardener pleads... and then what? What happens to the fig tree? What do you think? Does it bear good fruit? Is it chopped down? Is it destined for tree heaven or condemned to tree hell? Enquiring minds want to know. But the story just doesn't tell us, perhaps because the point of the story isn't to show us the tree's eternal destiny but to point us to its uneasy present, its present opportunity to change and grow. But in the absence of easy answers, our human imaginations tend to run wild and we end up projecting our own fears and insecurities onto the situation in order to bring a closure that's just not there.

In much the same way, as much as we may want an easy explanation to our persistent questions about evil, sin, and suffering, there's a problem with the whole good cop/bad cop theology. There's a hole in that theory, too, because in our Christian way of believing, Jesus and God, along with that elusive Holy Spirit, are one—somehow, some way—in the mystery of the Trinity. It is an article of faith that what we can say about the character of Jesus—that Jesus is loving and merciful, full of grace and compassion—we can say about God the Creator, and what we can say about the character of the Creator—that God is perfect in justice, that God hates sin and evil and is working even now to bring an end to them forever—we can about Jesus. There is no good cop. There is no bad cop. In fact, there is no cop at all, just God, God is who is merciful and pure, holy and loving, just and gracious, all at once, the God who, yes, hates our sin and loves us sinners, who hates our suffering and at the same time suffers with us, the way only one who truly loves can suffer. It's a mystery—a baffling, frustrating, sometimes infuriating mystery—but at the end of the day, thanks to what we've come to know about God in Christ, we believe it's a loving mystery.

That's part of what I hear Jesus saying in the first part of our reading from Luke, the part about those killed in all-too human tragedies and natural disasters. He asks his audience, "So, those Galileans who died so horribly at Pilate's hand, were they any more deserving of suffering than any other Galileans? And those unfortunate souls crushed beneath the rubble of the tower of Siloam, were they any more sinful than anyone else in Jerusalem to come to such a gruesome end?" To which Jesus himself answers an unequivocal "No." Then why? Why, O Lord, is the world full of sin and evil and suffering?

And again, there's a hole in the story. Doubtless to his disciples' frustration, Jesus sidesteps the question. He doesn't reveal to them the inner meaning of suffering, he doesn't tell them why. But he does tell them what now. Again, he points neither to the future nor to the past, but to the opportunity of the present moment. "Repent," he urges them, and us. It doesn't matter what we've done or left undone. There truly is nothing we can do to make God love us less and there's nothing we can do to make God love us more. At the end of the day, all human beings suffer, some more than others, and all human beings die, some better than others, we won't ever really know when or why. It is our job to work to end suffering, not necessarily explain it. But we should focus not on some heavenly or hellish hereafter but on the here and now. After all, God's ways are not our ways and God's thoughts are not our thoughts. But as the prophet Isaiah encouraged us, we should "seek the Lord while the Lord may be found and call upon God while God is near." Oh, and when would that be?

Now. And now. And now. We cannot buy God's love or curry God's favor. There is no good cop and no bad cop, no carrot and no stick. It is not our job to explain the why of suffering, but to work with God to end it. But no matter who we are, no matter where we are on life's journey, we have a window of opportunity now and now and now to repent, to mend our relationship with God and our neighbor and even our very own selves as God intends us to be. God is present with us now in this present moment, making the moment a present now and for all time. As Jesus himself preached, "The Kingdom of God has drawn near. Repent, and believe the good news." So don't delay. Call now. Operators are standing by.