The Delight in Difference
Last winter, walking through our snow-laden neighborhood, I passed an elderly man shoveling his driveway. I faintly recognized him from the local congregation. I offered my help, which he cheerfully accepted. The snow was deep and we labored together a little while, scoop and throw, scoop and throw.
After a few minutes of shoveling in silence, I paused with my arm on my shovel. “I hear you once played professional football?”
“Yes, I did,” he replied. “A few seasons with the Chicago Bears.” He reminisced briefly but fondly over his successful career. He was large, still trim and powerful in his build, and clearly relished his memories.
“I know this will come as a surprise to you,” I said as I stood erect with all my 130 pounds, hands poised thoughtfully on the handle of the shovel still idle before me, “but I never played professional football.”
He didn’t so much as pause in the rhythm of pitching his snow. “That’s ok. We all have different gifts,” he said.
I’ve thought about that interaction many times since. Because even though he missed my irony, there was a genuine grace in his words.
“The task is to recognize the creature’s otherness,” writes John Durham Peters, “not to make it over in one’s own likeness and image. The ideal of communication, as Adorno said, would be a condition in which the only thing that survives the . . . fact of our mutual difference is the delight that difference makes possible.”1
This “delight that difference makes possible” may be the essential feature of that love into which Christ is trying to initiate us.
Love can only operate in the presence of difference, though difference has many deceptive surrogates. Social media is not the only shaper of “affinity bubbles,” as Noreen Herzfeld calls them.2 Ego and fear alike lead us to surround ourselves with mirrored walls we think are windows of communion.
God’s fullness of joy exists in the face of infinite human variability. That stunning fact warrants pondering. Our particularity is the field in which God’s delight is operative. Helen Oppenheimer sees human value as “a particular sort of living claim” that God recognizes.3
As a religious imperative, therefore, “what the belief in a heavenly father requires is the exercise of imagination to see each other's irreplaceability.”4 We must be schooled to see difference, variability, particularity, as God does: not as obstacles to surmount but the precondition for fullness of celestial joy. Oppenheimer sees parental love as a pale but valid analog: “the alternative to making favorites among our children is not to love them ‘all alike’: it is to love them all differently.”5
In one of the most provocative of his theological insights, Stephen Webb suggested that, in one crucial regard, we may miss the point of our incarnation. Out of his nurturing love, “the Father creates bodies that can share the Son’s sorrows and joys and, in that process, become more like him.”6 In other words, Christ’s primal place within a relational mosaic, joyfully and sorrowfully responsive to the entire array of our fractiousness and frailties, is the condition for which mortality prepares us. His Incarnation expresses his solidarity with us; but our incarnation prepares us for solidarity with him. His Incarnation heals and redeems us, while our incarnation puts our potential in play. Our potential, that is, to love as he loves, with the same vulnerability and delight in difference.
Oppenheimer emphasizes what this love has to move beyond within a field of radically differing personhoods. "It is an impoverished human being whose highest hope is to be at the receiving end of a merely accepting love. Tolerance, after all, is not the top virtue.”7
Perhaps this point is what’s behind Peter’s admonition in his first epistle to “love one another with a pure heart fervently” (1:22 and again in 4:8). He needed the adverb, twice, to emphasize the active embrace of, rather than tolerant acquiescence to, the difference that constitutes one’s neighbor—or one’s child or spouse.
Our best ethical philosophers have seen this “delight that difference makes possible” as reframing human interaction in powerful ways. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “Christ was not concerned about whether ‘the maxim of an action’ could become ‘a principle of universal law, but whether my action now helps my neighbor to be a human being before God. God did not become an idea, a principle, a program, a universally valid belief or a law. God became human.”8
Herbert McCabe restates that idea more simply:
“The morally good act is not the act prescribed antecedently by some moral law, it is whatever love demands in a particular situation.”9
Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.
Art by Eileen Cooper.
Audio produced by BYUradio.
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John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 31.
Noreen Herzfeld, The Artifice of Intelligence: Divine and Human Relationship in a Robotic Age (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 44.
Helen Oppenheimer, The Hope of Happiness: A Sketch for a Christian Humanism (London: SCM, 1983), 101.
Oppenheimer, Hope of Happiness, 94.
Oppenheimer, Hope of Happiness, 81.
Stephen Webb, Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 270.
Oppenheimer, Hope of Happiness, 119.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Reader’s Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 44.
Herbert McCabe, Law, Love and Language (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979), 31.
Insightful and inspiring.
This calls Colossians 1:24 to mind. We do not use it because of the awkward King James translation: Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church:
Other translations are more immediate:
YLT: I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and do fill up the things lacking of the tribulations of the Christ in my flesh for his body, which is the assembly,
NT Wright: Right now I’m having a celebration—a celebration of my sufferings, which are for your benefit! And I’m steadily completing, in my own flesh, what is presently lacking in the king’s afflictions on behalf of his body, which is the church.
NRIV I am rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for his body, that is, the church.
From my marginalia for that verse:
"Paul is saying that he is augmenting any gap in Christ's suffering for the sake of the church. This is a tough doctrine. Does it suggests that Christ's suffering was inadequate? No. It says that Christ's suffering is meant to enlist our suffering on behalf of others. Its infinitude is not in an absolute self-sufficiency but in its capacity to be augmented by those who add their suffering to His. His suffering is infinite in that it is entirely sufficient (2 Cor. 9:8) for the redemption of my sins. But it does not trivialize or diminish my efforts to extend His grace through me to others. To the extent that our efforts are non-trivial then Christ's sufferings can be said to be lacking. In fact, the gap in his suffering that Paul calls lacking is the opportunity Christ provides us to make our agency meaningful and not a charade. It makes our cross heavy, not a cardboard prop. It allows us an opportunity to share the grace we have received in entirely voluntary and non-self-serving ways. It allows love to work in us. It is the difference between saved and saint.
Another lack in Christ's suffering is that he is not present in person to show us his suffering. Remember that Paul had a special grace granted him, the personal appearance of Jesus Christ. Paul understands acutely that not all have this so he must suffer for Christ's not appearing to all.