The Trust Between
Why God's Perfect Love Means Perfect Trust
Trust can be defined in myriad ways. I wish to illuminate this concept by exploring its relationship to the most essential term in (at least my own) theology: love. I see this relationship extending along two dimensions. First, repentance as our trusting response to love; and second, reconceptualizing Christ’s redemptive work as his trusting demonstration of love.
A Tragedy of Translation
Repentance, metanoia, signifies a change of heart. That is what the word denotes. Complications erupt with its connotations. As is so often the case, we must see the word in its original context to fathom the meaning, tone, and significance it conveyed to an early Christian audience. When the term first appears in Matthew, it is part of this longer sentence: “Metanoiete (μετανοεῖτε), for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (4:17, KJV). What does the logic of that sentence convey? Repent, because the kingdom of heaven is at hand. So what does the nearness of heaven have to do with the injunction—or invitation—to repent? Two entirely opposite possibilities are equally reasonable. The imminent approach of judgment and punishment demands speedy change and contrition. Or, since all things are being made new by Christ’s advent and his demonstration of love’s triumph over death and sin, you are invited to replace despair and defeat with trust in the new life—figurative and literal—that he is at this moment ushering in.
Jerome was a Christianized Roman who set out to translate the Greek New Testament into Latin in the waning years of the fourth century. At this very moment in time, Augustine was reinventing Christianity. Christianity was already shifting from a religion of the margins to the religion of empire, sovereignty was displacing love as the paramount quality of the divine nature, and legalism and creedal orthodoxy were supplanting the emphasis in the gospel of John on community and fellowship in Christ. Equally tragic, the theology of ascent wherein life was an experience in moral formation disappeared in the face of the new doctrine of original sin, first articulated fully by Augustine and enthusiastically endorsed by Jerome.
That new doctrinal context alone can explain the remarkable decision Jerome made to render metanoiete as pœnitentiam agite: “Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” In his view, the nearness of the kingdom was a cause for fear; judgment and retribution were looming; be afraid, be very afraid! Do your penance now or do it later, in this life or through eons of time (in hell or, in subsequent theology, in purgatory). It is no wonder that to this day, repentance seems an utterly joyless affair.
With a more celebratory embrace of Christ’s good news, Jerome might have rendered the sentence as “The kingdom is at hand; don’t fear; I am with you; I bring new life—the abundant life. Reposition yourself along that new point of the compass. Lift, change, elevate your heart and soul, because all things are new.”
The too-little-known Anglican cleric W. H. Vanstone was among the most insightful theologians of the twentieth century. He agreed that the preachers’ call to repentance [metanoia] did not imply “that they should be ashamed of their past and resolved to mend their ways: it was rather an invitation to . . . see their own situation in the light of what they had heard.” In other words, the call to repentance may have suggested an orientation almost exactly opposite the one invoked by Jerome. “A revolution of awareness,” in Mark Vernon’s words. The mind “igniting” with possibilities looking forward, a consciousness that has been renewed and reborn in hope.
Paul in fact gives us exactly that language in place of the word metanoia. “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2, NIV). The new consciousness deserves the name of new creation, new beginning, new birth. That is why this new identity forged in response to Christ’s reshaping of our world and our future is ritualized as an adoption.
Our Trusting Response to Love
What is the token that our relationship with Christ is durable and transformative and a cause for trust? How do we know that Christ is ours and we are his in this remade world? Because we have an ordinance that symbolically designates Christ as our new parent and us as his children. He adopts us, and we entrust ourselves to his care and spiritual tutelage. We go into the waters of baptism and come out new creatures with a new parent, a new identity. Baptism is the ordinance of adoption—and it is that adoption that we re-commemorate every time we partake of his emblems. We witness again before God that we are willing to take his name upon us. We put our names again to the contract of adoption, signifying our abiding trust.
What that adoption means from Jesus’s perspective becomes most clear in John’s story of healing recounted in chapter 9. As I read John, the entirety of his project is to testify of God’s true nature. Matthew’s God is Messianic and majestic, Mark’s is Lord over demons and angels, and Luke’s God is the teacher of stories and parables. But John’s God is the God of love: love that is costly, universal and inexhaustible. John teaches us that God is never more God than when he is born into a stable, eats bread with his friends, weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, and washes the feet of his disciples. This God is the figure who cannot witness pain or suffering without desiring to heal it. And so, in John chapter 9, we see him heal the man who was congenitally blind.
This story of healing, however, is an act of compassion that unfolds according to the law of unintended consequences. Christ’s healing of the blind man solves one problem but creates a greater. The miraculous healing arouses opposition and hostility to the Christ, and the poor man is caught up in the politics of persecution. His parents, fearing the authorities, elude the controversy. The healed man, by contrast, refuses to repudiate the One who has succored him. “I was blind and now see,” he doggedly insists. The healer was “of God.” Because he will not renounce his healer, the once-blind man is cast out of his synagogue. Most likely, he would have been banished from the temple and excommunicated in a public ritual. His neighbors and his community at large would have been alerted to his cursed status. Jesus learned of this calamity within days or weeks, apparently. The man he had desired only to bless and heal was now reviled as a pariah. “Jesus heard that they had cast him out,” John tells us simply (John 9:35, KJV).
We are left to imagine the dismay and alarm when Jesus discovered he had been responsible for these dreadful consequences of his efforts to relieve rather than aggravate suffering. We can envision Jesus coursing through back streets and alleyways, scanning crowds and vacant vistas for a sight of the man. How many inquiries did he make, how many fruitless, anxious hours conceiving a way to repair the damage he had done to the unwitting disciple of the miracle worker?
We pick up the story at verse 35:
And when he had found him, . . . he said unto him, Dost thou believe on the Son of God? He answered and said, Who is he, Lord, that I might believe on him? And Jesus said unto him, Thou hast both seen him, and it is he that talketh with thee. And he said, Lord, I believe. And he worshipped him.
Christ performs a healing miracle. The miracle comes at great cost to the patient, so Christ returns and performs a greater work: a personal, intimate, almost unprecedented verbal witness of his own divinity. When Christ adopts you, he adopts you. We find no more touching proof in the New Testament that placing trust in Christ, however unformed and inarticulate our trusting gesture, is more than abundantly reciprocated.
Christ’s Trust in Love
We find the path to discipleship because “God loved us first” (1 John 4:19, CEV). However tentatively, most of us learn to place our trust in the reliability and constancy of that love. We risk nothing because God is trustworthy and faithful. And God? In what or whom does God trust?
