This finishes a four-part series regarding the modern church lexicon that gives so much credence to price over grace and payment over gifts … I think it’s a throw-back to the Old Covenant playbook.  Easter blessings to all.  Bob

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Spirituality Column #855

March 28, 2023

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Delightful Gift, Part 4  

By Bob Walters

“Delight is what distinguishes a gift from a payment.” – Ephraim Radner, First Things

What price did you pay to be married to your spouse?

The correct response, of course, is, “I married my spouse for love, for our life together, for our family, and for too many reasons to count.  Price?  My spouse is a delight; priceless!”

That’s the way I think we should approach our relationship with Jesus Christ, and embrace the safe assumption that it’s how Jesus looks at us.  It is relationship too big for measurement, and can only be expressed in love.  And if one could arrive at a material price, to whom would one pay it?  And what, besides love, could the currency possibly be?

Our churches endlessly put forth the notion that Jesus “paid a price” for our salvation in the form of His pain, suffering and death on the cross. The metaphor works as a relatable expression of “one thing leading to another,” for Jesus’s violent death allows our eternal life.

Where the metaphor does violence to our understanding of salvation is in applying the Old Covenant’s measurements to New Covenant grace.  God’s work cannot be measured, while man’s work under the Old Testament Law is nothing but measurement.

God’s Creation and his love are compared to the “stars in the heavens” (Genesis 26:5), the “grains of sand by the seas” (Psalms 139:18), counting “the hairs on our heads” “(Luke 12:7), and as “far as the east from the west” (Psalms 103:12).  When Jesus describes the magnitude of God’s love and generosity in the parables, He speaks of amounts so vast or so small and love so pure no human value can be assigned it.

On the other hand, look at the Law.  Everything in the Law is about price and transaction: payments for this, atonement for that, punishment for this, retribution for that.   That’s the law, specifying quantifiable actions, sacrifices, amounts, cost, price – even locations, worship, feasts, and festivals.  All are carefully described and commanded. 

The Law specifies human transactions to honor God.  Love isn’t in the equation, and neither, you may notice, is freedom.  Why? It is love, not the Law, that breeds freedom.

With Jesus, it is love that is the completely different and newly inserted dynamic in the New Covenant.  If one sees “love” as a “price” for something, one sees love as a quantity, not a quality: as a restriction, not freedom … as an obligation, not a cause for joyous thanks.

And as I can measure quantities, so can I compare yours with mine, keep a scorecard of blessings and sins, and turn my walk with God into an empirical exercise.  I become a judge of “quantities” … oops.  Life with God – you know, eternal life – is life in the quality of divine love.

One may easily notice that measurements and comparisons beget jealousies and factions.  Do I sense that God loves you more than me?  I am jealous.  Or loves me more than you? I am prideful.  In love, I am never jealous of another’s walk in the Kingdom … or station in the world.  The proper posture in Christ is to praise Him, thank Him, love Him, and love others.

And speaking of loving others, rather than comparing ourselves to others, Matthew 22:29 says the greatest command is “to love God, and to love others as ourselves.”  Am I to love myself?  Yes … I am a creation of God and it is my duty to love that which God creates.  It is also my duty to love others, who God also created. It’s not about me; it’s about God.

When Jesus is challenged about paying a tax to Caesar (Matthew 22:15-22), Jesus says “give to Caesar what is his,” i.e., money, and “to God what is God’s,” i.e., love.  Jesus knows that the way of the world is keeping close count on quantities.  Jesus also knows that the way of God’s Kingdom is freely and enormously bestowing love and grace.

Occasionally we see “price” in the New Testament, like the “price” of thirty shekels (Matthew 27:9) the Pharisees paid to Judas to betray Jesus; i.e., the Law’s price of a slave.

Instead, I’ll take God’s freedom and life expressed in Revelation 22:17, “Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life.”

Delight may be in the Law of the Lord (Psalms 1:2), but the gift of Jesus is greatest of all.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes: Jesus’s value is too big to be imagined … or priced.