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As a late note to this post, I'm actually surprised at how much ground it allows to be covered, though I admit the winding path we seem to be following seems headed more toward the realm of abstraction. I had initially considered your post lacking substance, but I think it's more that I don't see the same degree of relevance. In the end, it's not that I think, "God doesn't care", but rather that I disagree which aspect of what God actually cares about.
On the one hand, knowing God as we know ourselves means we don't really know God at all. Loving God as we love ourselves seems a difficult proposition; were that the case, what necessity would there be for Christ's redemption?
Yes, God does care about the wrongs of humankind, but it seems much akin to bad parenting: "Because I say so," doesn't hold up when what is said is so counterintuitive.
Why forfeiture? Why punishment? Why die a second death? Because what God cares about is not the wrongness of the wrong from one human unto another, but the wrongness of disobedience.
What is the limit of God's authority? What makes the asserted arrangement through Christ the only way? Did God plan that humanity should fall at Eden? Did God plan that He should repent Saul's kingship? Did God plan that His message should be entrusted to such unreliable stewardship as to create many sects, some of which are irreconcilably opposed doctrinally?
What grieves God is His lack of authority, and perhaps lack of foresight. What the hell did God expect? That a lie could stand for all eternity? What happened at Eden was a disaster, but I have yet to see an explanation that properly--as opposed to arbitrarily or without any coherent foundation--addresses God's role in the fall of humanity. That's because what we want to believe, what we're supposed to believe, constitutes an aberration.
God grieves not because humans suffer, but because they defy His rules. Were suffering the source of His grief, why not fix it? What limits God, aside from His will? That humans are expected to jump through hoops on a point of faith is God's will from the outset.
Such perverse arrogance--that humanity is that important to the Universe--is a product of the human minds that create and nourish this God. This Biblical God is a scourge against the human endeavor. Remember that Christian faith looks forward to the end of that endeavor.
And yet whatsoever we do to the least, we also do to Him.
I disagree that God's grief is why Jesus said what he did. What Jesus said in John 14.6-7 he also sums up at the end of that Gospel: "Follow me!" (
21.22)
Additionally, John 14, reinforces that theme:
The whole thing seems a demand of faith. What of 21.10? (
"Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?") The whole chapter revolves around questions of faith:
• "Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?" (v.5)
• "Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied." (v.8)
• "Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?" (v.22)
Nonetheless, your questions remain:
"Honestly," is the first thing that comes to mind. But that in and of itself is insufficient. What can I tell people of the faith? I do not share that faith. I can tell you that the answers to your questions are contained in the Bible, but the only catch is that those answers are derived according to my understanding, and are among the reasons nobody's selling me on any truth of the Gospels beyond the metaphysical, philosophical, allegorical, or metaphorical; in other words,
not on a literal, real, or even complete truth. And that would sort of, y'know, pose a problem or two in terms of how that perspective would relate to your Christian faith.
Why for the Father's sake? Or, more specifically, doesn't that lend toward my point?
Admittedly, there is the Father's sake of the Father's grief, but that grief is what God wants.
Is it sickness? Prison? Hunger or thirst? I do not rebuke my brother for the sake of the Father, nor for my own. I will not pander to the Father in hope of redemption. If He judges, I will answer, and whatever will be is already known to Him.
Take, for instance, those American religious traditionalists that people like me find so irksome in terms of social cooperation and progress. These folks actually deserve my compassion, as I think they're wrong, and if I am to accept that they are not inherently evil I must consider the source of that wrongness. Are they deceived? Should I not, then, seek to correct their notions? Are they sick? Do I owe them symptomatic relief or a cure? Yet, sadly, in practice this compassion eludes me in part because these folks hold it at arm's length, regarding it warily as some form of condescension. What happens then is a tragedy of humanity: I know no better than many or most how to turn my back on my neighbors and say they don't matter.
If one chooses to believe in Christ, that's their choice and not mine to take away. But if that choice interferes with other people, it enters a realm where it can justly become a consideration among others to be assessed. (This is a consequence, not a principle:
How can I judge a private faith the details or even presence of which I am unaware?) Additionally, I would take no pleasure to find out on the one hand, that Christ was the way, while to the other these human brethren of mine who have denied themselves the joys of life in search for an eternal reward discover that they went about it wrong and will die the death, anyway. It would be tragic to think that Mother Teresa burns. It would be tragic to think that my partner's father, ultimately a bright and decent fellow warped indescribably by Christian faith, should have given up his life's dreams and academic ambitions in order to pursue a lie.
I would hate to see my Christian neighbors jump through all those hoops for nothing. My human compassion would measure
their loss, not God's. If I burn alongside them, that's fine. But it would still bug me to see these people forfeit everything for a lie. And if they're right that the Bible and Christ are the keys to God's Kingdom, well, things look rather grim for those folks. They're severely missing the point.
If we let God come out of the shoebox, a glorious abode unfolds.
