A God Who Will Not Fit Within Our Boundaries

The frightening freedom of divine love

“Do not forbid him; for he that is not against you is for you.”

— Luke 9:50

There is something almost painfully human about the disciples in this Gospel.

They have discovered a man casting out demons in the name of Jesus, and immediately they are troubled.

Not because the demons remain.

Not because the man is deceiving anyone.

Not because the name of Jesus is being dishonored.

Their complaint is much simpler:

“He does not follow with us.”

He is not one of ours.

He has not come through the proper channels. He does not belong to the circle. He possesses no recognizable authorization from those who have begun to imagine themselves the custodians of Christ’s power.

And so they issue what amounts to the first ecclesiastical cease and desist order.

“We forbade him.”

One can almost hear the satisfaction in the report.

Surely the Master will approve.

Instead, Jesus says:

“Do not forbid him.”

The disciples are still learning something that the saints will spend their entire lives discovering: God is infinitely more free than we are comfortable allowing Him to be.

We want grace to move along recognizable paths.

God simply moves.

We want to know who belongs and who does not.

God looks upon the heart.

We construct boundaries around the places where we have encountered Him, and then, almost without noticing, begin to imagine that we have constructed boundaries around God Himself.

The desert fathers were deeply suspicious of this impulse.

For all their severity toward themselves, they could be astonishingly reluctant to pronounce judgment upon another. They knew how little a human being sees. They knew that the hidden work of grace cannot be measured from the outside. They knew that the brother standing before them might possess a secret repentance known only to God.

Again and again in the desert, a monk comes asking an elder to condemn someone.

Again and again the elder refuses.

Not because sin does not matter.

Precisely because God matters more.

The elder has spent too many years staring into the abyss of his own heart to speak casually about the soul of another.

This is why the true spiritual father becomes spacious.

The closer he draws to God, the less anxious he becomes about controlling God.

He learns reverence before the mystery of what grace may be doing in another human being.

The disciples have not yet learned this.

And the Gospel immediately gives us a second example.

A Samaritan village refuses to receive Jesus.

Now James and John are ready.

“Lord, do you want us to bid fire come down from heaven and consume them?”

It is remarkable how quickly religious zeal can become murderous when we believe God has been insulted.

The disciples believe they are defending Christ.

Christ has to defend the Samaritans from His defenders.

He turns and rebukes them.

And then comes perhaps the most beautiful line in the entire passage:

“And they went on to another village.”

No fire.

No vengeance.

No argument.

No demand for vindication.

They simply went elsewhere.

Christ does not need to destroy those who refuse Him.

He is free enough to be rejected.

This is the freedom that the disciples have not yet acquired.

And perhaps neither have we.

We often imagine that zeal for God requires us to defend Him constantly—to correct, condemn, expose, silence, exclude. We can become strangely anxious whenever grace appears somewhere we did not expect it or whenever someone refuses what we believe they ought to receive.

But Christ is walking toward Jerusalem.

That changes everything.

His face is set toward the Cross.

James and John want fire to descend upon the Samaritans.

Christ intends instead that fire should fall upon Himself.

The disciples want the offenders consumed.

Christ is going to allow Himself to be consumed in love.

This is the great reversal of the Gospel.

The world rejects Him, and He gives Himself for the world.

Human beings misunderstand Him, and He loves them.

They crucify Him, and He prays for them.

They wander far from Him, and He continues to seek them.

This is why the great elders of the spiritual life become increasingly incapable of narrowness.

St. Isaac the Syrian dares to speak of a merciful heart as one that burns with compassion for the whole creation—for human beings, animals, demons, and every created thing. Such a heart cannot endure the suffering of another without tears.

That is not sentimentality.

It is what happens when a human heart begins to resemble the heart of God.

We begin our spiritual lives asking:

Who is right?

Who belongs?

Who has authority?

Who is inside?

Who is outside?

Who deserves correction?

Who deserves judgment?

But prayer slowly asks something far more terrible of us.

Can your heart become large enough to love what God loves?

That question is frightening because God appears remarkably unconcerned about preserving the little borders we construct around our compassion.

The desert does not make the heart smaller.

It burns away everything that prevents the heart from becoming vast.

This is why the deepest asceticism may finally be the renunciation of our need to decide who deserves mercy.

We repent of our desire to control grace.

We repent of our secret satisfaction when others are exposed or defeated.

We repent of confusing zeal with anger.

We repent of imagining that proximity to Christ gives us ownership of Christ.

“He does not follow with us.”

Perhaps.

But is Christ working there?

Then rejoice.

“They would not receive Him.”

Perhaps.

Then keep walking.

There is another village.

There is another heart.

There is another hour known only to God.

The modern elders possessed something of this same spaciousness. The closer they drew to Christ, the less interested they became in winning arguments about Him. They knew that coercion cannot produce communion. They knew that another person must be approached with reverence because God is already present there in ways we cannot see.

The purified heart does not become indifferent to truth.

It becomes incapable of separating truth from love.

And perhaps this is one of the clearest signs that repentance is actually transforming us.

We cease asking Christ to rain fire upon the world.

We cease handing out cease and desist orders to grace.

We cease imagining ourselves the gatekeepers of a Kingdom whose doors were opened by the pierced hands of God.

And gradually another prayer begins to arise:

Lord, enlarge my heart.

Make it spacious enough that I do not fear Your goodness when I discover it somewhere unexpected.

Make me rejoice whenever darkness is driven away, even when You have chosen another hand to carry the lamp.

Keep me from calling down fire upon those who cannot yet receive You.

Teach me the terrible gentleness of simply going on to another village.

For Your love is not diminished by rejection.

Your mercy is not exhausted by our resistance.

And Your grace has never asked our permission before entering the world.

Perhaps holiness begins when we finally stop trying to make God as small as our hearts—

and allow Him instead

to make our hearts

as vast as His mercy.