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Do I believe that Jesus has blotted out the handwriting that was against me, taking it out of the way, nailing it to his cross?
On the TV show The Good Place, the moral narrative is that every action in our life has a positive or negative point value. Remember your sister’s birthday? Plus 15.02 points! Sexually harass someone? Minus 731.26 points. When you die, all of those actions are tallied up to determine your destination in the afterlife. If you die with a positive score, you get to go to the Good Place. Otherwise you have earned a one-way ticket to the Bad Place.
It got me thinking about how we do the same kind of math in our Christian faith. Only, the calculation has to be adjusted because the baseline for action is not some theoretical neutral, but to fully and completely follow God’s ways. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” Jesus tells us (Matthew 5:48 NRSV). If our aim is to do God’s will, then every action that detracts from that ideal is not only a negative, but cannot be restored. As St. Anselm understood it, even if we could make up for the sin, we also must satisfy our offense to God’s very honor.
Not living in a medieval society where this ideal of honor makes any sense to us, I sometimes find Anselm’s perspective hard to understand. But then I think about how early in my marriage, I wanted to do everything perfectly. But when stress popped up at work, I let everything slip at home. I put the dishes on the counter instead of in the dishwasher. I forgot the laundry in the washing machine overnight and the next day everything smelled moldy. I left a light on in the family room all night. These examples help me see a bit more clearly what Anselm meant.
When I noticed these minor acts of neglect, I found myself apologizing. Each one felt like a bigger deal than the next, and I began keeping a mental tally of my faults. I felt so rotten about it that when I noticed something my spouse had left undone, I jumped on it. I wanted to even the score or cancel out one of my own marks. But how does pointing out the fault in another fix your own? It felt like another point against me. I tried to focus on good deeds around the house, but they couldn’t erase the negatives if they were simply what I wanted to achieve in the first place.
The same is true for our relationship with God. We may want to perfectly love and serve God, but it is impossible for us to do so. Sometimes we get lost trying to account for it all. Every sin and every mistake feel like a tally mark on an eternal scorecard. Good deeds can’t earn us brownie points with God because they are simply the baseline expectation of how we should live as faithful people. Like that eternal scorecard from the Good Place, it hangs over us, and the shame, guilt, and hopelessness can drag us down even further.
In the Letter to the Colossians, Paul reminds us that if we live according to this scorecard, we are dead already (2:13). The very life is sucked out of us in this eternal striving for an unattainable goal. But why are we keeping score? Why do we let that narrative of our mistakes capture our attention and hold us back?
Christmas, in fact the whole Christian life, offers us a different narrative. It gives us the good news that Christ has come, and that has made all the difference for our present and our future. As Colossians goes on to say, we have been made alive in Christ. He has wiped the slate clean and blotted out all of the handwriting of our misdeeds (2:14). All of those expectations and guilt and the record of our imperfections were taken away. They are no more.
In my marriage, I had to learn to trust that my spouse was with me not because I did everything the right way. I was loved, and I loved him, and there was no need to keep track of our mistakes. As Paul tells us, we shouldn’t be distracted by those expectations. “Just go ahead with what you’ve been given. You received Christ Jesus, the Master; now live him” (Colossians 2:6-7 MSG). We can stop keeping score.
After all, God has.
Rev. Katie Z. Dawson