Free Grace and Toxic Masculinity

Back in late June during some extremely difficult days in my life a theologian friend and professor at my current seminary wrote me a lengthy email covering many important topics.  I’ve read it and reread it several times because I found great wisdom in her words.  Two things she wrote to me have especially stayed with me and I’d like to pass her words to me along here:

1) “According to the Markan version of the crucifixion, Jesus died hearing only the ‘silence’ of God’s apparent abandonment. But God did not abandon him, and lifted him up in the resurrection. God can and will do the same for you, as a gift of grace (not as a result of your efforts).” 

2) “...take a good hard look at what elements of your faith and theology have served to cover up or even promote toxic masculinity. This is not to earn God’s grace and love, but as an important part of ‘finding yourself’ in God’s image with the help of the Spirit.”

In some very real ways these words have become something of a divine gift in my life.  Like all good preaching, her words to me bring both comfort and affliction.  They are both hope-giving and fear-inducing. Now it would be very easy for me to “listen” only to the first of those two points because, after all, free grace is very comforting.  However, to just cherry pick what I like hearing would be a sacrilege; it is what the stiff-necked and stubborn and unyielding people of God do all the time and always have. So I need to lean into the pain of embracing her second point.  Otherwise, the first point just becomes Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace.”

Tonight as I scrolled through Facebook I saw many women that I know and love writing “me too” as a way of indicating that they were once sexually abused in one way or another.  It was truly painful to bear witness to their testimonies and I could feel the hot anger rising in my heart against the men who had done these things.  But then... then I turned my firey righteous indignation inward to examine the monster that lives within me too.

I have never sexually assaulted a woman, and I thank God for preserving me from such evil for it certainly lurks within.  There is almost no end to the darkness inside a human heart, mine included.  I have, however, been guilty of verbal abuse. In my lost and dark moments while caught in addiction, I verbally lashed out against the woman I loved the most. It was wrong and evil and I knew it. She divorced me for its and was right in doing so.  And so I cry out with Paul, “What a wretched man I am! Who will save me from this body of death?”

Sometimes I think we need to learn to dwell in Romans 7 before easily moving on to the “good news” of chapter eight.  We need to stare at who we are as humans and use both our brains and our hearts to admit we are profoundly fallen creatures. I have toxic masculinity within me.  It is still there and I have not been sanctified from it.  

I’m part of the problem. I say this to my great shame.  I am the Roman guard nailing Christ to the cross. And as Miroslav Volf taught me years ago, the scandal of the Christian message is that Christ died for the Roman oppressors too.  Now that is offensive!  I want the oppressors to burn in hell, but then I remember who I’d be condemning. Thankfully our Mother God is more gracious than I am. She is, I often suspect, more gracious than any of us can even imagine.