Mexican and French Theology

I once had a conversation on San Jeronimo Street in the middle of Cuernavaca, Mexico that I will never forget. San Jeronimo is a hilly street with a big glorieta (roundabout) directly beside La Universidad Internacional, a Spanish language school to which FHU sends students. The house in which I lived for two summers while studying there is in that glorieta. Iker Márquez, my friend and mentor, and I were standing beside the big yellow gate that served as the entrance for that house.

I have a lot of respect for Iker. He became a Christian moderately late in life, and lived a rather wild life before then. But now that he is a Christian, he serves his church and his family as if he had never known anything else. I have always thought that he was probably the strongest Christian I know. I have never seen anyone with as many temptations as he has—yet living as faithfully as he does.

We had just met a few weeks before, but had become good friends almost instantly. It was nearing the end of my first summer there and we went out to dinner and ended up talking for a long time once we got back to my house. One of our usual topics is a discussion of what we see as strengths and weaknesses of each other. He listed off a few things that I can hardly remember now about me, and I shamefully paid them little attention. But then it came time for me to tell him what I thought about him. I told him that he was one of the strongest people that I had ever met in my life.

I’ll never be able to forget what he said in response. He looked up at me and simply said, “yo no puedo hacer nada” (“I can’t do anything”). I must admit that I thought it a rather stupid answer to my compliment. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that I was, yet again, learning something from him. It hit me: the only reason he was strong was because he acknowledged he was weak. That is it.

No one is strong. No one. We are human—nothing more.

“Only when the Christian expects nothing of himself and everything of God can he be at peace.” Michel Quoist**

I have been thinking a good deal about this statement lately. I read it the other night and just can’t seem to get it out of my mind. It brought back that conversation with Iker. I think that it has hit me so hard because it is one of those things that my head has always known and my heart just won’t believe. And when I do believe it, like I did that night in Cuernavaca, I seem to forget it.

It goes completely against my natural theological instincts. Whether I would like to admit it or not, most of my life I have been trying to be faithful alone—by my own efforts. I have always focused on my responsibilities, my duties, my salvation, my baptism, etc. I think that I have, in many ways, tried to save myself. I mean I would tell you all along that it is God who is the one who saves—then I’d turn around and claim that a person must do this, this, this, and this in order to be saved.

And what I failed to realize is that people can’t. We just can’t. We are unholy people. We are sinners. The more I live, the more I am seeing that it is not in human nature to be faithful. But ironically it is part of our natural thought process (at least it is for me) that we must earn our salvation. That seems so self-contradictory. And this is not just true for people in Churches of Christ, although I have seen us really struggle with this issue. This is a cross-denominational issue.

For example, this really came out when I was talking with a lady the other who was in the hospital. She was sitting in a chair beside her bed with one of those revealing (and often humiliating) hospital gowns haphazardly draped over her body. She sat with a tray of uneaten hospital food close by as she breathed in an unnatural rhythm through an oxygen tube that wasn’t properly placed. She had this look of complete sadness in her eyes as I entered the room.

Once she figured out that I was a chaplain, she immediately started talking about religion. Most do. But after a few minutes of paying a hollow lip service to God, she began to tell me how useless she felt. She felt useless because her health stopped her from doing what she was used to doing in the church. She expressed what I, too, feel often just spending all my time at school! We want to know that we are doing something for God. While pious in its intent, I am so afraid that this is unhealthy.

I am in no way saying that this lady was in the wrong. She no doubt loved the Lord with all her heart. And I do understand where she is coming from. I love knowing that good has come from my life, too. And I would imagine I’d feel exactly like she did if I were in her shoes. In fact, I know I would.

It just seems like we never stop to realize that God is really the one who is doing the work. We fool ourselves into thinking that we can do things worthy of God. We cannot do anything of the sort. Only God can.

Probably the most commonly cited verse in the Bible used to defend this idea of us actually being able to do anything good is Philippians 2:12. You know, it is the one that says, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” The problem here is that we never read the next verse: “for it is God who works in you…”

Does anything else need to be said?

**This is from “Temptation” in his Prayers (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1954), 131. Forgive the gender-specific language here, please. This prayer was translated from French before widespread attention was placed on the male-biased sexism that is prevalent within the English language.