The Unfairness of God

The Unfairness of God.  The Golden Rule forms the historically set high-water mark for interpersonal relationships, an ethos that is rare in the world even with God’s help and utterly impossible without God’s help. “As you wish that others would do to you, do so to them” (Luke 6:31; see also Matt. 7:12). What The Golden Rule idealizes, Christ incarnates. Think about this profound principle a beat longer than it takes to recite it from rote memory. It is completely inverted from all our social norms, wildly countercultural, and baldly unfair.

If I wish to be respected, then I respect others. If I wish privacy and freedom, then I afford privacy and freedom to others. If I wish to be healthy, wealthy, and wise, then I impart health, wealth, and wisdom to others. Wait a second! The calculus of this relational equation feels grossly imbalanced and naïve. How can giving away to others that which I most desire effectually spin back to myself some form of a boomerang benefit, freely returning to me that which I freely give away? The math doesn’t add up. The Golden Rule is hard to understand, extraordinary to experience, and risky if most people on the planet are like me. And they are.

Normally, when I find a penny, I pick it up. Why? Because within this analogy, I want all day long to have good luck. Abnormally (i.e., never), do I supply a penny for someone else to find. Because, what if the wrong sort of someone else finds my money? I certainly don’t want an unsavory person all day long to have good luck, not if I can help it. I’ll buy a meal for a panhandler, but I won’t give him cash for the same reason: I don’t want to help him to buy cheap booze, even if he might consider a bottle of hooch an all-day-long example of good luck. After all, fair is fair. He squandered his chance. Why should I subsidize his foolishness?

Yet, if the verse housing The Golden Rule were followed to its paragraph break, then we would see that the unsavory person is exactly the audience that Jesus intended for The Golden Rule. “If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them … But love your enemies and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil” (Luke 6:32, 35). The marvel of The Golden Rule is not found in the boomerang benefit returned to the giver but in the transformative miracle of generosity while expecting nothing in return. This is what is elsewhere in the Bible called grace. In every way any accountant might balance the columns at the bottom of that transaction, grace does not add up. It is costly. It is unfair. God himself pays the cost for unsavory persons who squandered their chance, who might even misuse his kindness to buy a pint of liquid luck. Extravagantly he credits, even to his enemies, his own life. If God is unfair to anyone, he is only unfair to himself so that he might be generous to unsavory people, like me.