This past month, the Episcopalian priest and author Robert Farrar
Capon died after a long, passionate, and good-humored life. I got to meet him
once, during a weekend retreat when I was in seminary. He gave a series of
lectures on the parables of Jesus in which he showed how the theme of the
parables is the overwhelming grace of God. He said that God’s work to forgive
and redeem the world is already done, even if it is not yet complete. I
remember how he smiled as he addressed the view that we needed to do something
to receive God’s grace. Don’t we need to ask forgiveness, or to believe, or to
turn our lives around? “No,” he said. “God’s work of salvation is done. It’s Done.
IT’S DONE!”
Here’s an excerpt from his book The Parables of the Kingdom, in which he expands on his short
answer to the question of what the Bible is about:
If scripture has a
single subject at all, I said, it is the mystery of the kingdom of God.
…I can think of no
better way of reformulating my answer than to lean heavily on the imagery of
the Revelation of St. John the Divine. Accordingly, my new version of what the
Bible is about reads as follows: it is about the mystery by which the power of
God works to form this world into the Holy City, the New Jerusalem that comes down
out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
Note, if you will,
how much distance that puts between us and certain customary notions of the
main subject of Scripture. It means that it is not about someplace else called
heaven, nor about somebody at a distance called God. Rather, it is about, in
all its thisness and placiness, and
about the intimate and immediate Holy One who, at no distance from us at all, moves mysteriously to make creation
both true to itself and to God.
Capon spent a life reminding people to give up the idea that
it all depends on us. It depends on God, and God can be trusted.
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