God owes us nothing

Reflect on gifts given and received at Christmas, and spot the key to a whole lot of wisdom.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A large stone house is wrapped in a red ribbon and bow.

Howard Dickins, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

One of those difficult Christmas Day moments is opening a present from someone, only to realise you forgot to get them something. Or the reverse – expecting a present, but not getting it. It leaves you feeling awkward. Like you owe them something. Or they owe you.

The familiarity of the Christmas story also plays into this. We know how it goes. God gives us the baby Jesus. He does it every year. If he didn’t we’d feel short-changed. After all, life is hard sometimes, and, surely, God owes us something.

God Owes us Nothing. This is the title of a book by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. The book is actually about Blaise Pascal and the way the Catholic Church rejected the legacy of the great St Augustine when it rejected the Jansenist frame of mind in the seventeenth century, but that's by the by. What got me thinking again is the title: God Owes us Nothing. It's a powerful thought, maybe on first sight depressing, but the more I have thought about it, the key to a whole lot of wisdom.

If God owes me something and he doesn't provide it, I lose faith in God. Our natural cry 'it's not fair' when something bad happens to us reflects this same basic idea – that we somehow deserve fairness or justice.

Kolakowski's point is that this is essentially the insight at the heart of the Augustinian tradition in Christianity, something that runs through much mediaeval thought, to the Middle Ages, through Luther, Calvin and then on to Pascal and beyond.

If God owes me something – happiness, wealth, health or whatever, I will naturally feel short-changed if I don't get it. You regularly hear stories of people who believed in God, until a friend got ill, or died, or they encountered tragedy in the raw, or experienced the aftermath of an earthquake, a war or a tsunami, or encountered real suffering and 'lost their faith'.

I suspect this kind of thing happens because deep down we think that God owes us something, and if God doesn't give it, then the problem is with God – either that he is unkind, or simply doesn't exist. God should step in every time we make a bad choice, or someone else does, because, basically, he owes us. If God owes me something and he doesn't provide it, I lose faith in God. Our natural cry 'it's not fair' when something bad happens to us reflects this same basic idea – that we somehow deserve fairness or justice.

'Gifts' make us grateful, always delighted with the new things that come, and a bit more philosophical about the stuff we lose.

To begin however from the perspective that God owes us nothing – that we have no rights over him, no claim on him, means that everything we do get comes as a gift – as a sheer delight, something to be deeply grateful for. Every breath, friendship, act of kindness, chocolate, football, mistletoe, wintry walks on bright December days – all these are gifts not rights. It suddenly turns everything about my life from something I feel I have right to, and moan mercilessly about if I lose it, to something that is a true surprise.

To that extent the Dawkins atheist brigade have a point – we should not think the universe is made for us, or that we are any more than specks of life on a distant planet, and we should give up our delusions of deserving divine intervention when things go a bit wrong. The essence of Christian faith is the faith that although we should not expect to receive any divine favours, the surprise is that we do receive so much from the hands of God. Despite our insignificance, we have been privileged by God to play a key role on this planet of reflecting his image to the rest of creation, caring for it on his behalf. We do often enjoy gifts of health, laughter, sport, music, shelter etc., and these are neither random accidents of a faceless universe, nor things we have a right to expect because of our inherent deserving, but gratuitous, free gifts from the heart that beats behind it all. And most of all, we are given the gift of Christ as a brother, a friend and a rescuer.

It is so much better to view everything as unexpected and gratuitous gift than as a right. 'Rights' make us grasping, holding onto things and insisting on them – they centre life around me and what I deserve. 'Gifts' make us grateful, always delighted with the new things that come, and a bit more philosophical about the stuff we lose. In the Christian life, if I think God owes me something, then grace and mercy will not seem a miracle to me at all – after all, it's only what I deserve. If God owes us nothing, his grace, the gift of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, his provision of my needs are all miracles, things I don't deserve and thus to be given thanks for with a constant sense of wonder and amazement.

As you look around the living room post-Christmas at the gifts you have been given, whether wanted or not, try to think of them as given from people who owed you nothing, yet gave you something. And then think of everything you receive each day as pure, surprising, delightful gift. And then take that into the new year. It might lead to a truly thankful and (relatively) more carefree life. It is perhaps the key to happiness.

Article

Belief

Creed

30 September 2024

4 min read

Are miracles real?

In miracles, as in much of life, you see what you're looking for.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A woman sees her reflection in a mirror and hold a finger up.

Ivan Lapyrin on Unsplash.

Recently, I heard a remarkable story about a friend of mine who happens to be a vicar. He had been diagnosed with a serious cancer, and the diagnosis was bleak. He was preparing himself for a difficult few months, readying himself, and his parish, for the end before too long. His body was reacting poorly to chemotherapy, and the prospects did not look good. However, he continued to try to get a balance of rest and work through the tiredness, praying when he could - little and often - but without too much discomfort.

A short while ago, during a routine visit to the hospital to receive the results of a scan on how the cancer was progressing, something puzzling happened.

The surgeon showed him the scan related to the original diagnosis. He asked, "Can you see the tumour?" My friend replied, "Yes, of course, it's right there," pointing to the black mass. The surgeon then showed him another scan.

He asked again, "This is the most recent scan we’ve just taken; can you see it on this one?" My friend peered closely into the scan and said, "Hmm. I'm not sure I can." The surgeon then responded, puzzled, that somehow, between the two scans, the tumour seemed to have disappeared.

He added: “To be honest, in my world, we don't really have an explanation for things like this. But I suspect in yours, you do.”

Besides being delighted for my friend, since hearing the story, I've pondered what it means. Of course, miracles are by their nature rare and we cannot automatically predict them, My friend was in the kind of church that doesn't routinely demand God for miracles but simply carried on gently praying that somehow God would be with the vicar in his struggles, hardly daring to hope that the cancer would in fact vanish.

Was it a miracle? Or was there some other explanation? It seems to me that the answer you give to that question depends on the framework you bring to it. If you are a believer in a God who might do this kind of thing from time to time, and consider that such things can and do happen occasionally, not regulated by the usual course of cause and effect, but by some extra dimension of reality unseen to us and immeasurable by the methods of science, you will probably simply accept it as one of those occasional interruptions to the normal course of things. And then give thanks to God and rejoice with my friend at this sign of God’s goodness.

Of course, it raises the question of why this cancer was healed and others aren’t, but that takes us into other territory, which I’ve examined before in relation to Donald Trump’s narrow escape. Would we rather a world in which such things as this never happened, and my friend’s cancer had taken its usual deadly course? Or a world where just every now and again, something delightful and unanticipated happens, like stumbling on a gloriously unexpected view of rolling hills and a dramatic sunset at the end of a routine walk on a summer’s evening?

Belief in miracles doesn’t mean an irrational rejection of science and its benefits in favour of an entirely random world. it simply means an acknowledgement of the limits of our reasoning.

An honest doctor like the one treating my friend, might recognise that the methods of medical science, for all its brilliance, value and wisdom, on which we all depend so much, has to shrug its shoulders at this point, realising that it doesn’t have the categories to explain it, reverting to a kind of agnosticism. A more thoroughgoing materialist would say: “Of course we know there are no such things as miracles, so that’s the one thing we know it is not. There must be some other explanation, and science will one day discover why such mysterious things happen.”

What we believe about such things is determined not by the self-evident ‘facts’, the bald evidence of what is before us, but by our pre-conceived mental map of the world, our framework of faith, what we think the world is, and what, or who we think God is, (if he exists at all). We are all believers in the end – the difference is what we believe in.

Belief in miracles doesn’t mean an irrational rejection of science and its benefits in favour of an entirely random world. it simply means an acknowledgement of the limits of our reasoning, open to the possibility of an extra dimension of enchantment that occasionally shows its face, and that there is a bigger world out there than we with our small minds and spirits are able to comprehend.

GK Chesterton once put it like this. "Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has risen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles except them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them, rightly or wrongly, because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them, rightly or wrongly, because they have a doctrine against them."

In miracles, as in much of life, you see what you're looking for.