Tough Love for Soft People

(PART FIVE OF A FIVE-PART SERIES)

How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?

Oscar Hammerstein wrote these words to introduce the character of Maria in The Sound of Music. It’s actually a song of frustration, sung by three nuns in the abbey where Maria is a postulant, because her behavior is so un-monastically free-spirited. And their complaints sound very similar to what a lot of us say about talented pupils, eccentric employees, or gifted neighbors who are square pegs to life’s round holes. At our best, we try to be as patient and indulgent as the character of the Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music, who calms down her irritated subordinates. But in the immediate circumstance, what we normally feel is exasperation and maybe a little disappointment that having been given an inch such folks blithely take a yard, over and over again.

Up to this point in his letter, Jude has been sounding very much like the nuns in The Sound of Music, not the abbess, and we might be inclined to wonder if he, too, has not been a little one-dimensional in his attitude. That is, until we consider the people he’s complaining about, who are not just yodelers on mountaintops. They are a good deal more malevolent: they are (as he has described them) creepers-in, impious, ungodly types, and have been doing a lot worse than teaching the locals how to do-re-mi. They’ve been a genuinely disruptive element, and the church to whom Jude is writing has been trying very hard to behave like the abbess, being toler­­ant, and understanding—only to find out that these creepers-in don’t respond by going merrily off to become singing governesses.

Remember the Apostolic Instruction

But now, in the final stretch of his letter, Jude stops as if to take a breath—the sort you take after a long and sustained speech, full of dependent clauses and dangling participles:

But you, beloved friends, should remember the words spoken to you early on about the Lord Jesus Christ by the apostles, because they told you that toward the end of time there would be mockers and hedonists, people who set up divisions, worldly-minded people who don’t have the Holy Spirit. (Jude 17–19)

This is so close to what Peter says—“Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires” (2 Pet. 3:3)—that it’s tempting to think that the apostles Jude alludes to must have included Peter.[1]

At the same time, though, there’s a real mental pause here. Having done some serious finger-wagging and reproof, Jude now settles down and tells them that this kind of situation is not entirely unusual or unexpected. It’s like going to the doctor, being told you have a disease with sixteen frightening syllables to it, and then being informed that, by the way, everyone else has got it too, so no need to worry.

Yes, there are mockers among you: jokesters, tricksters, smart-alecks. Yes, there are even peace-wreckers (these are the people “who set up divisions”; Jude calls them apodiopizontes, which is the only time the word is used in the New Testament and is the same term Aristotle uses in his Politics, describing how demagogues corrupt democracies by flattering the people and using that flattery to gain power for themselves).[2] Yes, they are unspiritual (Jude uses the word psychikoi, or “worldly minded,” which almost sounds like “psychotic”).[3] Everything they say and do comes from the human level. But the truth is, Jude says, that you knew all of this already. You heard it from the apostles (and perhaps directly from them, if this is a church founded by the preaching of one of the apostles) and maybe (he hints) you should have remembered that and taken more precautions.[4] But it’s neither the first time nor the last that this happens.

Rebuild Our Christian Architecture

It’s not the same thing, though, as telling them to let up, rest easy, and go about their business as though the problem will cure itself. It’s a rule in seamanship: everything is easy until you relax. In full-canvas sailing, there is always something to do, something to be attended to, something to watch for. And in Christian life, too, there is something to be done—in fact, two things.

The first is in verse 20: “But you, friends, get to work building up yourselves in holiness and faith.” The best medicine for your church, says Jude, begins with you. No one can play doctor to others if they’re sick and weak themselves. In fact, he’s implying that a good deal of the trouble they’ve been experiencing rose from precisely the lack of such building up. If they had, then they wouldn’t have been so clueless about the motives and activities of the creepers-in. The first task is, so to speak, architecture: Build yourselves up in holiness and faith “as stones in the spiritual temple of which Christ is the cornerstone.”[5]

To do that, Jude provides what we might call a three-step recovery plan for Christians who haven’t been paying sufficient attention to the architecture of their souls. Begin, he says, by “praying in the spirit” (v. 20). Not just prayer that rattles off requests, but prayer as though your life depends on it—which it does, spiritually speaking. As one commentator put it, “Watching sights the enemy; praying fights the enemy.”[6] No healthy spiritual growth ever takes place in a church without prayer, whether corporate and liturgical or private and conversational. This is because prayer is the communication system that penetrates the wilderness of this world. If you think of this world as an occupied country (which it is), then prayer becomes like those clandestine radio receivers by which the Resistance stayed in touch with the Allied high command in World War II, or the Radio Free Europe by which people in the old Soviet bloc got their news. Of course, we tend to turn on the news, or access news websites, more often than we pray (which is odd when you reflect on it, since the contact we’re making in prayer is more important). But maybe that’s a good gauge of the frequency with which we ought to be praying (certainly, every time we access the news, we usually hear something that makes us pray).

Unhappily, prayer is not a natural or automatic function, except for a sainted few. There is something in our limited attention spans, our scream-out-loud culture, and the wiles of Satan that always seek to pull us away from prayer, to be distracted, as C. S. Lewis puts it, by “a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past.”[7] It is all to the devil’s advantage if he can alienate our minds from prayer, or make it seem puerile and fruitless, if only because (as the poet William Cowper writes):

Restraining prayer, we cease to fight;
Prayer makes the Christian’s armor bright:
Satan trembles when he sees
The weakest saint upon his knees.

That distractedness is compounded by (1) a lack of real instruction and practice in prayer and (2) by self-consciousness, if we are in a position of praying out loud. But there is nothing in prayer that requires you to be an Olympian in order to begin praying. In fact, some of the most pungent and health-giving prayers are the short ones that we can time to regular intervals in the day:

Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me. . . . Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner. . . . Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief. . . . O Lord our Lord, how excellent is your name in all the earth. . . . O Lord, convert the world and begin with me.

Don’t hesitate to use helps and aids. Small books of prayers (like John Gilling and Madeleine Evans’s When You Pray, Arthur Bennett’s The Valley of Vision, or John Pritchard’s The Intercessions Handbook) can be a helpful assist, like having a personal trainer.

But however you build a life of prayer, bear in mind that short and frequent is better than long and sporadic, just as specific and personal is better than vague and platitudinous.

As King Solomon wrote,

Guard your steps when you go to the house of God; to draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools: for they do not know that they are doing evil. Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven, and you upon earth; therefore let your words be few. (Eccles. 5:1–2)

The second step in rebuilding spiritual life is to “keep yourselves in the love of God” (v. 21). Love is not something that happens only on some enchanted evening when you see a stranger across a crowded room (that’s more Oscar Hammerstein). Although that may happen on occasion, as a rule, love is not like an attack of indigestion. Its beginnings may be unpredictable, but beyond that it’s a task you have to work at day by day, year by year, anniversary after anniversary. Persistence, perseverance, and loyalty are its fundamental materials, and on this score, consistency really is a virtue. This is why Jude’s prescription is in the form of an imperative: “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” Don’t think that loving and being loved by God is only a matter of emotional tsunamis. It’s more like a steady, dependable plateau, and you need to be careful about not falling off the edges. It’s a love fed by Bible study, fellowship, and time concentrating on worship and adoring God’s attributes (which, when you think about it, is the way we keep all our other loves alive, too).

The third way we rebuild our Christian architecture is “waiting for the mercy of the Lord” (v. 21). Jude’s word for waiting is prosdekomenoi—a mixture of welcoming and waiting, active and passive. And that mixture is worth bearing in mind as we realize that the day-to-day practice of prayer and the love of God are unnatural and sometimes dangerous things. We really are strangers in a strange land. So, don’t think you can wage this love or manage this prayer purely on your own. You will be threatened, assaulted, disturbed; communications will sometimes be cut off; you may be betrayed, discovered, punished. What will sustain you is a constant, throbbing undercurrent of recollection and reminder that you are doing this on borrowed power, borrowed strength—which, in the end, is the only strength any of us really have.

Reclaim the Wanderers

Once we are built up, however, there is a second task for us to perform in dealing with the problem of the creepers-in:

If there are any who are wavering, persuade them back; others, who are getting involved with this, snatch back like you would something which falls into the fire; on others, have mercy with fear, hating the spots but holding on to the garment. (vv. 22–23)

As much as their garments—and Jude here means the inner tunic, the chiton, worn by both men and women, not the looser outer robe—are spotted, they can still be cleaned.[8] In other words, from the strength you have in your own Christian architecture, reason with these people. And in some cases, hold your nose and go in and tell them they’re wrong in what they’re doing and you’re saying it because you love them and want them to come to dinner.

If we thought, from working our way through Jude’s Epistle, that he was cranking himself up to a real jihad against the creepers-in and the boasters and dividers within the church, then it will seem strange that here, at the very end, he’s not calling for their extermination but their recovery. But he does, and he does so because he’s counting on dealing with a church that has the right architecture—one that prays, that works at loving God, and that knows every day that there but for the grace of God goes the church.

In the end, Jude is not telling us that in the life of the church anything goes. There are certain behaviors and ideas that just don’t square with our Lord Jesus Christ and that need to be rebuffed, and the church that doesn’t do so is in danger of losing its title deeds. At the same time, he also understands that the church is not like a club, which thrives on exclusion, much less like a party where you come as you are. Rather, it is like a hospital, where the sick and the injured come to be healed by those who know how to do the job.

Get that right, and the church will come right along with it. Which is why, after all this warning and hectoring, in the last verses (24–25) Jude knows that this church will come right, just as every church that reads his letter will. And so he can say in terms that move away from the warning, away from the instruction, to a high point of joy and “a sacred and solemn doxology,”[9]

Now to him how is able to keep you from falling and to present you without blemish before the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

Allen C. Guelzo is senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities and director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Prince­ton University.