Recently, a bunch of Christians were upset with Justin Bieber. But probably not for the reason you would think. They were upset because he sang a worship song at the Coachella Music Festival, written by Cory Asbury, called “Reckless Love”.
With his fame, he exposed many more thousands to the faith. So what’s the problem? According to these Christians, the problem is that the song implies that God’s love is reckless. That God is careless, rash, impulsive, irresponsible, indifferent to the consequences of his actions.
But as provocative as the song may be, the problem with the criticism it’s getting is that “Reckless Love” is based squarely on Jesus’ teaching. Jesus consistently paints a picture of a God who does love with reckless abandon.
Jesus’ parable of The Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18:22-35) is one of the most poignant and easily overlooked examples. Jesus says that there’s a king, a master (who is clearly supposed to represent God) who has a servant that owes a debt of ten thousand talents (which is clearly supposed to be symbolic of sin).
The entire parable hinges on this detail, a detail most miss.
See, in the currency of that day, a talent was equivalent to 6000 denarii. And a denarii was a single day’s wage. So if you do the math, the debt this servant owes comes out to 60,000,000 days wages! It would take roughly 160,000 years’ labor or at least two thousand lifetimes to pay off—clearly an impossible task: the servant can’t ever come close to paying it off. (See Frederick Dale Bruner, Matthew: The Churchbook, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990, p.237 for a detailed analysis.)
The ten thousand talents the master forgives is an astronomical debt, an extravagant, foolish, or one might even say, reckless act.
What makes the master’s act even more remarkable is what the servant does next. Having just been forgiven this impossible debt, a debt that would in effect cost him everything, including his life (in debtor’s prison), he goes and shakes down a fellow servant who owes him a mere pittance. He is unwilling to do even the most minimal thing he could to show gratitude for the enormous gift he has received—a poignant reminder of how fabulously unworthy he was of his master’s ridiculously lavish grace in the first place!
Assuming that someone who takes a life owes their life in return, if you put the servant’s debt into terms of sin, it crudely equates to someone whose murdered two thousand people (who would need two thousand lifetimes to pay it off). Think about it: some of the most notorious serial killers—Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, or Ted Bundy, for example—wouldn’t even come close.
A love that would forgive this much truly is a reckless love. It’s the kind of love that, when we really understand what Jesus was teaching, causes us to react with shock and dismay. It is so radical, even many Christians have a hard time grasping it.
Our sense of justice is such an overwhelmingly powerful human impulse. We desperately want to believe that life, in the end, is fair. What goes around comes around. Karma. We get what we deserve. That it’s all about being a “good person”.
But Jesus’ understanding of how God works rocks us to the core. If it doesn’t, it’s only because we’ve become so jaded to it. We throw the terminology around so much, saying things like God loves unconditionally, that we think we “get it” when we really don’t. We have no idea how radical, extravagant, extreme, and counterintuitive His reckless love truly is.
A quick example: do you long to see Osama bin Laden in heaven? God does, according to Jesus. Ultimately, Jesus taught that it would be up to him whether he ever accepted this offer of God’s grace, to repent, or not. But it is God’s will to see him, and every other human being, no matter how vile or despicable, in heaven—and should be ours too, if we really “get it”.
If this infuriates you; if you can’t accept a God who would forgive the architect of the horror of 9-11; if you don’t rejoice, as God does, at the thought that he might have repented in his last moments and is now in paradise, then you—like most of the rest of us—are jaded to how radically subversive Jesus’ image of God actually is.
As much as we talk about “amazing grace”, we don’t really want a God like this. We want a god who gives us what we deserve, who is safe, tame, predictable. After all, if we get what we deserve, if there is something we can do to earn it, if it’s something we’re owed, something we have a right to, then we have control over it.
We like being in control.
The fact that God could so recklessly love those who “don’t deserve it” as much as He loves us, scandalizes us to the core, the way it did Jesus’ first hearers. We don’t get what we deserve—and that’s supposed to be good news!
But there’s something even more shocking about this parable, a dimension of God’s love that is even more reckless. Since the vast majority of people who will ever walk this planet aren’t serial killers, since most of us don’t owe this kind of astronomical debt, Jesus isn’t just talking about the amount of sin we have relative to other people. Regardless of what we have or haven’t done, he’s saying that we are all in the same position as the servant when it comes to the debt we owe God.
How so? Because of what it cost God to reconcile each of us to Himself, to save us.
It will take many more blogs to explain how all this works (stay tuned!), but for now, even if it doesn’t make perfect sense, just think about the enormous sacrifice God has made for us—IF Jesus really is God, He gave up the infinite bliss of heaven to become a vulnerable human being; then, on the cross, experienced the infinite suffering of separation from His Father’s eternal love. In other words, He paid an infinite price to save us—which is a debt we could never repay.
God is reckless, but not with us. He is reckless with what He has sacrificed of Himself for us.
But this just isn’t how it’s supposed to work. As the great scholar of comparative religions Rudolf Otto and the great historian of religion Mircea Eliade have shown, we humans have a virtually universal sensibility when it comes to the Transcendent. Across time and culture, in the world’s enduring major religions and all the primitive religions that have come and gone, we share a common and pervasive understanding of God. In our creatureliness, we feel a sense of dread, awe, and terror as well as a sense of desire, fascination, and enchantment in the presence of the Holy. Across the globe through the ages, this has created in humanity a consistent and irrepressible compulsion to worship and adore, to serve and sacrifice and offer up our lives to the all-consuming Divine Transcendence.
However, Jesus totally flips this around. He offers up His life for us. He recklessly sacrifices everything for us.
As scholars have noted, this God of reckless love is a complete innovation, radically transcending all our most powerful and pervasive instincts about God and how He should behave toward us.
This presses the question: if there really is a God, and if this God really became human, isn’t this exactly what we’d expect? Wouldn’t we expect Him to radically transcend our finite human understandings? Wouldn’t divine love, love that is perfect and otherworldly, look extravagant, foolish, and even reckless to us? Wouldn’t supernatural love subvert everything we think we know and turn our world upside down?
If Jesus were everything we expected and wanted God to be, if he was safe, tame, and predictable, He couldn’t possibly be from the transcendent realm. He wouldn’t be God.
But the fact that His reckless love—among other things—so radically transcends our limited human understanding is fully consistent with the claim that He is the transcendent One become human.
