Dayenu

Back when I was a student at the University of Tennessee, I got involved in the Christian Student Fellowship (CSF), a small non-denominational campus ministry that met in a house just off a main campus thoroughfare. UT is a big school in the Bible Belt, and so of course the CSF wasn’t the only campus ministry at UT. I walked past the Episcopalian ministry every day on the way to class; there was a Catholic ministry a bit up the hill, in between the Baptists and the Methodists; and so on.

On the corner near those ministries, in a brick building with a window wall looking out over the street, was the Jewish Student Center. Each year, they invited the anyone who wanted from the Christian campus groups to join them in a Passover meal. I attended along with several others from the CSF; after all, we believe in Passover, too, and it was an interesting cultural experience and good food. (From what I recall, they served a full conventional meal, in addition to explaining the traditional elements of the seder.) And I found out some interesting trivia at the Passover meals, too; for example, one year, a Jewish student who sat at our table explained that they couldn’t drink beer during Passover week, because it was made from grain and needed yeast to produce, but vodka was fine, since it was made from potatoes.

At these events, someone from the Jewish Student Center talked about the Passover feast. It’s an ancient tradition, rich in symbolism: bitter herbs to represent the bitterness of slavery in Egypt, vegetables dipped in salt water to represent tears shed, unleavened bread to remember both the poverty of life in Egypt and the haste of the Jews’ departure from Egypt, and the Passover lamb itself, remembering the means by which God delivered his people. One year, the woman who spoke talked about this theme of deliverance. She suggested that we Christians had too small a view of deliverance; we primarily or only talked about God as delivering people from sin. In reality, she argued, God is always interested in and acting to deliver people in every way, offering all-encompassing freedom and overturning oppression of every kind: sin, the slavery of the Jews in ancient Egypt, racial and political and economic injustices and oppressions in the modern world, and so on.

Perhaps to drive home this point, they recited or sang Dayenu, a thousand-year-old Jewish song: (“Dayenu” is a Hebrew word meaning “it would have been enough” or “it would have sufficed.”)

If He had brought us out from Egypt,
and had not carried out judgments against them
— it would have been enough!

If He had carried out judgments against them,
and not against their idols
— it would have been enough!

If He had destroyed their idols,
and had not smitten their first-born
— it would have been enough!

If He had smitten their first-born,
and had not given us their wealth
— it would have been enough!

If He had given us their wealth,
and had not split the sea for us
— it would have been enough!

If He had split the sea for us,
and had not taken us through it on dry land
— it would have been enough!

If He had taken us through the sea on dry land,
and had not drowned our oppressors in it
— it would have been enough!

If He had drowned our oppressors in it,
and had not supplied our needs in the desert for forty years
— it would have been enough!

If He had supplied our needs in the desert for forty years,
and had not fed us the manna
— it would have been enough!

If He had fed us the manna,
and had not given us the Shabbat
— it would have been enough!

If He had given us the Shabbat,
and had not brought us before Mount Sinai
— it would have been enough!

If He had brought us before Mount Sinai,
and had not given us the Torah
— it would have been enough!

If He had given us the Torah,
and had not brought us into the land of Israel
— it would have been enough!

If He had brought us into the land of Israel,
and not built for us the Holy Temple
— it would have been enough!

I don’t completely agree with this Jewish woman’s take. God is, of course, concerned with justice and deliverance. However, I’m concerned that making broad temporal justice an emphasis of the church can too easily drag the church off its mission. We are to be first and foremost a foretaste and beachhead and first installment of God’s eternal kingdom, not an inherently temporary fix for the kingdoms of this earth.

And yet…

There are pitfalls in our emphasizing only deliverance from sin. In The Deep Things of God (p. 15-16), Fred Sanders writes,

Evangelicalism has always been concerned to underline certain elements of the Christian message. We have a lot to say about God’s revelation, but we emphasize the business end of it, where God’s voice is heard normatively: the Bible. We know that everything Jesus did has power for salvation in it, but we emphasize the one event that is literally crucial: the cross. We know that God is at work on his people through the full journey of their lives, from the earliest glimmers of awareness to the ups and downs of the spiritual life, but we emphasize the hinge of all spiritual experience: conversion. We know there are countless benefits that flow from being joined to Christ, but we emphasize the big one: heaven.

Bible, cross, conversion, heaven. These are the right things to emphasize. But in order to emphasize anything, you must presuppose a larger body of truth to select from…

When evangelicalism wanes into an anemic condition, as it sadly has in recent decades, it happens in this way: the points of emphasis are isolated from the main body of Christian truth and handled as if they are the whole story rather than the key points. Instead of teaching the full counsel of God (incarnation, ministry of healing and teaching, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and second coming), anemic evangelicalism simply shouts its one point of emphasis louder and louder (the cross! the cross! the cross!). But in isolation from the total matrix of Christian truth, the cross doesn’t make the right kind of sense. A message about nothing but the cross is not emphatic. It is reductionist.

God delivers us from sin, not because he doesn’t care about deliverance from slavery and racism and poverty and the rest, but because sin is the root problem behind slavery and racism and poverty and the rest. It’s not that the others aren’t important; it’s that God is too big to fix only those temporal evils without also fixing sin and death and the entire universe. In our commendable desire to emphasize salvation from sin and eternal life in heaven, we sometimes almost give the impression that Christianity is mostly a “get out of Hell free” card. It is that, but it’s not only that; it’s God speaking to us through his Word, and the fellowship with other believers, and an abundant life that starts now, and a purpose and provision on earth, and the joys of God’s creation, and the treasury of God’s actions on behalf of his people, from the Passover culminating in Jesus. Any one of those, as the hymn says, would have been enough.

Everything belongs to you, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future. Everything belongs to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. - 1 Cor 3:21-23

And yet…

From our perspective, any of those blessings would have been enough. After all, any of those blessings are more than we deserve; that’s why we preach grace. God’s perspective, though, seems to be different. He “made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6-7, ESV, emphasis added). If we take Paul at his word here, he’s saying that part of God’s reason for giving us eternal life is so that he can have eternity to continue showering grace upon us, to grant us “the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and… the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Eph. 1:18-19). For God’s love and God’s grace, nothing less than infinity is been enough.