"Does God Help Those Who Help Themselves?"
Matthew 13:31-52 July 27, 2008
Today we’re continuing on in our summer series of answers to questions asked by real live church members just like you. We’ve paired two questions together which are sort of related to each other, and maybe more so as you think about them. I’m also thinking about these two questions under the category of “wisdom” or “law,” which puts them into a little different perspective. The questions are these: “Does God help those who help themselves?” and “Is there an unforgivable sin?” These are certainly straightforward questions that deserve straightforward answers, so here we go: the answer to the first is No, and Yes; and the answer to the second is Yes, and No.
Let’s take them separately first, and then put them together. Does God help those who help themselves? You hear that sometimes, as though it were a quote from the Bible. In fact, the question was raised by someone who heard a news report that some survey had indicated that a majority of people thinks that it is a verse from the Bible. I won’t risk embarrassing anyone here this morning by asking you what you think. I’ll just tell you straight up - it is not a verse from the Bible. But it does come from a religious source – that is, is you consider Aesop’s Fables religious. The fable in question dates from 550 B.C., but this is the way the story was told in a Book of Lessons for Children published in 1919:
A Farmer was driving his wagon along a miry country road after a heavy rain. The horses could hardly drag the load through the deep mud, and at last came to a standstill when one of the wheels sank to the hub in a rut. The farmer climbed down from his seat and stood beside the wagon looking at it but without making the least effort to get it out of the rut. All he did was to curse his bad luck and call loudly on Hercules to come to his aid. Then, it is said, Hercules really did appear, saying: "Put your shoulder to the wheel, man, and urge on your horses. Do you think you can move the wagon by simply looking at it and whining about it? Hercules will not help unless you make some effort to help yourself." And when the farmer put his shoulder to the wheel and urged on the horses, the wagon moved very readily, and soon the Farmer was riding along in great content and with a good lesson learned.
And the moral of the story is this: Heaven helps those who help themselves. So says Aesop.
And so, how about it? - does God help those who help themselves? I guess the answer is Yes, if your god is Hercules. But if you prefer the God of the Bible, then the answer is going to be a little more complicated.
Maybe we should ask it this way: Does God help only those who help themselves? That’s the implication in the original fable as Aesop told it, and it’s still the implication in the saying as it’s passed into popular religious culture. Benjamin Franklin, for example, picked up on it and included it as a saying in Poor Richard’s Almanac: God helps those who help themselves. It sounds like something Benjamin Franklin would say. However, it doesn’t sound so much like something that Jesus would say, or even that the Apostle Paul would say.
Here’s what I think: God helps those who help themselves; and God helps those who can’t and don’t and won’t help themselves.
The first idea, you know, is pretty prosaic and, frankly, not all that interesting a thought. “God helps those who help themselves.” Fine. Taken literally, I’m sure it’s true. If you’re praying for a new job, God would probably appreciate it if you would at least update your resume and go for an interview or two. If you’re hoping to get to know God better, I’m sure God would find it useful if you spent more time in prayer and worship.
But it’s the second idea that takes us into the realm of gospel. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,” Paul wrote. “You didn’t choose me, but I chose you,” Jesus said to his followers. “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him,” Luther wrote in his explanation to the Creed. God helps those who cannot help themselves. It’s the very heart of Scripture, that’s what it is – that when we are the most helpless, the most useless to ourselves and to others, that when we have concluded, finally, that the things we need the most are the very things that we simply cannot provide for ourselves – in other words, when we give up – it’s then that God takes over. It’s then, in our helplessness, that God loves to come to the rescue.
Think about it. Israel enslaved. Lazarus lying dead in a tomb. A world lost in brokenness, sin, and despair. You, muddling through. Helpless and hopeless. Is God going to wait for someone else to make the first move? Maybe Hercules, but not the God of our Bibles. God helps those who cannot help themselves. And thank God for that!
Which brings me to “the unforgivable sin.” This might take a little background for some of you Lutherans to even understand what the question is all about. There are two places in the New Testament where Jesus, in disputing with the Pharisees, is quoted as saying something like “All sin can be forgiven except the sin against the Holy Spirit.” This has caused some people – and I think particularly people from fundamentalist circles, or those who come at the Bible with a more pronounced literalistic or legalistic perspective – it has caused some people all kinds of psychological and spiritual trouble; people who live in real fear of momentarily or even accidentally committing this one unpardonable sin (whatever it might be) and thus being put beyond God’s saving reach forever, for eternity.
What this sin might be is (like so many of the obscure and even not-so-obscure passages in the Bible) the subject of endless debate and theological interpretation. If you read the two places where the phrase occurs you have to notice that in both cases it’s in a dispute about who Jesus is – is he sent from God or is he in league with the devil? And yet the Pharisees’ (in these texts) lack of faith in Jesus is called a sin not against Jesus but against the Holy Spirit, which actually sort of makes sense from a Lutheran perspective; because what, after all, in Lutheran theology is the first and primary work of the Holy Spirit? It is to create faith in us, to lead us to believe that Jesus has come into the world as the greatest sign of God’s love and forgiveness. Which leads to sort of a nice, circular definition here, if you just have to take the idea literally and legalistically; namely this: that the only thing that might stand in the way of forgiveness is the belief that forgiveness is not possible; and not just a passing belief, mind you, but a lifelong stubborn refusal to see and to embrace God’s forgiving love.
And yet, then I wonder about this: what’s more helpless and hopeless than a person who is stuck in sin and guilt and an unforgiving attitude and unable to see God at work in their life? And if God helps those who cannot help themselves; if God could transform a person like Paul from a persecutor of the church into one of its greatest proponents; if Paul is right to say that while we were enemies of God Christ died for us; if Jesus is right to say that “with God, nothing will be impossible” – if the example of thousands of lives turned from unbelief to belief, from despair to hope, from hatred and bitterness to forgiveness and reconciliation means anything – then I think I have to take my place with the interpreters who say that there is no sin that cannot be forgiven, no situation that cannot be redeemed, no life that cannot be transformed, no person who stands beyond God’s grasp of love. Whatever Jesus might have meant when he spoke to the Pharisees one afternoon two thousand years ago, it has to be read and understood in light of the whole gospel. That’s true of all the Bible, of course. We don’t read anything in isolation from the rest of it. You don’t take one or two verses out of the context of the whole and try to write a theology based on them, no matter how clear and compelling those verses might seem. As Lutherans, we read all of Scripture only in the light of Jesus’ death and resurrection and the tremendous, unfathomable depth of God’s love for the all world that is seen in that sacrifice and victory.
I think it’s here where the parables of the Kingdom that we’ve read this morning from Matthew, chapter 13, can help. I’m especially taken by the third and fourth ones in the series: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found… The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls who finds one of great value…” I’ve always read those parables thinking that the treasure and the pearl were God, and I was the one who was supposed to be out looking. But I think I’ve had it backwards all these years. The one who’s out looking is God, and the treasure, the pearl of great value that God is looking for, is you… is me… is all the world. The Kingdom of Heaven is God’s search for us – helpless, hopeless, unforgivable us – and yet, for the One who is looking: us - the most valuable thing in all of creation. God searches for us, and finds us, and is willing to sell all, to give all, to provide all that God has, in order to have us. This is the story of Jesus’ own life, of course – you knew that all along – the story of the One who comes looking for us, and upon finding us, gives all that he has in order to possess us as his very own.
It’s the story of forgiveness, full and free. It’s holy help. It’s the story of a love that can’t wait and won’t be stopped. It’s grace, pure and simple. And it’s all right there in the Bible.
And with that as the story line of the gospel, it becomes absurd to ask if God is going to wait off to one side until we begin to help ourselves, and then God might pitch in and give us a hand. It becomes absurd to ask if Jesus, having died on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins, is going to find some fine print that will allow him to leave some sin of ours unforgiven.
God isn’t playing some game with us, trying to trap us or avoid us. God is in the world to help us, to forgive us, to save us – and God won’t be done until that work is done.
Amen.
