Our two main readings this week, telling the stories of Naaman (2 Kings 5:14-17) and of the Samaritan leper (Luke 17:11-19), are very clearly parallel. They once again show that God has no favorite people, no favored groups or nations. This despite the desperate need that humans have felt throughout history to feel they are special or preferred in some way as a result of some imagined identity based on language, place of origin, color of skin, political or religious ideology, or any other differentiating characteristic we may be obsessed by. God just doesn’t care about those things.
Paul’s explanation of his feelings as he is taken in chains towards his execution draw us into the center of this mystery (2 Timothy 2:8-13). If our relationship with God is not based on any of the characteristics we can identify in ourselves, what is it based on? Paul offers this cryptic conclusion: “But if we deny him he will deny us. If we are unfaithful he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.”
This appears to be telling us both that Jesus will cut us off in some circumstances but also that he won’t “because he can’t deny himself”. A contradiction? Let’s break it apart and see if we can get behind it.
“If we deny him he will deny us” sounds like a typical tit-for-tat – what you do to me, I’ll do to you. Any five year old would understand that. But we know God doesn’t do tit-for-tat, so that can’t be it. The adult way to understand it is: if we cut ourselves of from him then we will be cut off. His denial is not a response, even less a punishment, it is a logical consequence. Cutting yourself off is a one-sided action. It doesn’t allow for a response.
By contrast being unfaithful is foolish and hurtful but allows for the possibility of reconciliation. We may have damaged the relationship but we haven’t broken it. The extraordinary thing about the relationship with Jesus is that it isn’t damaged, at least as far as he is concerned. We also kinda know that since we talk about a loving God who is always willing to forgive, even though we find that very hard to accept (maybe for ourselves, or often in respect of those we believe least worthy of forgiveness). So Paul finishes by explaining why this is true.
We tend to think of our relationship with Jesus in the same way as other relationships – I do something, you respond; you do something I respond. But with Jesus, because he’s God, there’s something else going on. God isn’t responding to us as something separate from himself, we are part of God, he created us. We can’t be separate from Jesus any more than the hand can be separate from the head, to reference another stunning analogy that Paul gave us. He (Jesus, God) cannot deny us because we are him, he is us. We can cut ourself off from him but he can’t do it converse. God can’t stop loving, because that’s what he is. He is in a loving relationship with everything and everyone, because he created it all. That relationship makes us special and unique, and also just like everyone else. God has no favorites, or as parents will sometimes say “you are all my favorite children”: Arameans, Samaritans, Chinese, Europeans, Jews, Cretans, Fascists, Communists, light-skinned, dark-skinned, … And while any of us may choose to cut ourselves off, he will never disown us, any of us.