I spent a lot of today at the helm of a hospital wheel-chair, guiding my grandpa through the galleries and consultations rooms, and ante-chambers where they take your weight, and out-patient rooms of a medical facility. And it struck me: this is both like and unlike the ways in which my grandpa loved and cared for me when I was a baby.
I remember being pushed in a stroller by him through the wild labyrinthine corridors of queues of Disneyland; I remember being asked “are you buckled in?” and “are you hungry?” by him when I was a kid. And now here I am asking similar questions of him. Now I am pushing the cart around. Now I get the valet ticket, now I grab the car, now I have to remember where the car is, etc.
But its also unalike too. For while there are similarities in the way we’ve cared for each other on these two ends of our years together, there are also differences so great that it makes a kind of sheer mathematical comparison impossible. The fancy word here is “incommensurable” —it’s like the phrase “comparing apples and oranges.”
Incommensurability means that my grandfather’s care of me as a child and my care of him now that I am an adult share a paradoxical relationship. There’s parts of my care for him that is like the care he showed me. But there are also ways that these two forms of care are unalike. There are things about pushing a whiney child around Disneyland and getting a toddler dressed in the morning that are both alike and unalike pushing an 81-yr old through a hospital and helping him get re-dressed after a minor procedure.
Intuitively we get this. Intuitively we participate the mystery of incommensurate likeness of beings and actions. But intellectually we live in a very broken modernity which, for the most part, abandoned the theology which made sense of such things. Jon Milbank in his The Suspended Middle (required reading for a directed study I’m currently under-going) summarizes this modern brokenness in very technical theological language: [for secular modernity] “analogical paradox is incoherent and therefore univocal proportional symmetry must rule in all things” (31). See? “Very technical theological language” but not untrue. What he’s getting at is the modern theological difficulty with things that are alike but not commensurate. Examples abound: man and woman, God and humanity, Church and state, books and the Bible.
Here’s where this makes practical pastoral sense in the Christian life and points to the great grace of the created order of things. My grandpa’s care of me and my adult care of him delightfully share a common shape but neither one can ever commensurate or "equal” or “pay-back” the other. None of my service to my grandpa can ever repay the kindness he has shown me and neither can any of his love shown in my early days ever purchase from me the acts of kindness I show now to him. These acts which we have given to one another are similar but incommensurate.
In this season of Lent we place a special emphasis on works of justice, charity, and mercy. We encourage giving special offerings of alms to the poor, gifts to missions, tithes to churches; We encourage serving the poor and the needy in tangible and peculiar ways. We encourage and exhort folks to works of sanctification like fasting and the confession of sins to their pastors. But all of these works, while similar to the good works of the Lord (Jn. 5:17-19, 14:12-31), are incommensurate with them. Christ never says “don’t o good works!” Quite the opposite. What the work of Jesus proclaim to us is that (1) “our works cannot save us” (Eph. 2:8-9) while at the same time proclaiming to us that we are called to “do even greater works than these” (Jn. 14:12).
Here’s the charge: in all your Lenten works of love, sanctification, and service to others, do not relapse into the secularist falsehood of thinking that somehow your works are commensurate (or will be if you can do enough of them) with God’s salvation. God’s works and our are incommensurate goodnesses. Freely God has given to you, freely give back to Him (Matt. 10:8).