God Saves Us, Always
I've watched Paolo Sorrentino's shows The Young Pope and The New Pope and enjoyed them a great deal, though there are provocations aplenty in the shows, along with strong erotic content. The shows are tonally messy as they lurch from the sacred to the blasphemous. My theological take on the shows is that they are Augustinian meditations on love and the disorders of love--from sex, to power, to family, to the love of God. But in the midst of all the twisted and disordered loves on display, there are moments in the shows that are truly transcendent.
No spoilers, but one of those moments comes from Episode 7 of The New Pope, a scene in a confessional. After hearing a very sad confession, full of shame, guilt, failure, secrets, and weakness, the confessor shares these words of comfort, words I immediately wrote down because I didn't want to forget them:
God saves us, always. God does not deny anyone the grace of salvation. It is the most beautiful thing there is. We love vanity, and sin. We love depravation and wickedness. So we believe that God has abandoned us. That God does not like us. But God does not manage our lives. He does not correct our weaknesses. God does not stop our hand when it plunges into sin. No. All He does is save us. In the end, God saves us. And He saves us with a kiss.
Wow. Reminds me of an anecdote I heard from a woman recently, with her lovely British accent. She was telling of her childhood when she had a disordered live for junk food. She was hiding in the closet with her chips. Her mother found her and she expected a shaming word. Instead her mother said with warmth and rescue, "Come here love and let's have a snuggle. You don't need those." She felt the love and salvation of God in that moment.
God meets us in our mess with a kiss. I like this, in fact, could we say this is a metaphor of the gospel of Jesus? It seems, however, we can and do ignore his kiss and continue to plunge into sin. We then experience the destructive consequence of sin in our life. He continues his gracious affection toward us, but, sadly, we possess the potential to dismiss it all the way to the end. This quote raises the question of whether our rejection of God matters in the end and answers with a "no". There is some biblical reasoning for this. There is also substantial biblical reasoning for "yes" our rejection does matter in the end. In this tension, I reside. Part of me wants all saved, but this conflicts with the other part of me that says a loving God must be a just God who delivers judgment to those who perpetrate great suffering on others. Anyone else live in this struggle?