Dr. Paul Lim serves as the interim Director of NIFW, and is an award-winning historian of Christianity. He also serves as a faculty member at Vanderbilt University.
People learn indispensable lessons for life in various venues, often radically divergent contexts. Brother Lawrence (1614-91) – of The Practice of the Presence of God fame – learned crucial lessons for life while working in the kitchen of a Carmelite monastery in Paris. Mother Teresa learned the love of God while serving the most destitute and demonized by society in the slums of Kolkata, India. Both Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr., learned their key lessons of the inestimable price of freedom and fundamental human dignity for all colors while incarcerated, whether on the Robben Island or in the Birmingham Jail. In a much less significant and dramatic way, I learned a key lesson while standing on the platform of a London subway station as a graduate student in England: “Mind the Gap!” Hearing it for the umpteenth time in the late 1990s, it gradually dawned on me that these mind-numbing three words could actually be a poignant lesson for life.
The gap really does exist!
Let me start with the key theme of this blog: “Mind the Gap Between your Faith and Work! The only One who can identify that gap and stand in our place is Jesus: our Identity Giver and Idol Destroyer.” First of all, let’s make one thing clear: gaps really do exist! Gaps between our public personae and private expressions thereof. Isn’t that precisely what drives the sales of tabloid journalism? Many still find some perverse “delight” in reading about the fall or scandal of celebrities, especially those whose putative high morals are exposed as a tragic revelation of the gap that exist between the public (and false) presentation of images of these figures and the private (and true) outworking of the real self. This gap also exists in all of us. If the cultural and global awakening for justice that has erupted since the death of George Floyd in May 2020 – when he was beaten to death in the hands of Minneapolis police officers – has taught us anything, it is this: there is a structural and systemic gap with individual implications. Scholars might call this “social malaise,” “improper human flourishing,” “lapse of moral judgment,” etc. The Bible simply calls it sin, viz, the gap between God and humankind. Make no mistake about it. By the very distinction between the fact that God is the Creator and we are creatures inevitably leads us to acknowledge the two gaps: ontological and ethical. The ontological gap is that God is God, and we are not. The ethical gap is that God is holy, and we are – especially after the fall – unholy, affected by sin in all our capacities: emotional, intellectual, relational, volitional.
Not only do we see this dual gap between God the Creator and we the creature, more pertinently for our discussion, we see yet another gap, closely related to the second gap: the ethical gap. According Genesis chapters 3-4, the deliberate disobedience of humankind catapulted all of us into a different type of existence: birth and explosion of the human social and structural sin which led to a tragic alienation between the first human couple, Adam and Eve, and subsequently to another tragedy of fratricide, when Cain murdered Abel. So the gap really does exist. Both Cain, Adam, and Eve’s words of self-defense and blame-shifting belied the clear existence of this gap: gap between who they said they are, and who they actually were, fallen and in need of covering. The greater tragedy with Cain was that the murdering of Abel happened in the very place of Cain’s economic production: in the fields where Cain the “worker of the ground” was supposed to honor God and offer livelihood for all who worked with and for him. Ever since the collective fall of the “Adams Family,” we are still dealing with the cataclysmic reverberations of this gap. Thus the clarion call: “Mind the gap.”
So…what type of gap?
As previously mentioned, it seems that in 2023, there is a greater willingness to acknowledge that evil exists in a grander, even global, scale. Just as in the case of Cain, who took away the life of another human being in the place of work, there are gaps between our confession of faith and how that faith is manifested (or not) at work. Cain should have been his brother’s keeper, yet he was manifestly not that. Just as “every square inch in our whole domain of human existence” belongs to Christ who cries “Mine!” as the Lord over all, we are called to honor the Triune God as the meaning-giver and fulfiller of all human work. (1) The Christian perspective on this ubiquitous, universal gap is that it manifests itself both at the individual and societal levels. Historically, conservative Christians have tended to put greater emphasis on individual sins – Jesus as the forgiver of my personal sins and Savior of me and my family – progressive Christians have tended put greater emphasis on structural and social and systemic sins, which often tended to leave unattended one’s own individual moral gaps and sins. The truth is not an either/or, but both.
Minding the gap: Isaiah and Calvin
The Bible unequivocally calls out both the institutional and individual, the systems that perpetuate the gap as well as the self that participate in widening it. Isaiah 10:1-2 expresses the intensity of divine displeasure toward the creation and perpetuation of this gap, in this case in creation of unjust laws. Laws – by divine design – were intended to promote greater human flourishing and curb evil. Yet the Lord pronounces “woe” upon those “who make unjust laws,” e.g., creation of a Gap, and those “who issue oppressive decrees” to “deprive the poor of their rights” by withholding “justice from the oppressed of my peoples.” The Prophet continues that these unjust laws end up crushing the lives of the most vulnerable: “making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.” The poor, the widows, and the orphans were the triumvirate of the most vulnerable, not only in Isaiah’s times, but also in ours. This haunting question was answered by John Calvin (1509-1564), a refugee pastor who escaped persecution in native France and ended up in Geneva, Switzerland. His commentary on Isaiah speaks powerfully of the existence of the Ethical Gap in ancient Israel as well as – by extension – in sixteenth-century Geneva. Calvin wrote: “He chiefly mentions the poor, because for the most part they are destitute of help. While magistrates and judges ought to have assisted them more than others, they allow themselves greater liberty. . .in oppressing them.” What a poignant description of the gap between justice proclaimed and justice practiced, especially toward those who were poor! Continuing in the same verse, Calvin wrote: “But the Lord says that he takes peculiar care of the poor, though they are commonly despised; and. . .he does not allow oppression inflicted on them to pass unpunished.” (2) God is the One who will emerge as not only the defender of the poor and the marginalized, but also as the One who will stand to fill the gap. God does not merely “mind” the gap. As we will see below, the God of Isaiah will eventually fill the gap. So how? Or who?
God Incarnate and the gap filled
All of us, hopefully, know acutely well the existence of this gap. Gap between who we say we are as followers of Christ, and how that confession manifests itself at work. As I am writing this blog post, a book came to my mind. It is Who You Are when No One’s Looking. I read it when I was in seminary back in the 1990s. I have often gone back to it, and found just title itself convicting: who you are when no one’s looking. The author called the readers to be mindful of the gap, between public and private divergences, between perception and reality. The truth is, friends, we all fail to mind the gap, including the author of this book. The real trouble is more often that not, you might not like who you are when no one’s looking. Perhaps it is that the projection of self at places of worship (the Faith part) and the projection of self at one’s place of employment (the Work part) might have little in common. Ezekiel spoke on God’s behalf and issued judgment on Jerusalem: “I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap…but I found no one” (Ezekiel 22:30). This verse is not meant to get contemporary readers excited and say, “Yes, I will stand in the gap!” Actually this verse says that no human endeavors could be worthy of this task. The God of Israel found no one who would/could stand in the gap.
The Christian story is that God became human and filled that gap. In other words, for all human failings, universally considered, and for all human willful violation of divine desires and laws, God provided the One who would/could stand in the gap. They called him Jesus. Jesus was faithful in his work, firstly as a carpenter and then as a full-time itinerant teacher. There was no gap to mind between his public and private self. He alone is the One who could mind-and-fill the gap, both the Ontological and Ethical. He is the eternal, unique Son of God who could stand as our substitute (thus the Ontological); he is the second Adam who fulfilled where Adam had failed, and did not fail where he had fallen.
He also stands in the Gap in giving us a new valuation. In our contemporary world, much of our sense of worth and self is derived from our salary, or net worth. Here, Karl Marx’s words are hauntingly true when he says that money is the new god. This deity, aka money “is the universal self-established value of all things.” Money has “therefore robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.” (3) The tragedy of this gap is that money as the new god for our existence distorts the fundamental human worth and dignity by robbing it of its essence. Notice how Marx says this “alien essence dominates” all of humankind! It is alien, not natural, and yet we end up worshiping this alien deity. Jesus comes to offer to us the true and real God, not as late modern capitalistic fervor will radically alter our sense of self, society, and savior.
No Herculean effort to stand in the gap will do. Adam, Eve, and Cain all spectacularly failed. Only the Son of Adam and Son of God could do. Jesus filled and fills the gap, our gap, of hypocrisy and sin. Jesus reminds us: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Now, be free, and mind the gap as an act of delightful obedience who is continuing to fill the gap for us as our great high priest. Amen.
1 – This quote is from Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) whose theological perspective on human work and sphere sovereignty has influenced a number of Christians, including the current author.
2 – Calvin’s Commentary on Isaiah. https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom13/calcom13.xvii.i.html Accessed on 9/15/2023.
3 – Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/ Accessed 9/15/2023. As one reads this, there is an inescapable sense of anti-Semitism in Marx’s thought. Whereas Marx linked this creation of a new deity of money as “the jealous god of Israel,” I am universalizing the force of money as the new universal deity, by way of late modern capitalism. On this see Devin Singh, Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford University Press, 2018).