Unworthy Servants?

Today’s sermon opened with three Bible passages which touched on the theme of feeling unworthy.  Isaiah, on seeing a vision of seraphim, exclaimed, ‘Woe to me!  I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.’  Peter, on first meeting Jesus, echoes Isaiah’s words: ‘Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!’  And Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, admits that ‘I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.’

In each story, the pattern was the same: we may feel guilty or ashamed or unworthy, but God loves and affirms us, frees us from sin, and calls us to be his witnesses.

So, the vicar asked, did we know anyone who felt unworthy of God’s love because of some sin they had committed, which they felt was so terrible that God could not possibly accept them?  What would we say to such a person?  How can we show them God’s love, in demonstrating our love for them?

I wondered whether I did know anybody in that situation.  Of people outside the church, and most people in it, I didn’t think I knew anyone who felt quite that way.  (If you do, perhaps you’ve told me and I haven’t been listening.)

I know plenty of people who don’t believe in God.  I know people who think of God in a pantheistic way, simply identifying God with the universe, rather than seeing God as a personal being who can be depended upon to love them when no-one else does.  I know people who are less willing to discuss what they believe about God than they are to talk about how badly people in the church have mistreated them.

I meet people who are suicidally depressed because of bad things that have happened to them, whether being abused, suffering from incurable health problems, or feeling that their lives are meaningless in a culture where only those who are young, rich, healthy and privileged seem to live worthwhile lives.  Some of them might be angry at God for allowing them to suffer, but many just assume that (by the values of secular consumerist society) their lives are meaningless, and regard ‘God’ only as a tool used by repressive religions to make people feel guilty about seeking to end their suffering by killing themselves.

What I don’t often find, in secular society, is people crushed by a sense of overwhelming guilt.  Within Christian culture (I’m sorry, I don’t know as much about the experiences of followers of other faith traditions, but I’d be grateful to hear from people from other religious backgrounds), I don’t meet very many people who feel that they have committed too terrible a sin for God to forgive them.  After all, the point of Christianity is that we have all sinned, and that Jesus came to save all of us from our sins.

PDB11 tells me that he had an uncle who really did think this way, and would come to church but never take Communion, because of some sin he had on his conscience, but PDB has no idea what this sin might have been.  (It was never discussed in the family.)  I don’t know how common it is to feel this way.

My own problems have been rather different.  If I felt guilty about a specific sin, I could repent of it and ask God to forgive me.  But the times that have overwhelmed me with fear and despair and self-hatred have been the times where I believed (as I described in a previous post) that God regarded all humans as intrinsically evil just for existing.

I have the same problem with feelings of unworthiness.  Five years ago, I lost my job because I convinced myself that I didn’t deserve to have a job.  I had been unemployed for many years, and so, by the time I was finally offered a job in 2014, I was convinced that this was a terrible mistake and that I would soon be sacked.  In addition, I felt that, if God prefers the poor to the rich (something I have worried about elsewhere), he was probably angry with me for having a job rather than living on benefits. 

When I kept the job for over two years, then moved to Somerset in 2017 and was offered a new job on the strength of a recommendation from my previous employer, this seemed like even more of a mistake.  I told myself that when Jesus said, ‘So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty,”’ what he really meant was, ‘You’re not fit to be even a servant – you’re useless!’ 

I pictured Jesus taunting me that I would be cut off and thrown on the fire like every other fruitless branch.  I told myself that I would make a mess of my job.  After a sleepless night of this, I had a bad first day in my new job, and was sacked within a few weeks.  If anything, I felt rather relieved at this, but still guilty, as I pictured Jesus telling me that, because I was no longer working as a carer for disabled elderly people, therefore was no longer feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty, I would go to hell.

Last Christmas, the ‘unworthy servants’ verse came back to attack me again, at a more personal level.  A friend had come to stay with me, and, as he is disabled and needs a lot of rest, I spent much of my time fussing around waiting on him.  I felt that Jesus wanted me to see myself, not as a friend who could relate to my guest on equal terms and sit and eat with him (which my friend would probably have been more comfortable with), but as a skivvy who was only fit to serve my guest’s supper at the same time as washing up the plates from lunch and preparing a casserole for tomorrow’s lunch.  I felt that when I went out to buy milk, I wasn’t supposed to enjoy the beauty of the sunlight on frosty fields, because I was only a slave and should keep my eyes downcast.

And so, of course, because I wasn’t allowing myself to relax or enjoy anything, and so was angry and upset with Jesus, with my friend, and with myself, in practice I made my friend’s stay miserable, when he needed a relaxing holiday.  I wasn’t putting his needs first, because I was putting my own urge to crush and humiliate myself first.

What I needed to do, instead of taking one verse out of context and building my idea of Jesus around that, was to look both at the idea that God is love, and at the way that Jesus behaved to people in practice.  Yes, he rebuked those he considered arrogant or self-righteous, but he generally treated with respect those whom other people looked down on. 

When Jesus at first behaved in an apparently insulting way to the gentile woman who asked Jesus to heal her daughter (Matthew 15:21-28), he commended her for having enough faith to argue with him instead of accepting that she was worthless and giving up.  So, for Jesus, ‘having faith’ seems to be more about trusting in his good intentions for us, than assuming that he necessarily means everything he says.

So, should I worry that Jesus is going to reject me for being unprofitable, because he preached so many parables comparing God to an employer, or even to a farmer deciding whether it’s worth letting an unproductive tree live for one more year or cutting it down now?  I don’t see that worrying would achieve much. 

After all, it’s not as if I can aspire to be ‘employee of the year’ by doing more for God than someone else is doing.  By definition, none of us, no matter what we’re doing – treating leprosy patients in India, composing wonderful oratorios about the Resurrection, writing books that will inspire people for centuries – can be profitable to God.  The whole universe belongs to God, and there is nothing we can give to God that God has not already given to us.

Jesus died to save us because he valued us enough to think that we are worth saving.  We already have worth in God’s eyes, without needing to prove our usefulness to him.  We are God’s beloved children, and that is not something we need to deserve.