The Sacred Romance

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The Sacred Romance

The gospel is an invitation into an ancient and eternal drama of the heart

John Eldredge

Simone Weil once wrote that there were only two things that pierce the human heart: beauty and affliction.

Five weeks ago my best friend and partner was killed in a climbing accident. Brent and I had taken a group of men up to the mountains for a time of spiritual search and renewal, and the weekend took a tragic turn. Tragedy is a dramatic invitation for us to wrestle deeply with the truest and the most important questions of our hearts. Why? Why do we long so deeply for happiness, for joy? Why are we so full of dreams—for our children, for the future—when life seems to be so disappointing, so unpredictable?

The real tragedy of postmodernism is what it has done to the human soul. We are now in the postmodern era. We ask postmodernism to answer the deepest questions of the human heart. Postmodernism responds with, "We don't know. It's unanswerable. There are no answers to why you long for a different life than the one you have." Christianity was supposed to be the answer to the riddle of the earth. It was supposed to speak to the deepest issues of the human heart in a way that captured our hearts and drew us up into something larger, but because Christianity did not escape the trend into postmodernism, what we have left is not the gospel. What we have left is a Christianity of tips and techniques: three steps for a good quiet time, four habits for effective marriage communication. It does not take your breath away; and if Christianity does not take your breath away, something else will.

A little boy of 11 or 12 once wrote a letter of contrition to C. S. Lewis. As many of you know, C. S. Lewis was the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, a series of children's stories in which there is a hero, the Christ figure in the form of a lion named Aslan. The little boy wrote to Lewis and said, "I love Aslan more than Jesus."

Lewis very wisely wrote back to the boy, "No, all that you love in Aslan is Jesus."

All that people are searching for is the gospel, but we fail to see that because postmodernism has caused the total loss of the story. So, in response to postmodernism, in an effort to recapture the gospel, and as part of an honest wrestling with my own faith, I want to retell the story of our lives. What is this tale? The Gospel in Four Acts.

The story begins with the eternal love of the Trinity.

In the beginning—once upon a time. All good stories begin like that, don't they?

"Once upon a time there was a land named Narnia."

"Once upon a time there was a kingdom called Camelot."

"Once upon a time there was a prince and a princess." All good stories will follow this pattern, because they borrow from the true story.

And so, in the beginning, once upon a time—your thoughts probably go to Genesis 1. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." You can't start there. That's Act III. This shows you how much we've lost the larger story.

The story really starts in John 1. "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." In the beginning.

In other words, in the "once upon a time" before all time, there was perfect love. The life of the Trinity shows us real intimacy—the kind of love that you have been looking for all your life. I think I've been a practicing Unitarian for years and not known it. I've always thought of God as strong, sovereign, omniscient, and omnipotent—but by himself. God has never been by himself. God has always been a community of persons in the Trinity. For God to be love, as John says God is love, there has to be someone to love. And so in the beginning there was the community that every one of us has been searching for our whole lives.

We live with a memory of Act I, because when the story reaches Act III, where it says that we are made in the image of God, it says we are made in the image of the Trinity. This is why we are relational at the core of our being. Nothing will touch our hearts like relationship, either to thrill it or to break it. Have you noticed that everyone is looking to get back into the sacred circle? Single people think it's marriage: "If I can just get married, then I will have it."

Married couples know that's not enough. "If we could just have kids" or "If we could just get into the right church."

And if it's the wrong church, then it's a small group; and if you have a small group, you think it's a different small group. All your life you have been looking for heroic intimacy because of Act I.

When I was a boy, my parents would ship me off to my grandfather's ranch for three months every summer. I spent three months horseback riding, roping cattle, shooting rifles, riding in trucks. Sunday afternoons, we'd get in my grandfather's and we'd do what he'd call "going visiting." We'd drop in on the other farms and ranches in the valley. We'd visit third cousins, great aunts and uncles, and people who had become like family over the years. I recall sitting on the front steps listening to the old folks tell their stories. I remember having a "settled feeling" inside me—I felt that finally I was part of something larger than I was. Here was this wonderful life that had been going on for many years—that had me in mind, that was inviting me into it—but that I didn't have to do anything with to keep it going. I got to be a part of things.

That's the invitation of the gospel.

Eugene Peterson says that traditional Christian spirituality is not taking bits and pieces of doctrine and putting them to use, but it is entering into the life of God that is already in motion. Once upon a time. True love. Heroic intimacy.

All good love is generous in its heart. It's and . God is generous in his love. This is why married couples want to have children, because they sense that the love is larger than they are; they want to grow it. They want more souls around the house to share in it. It's because of the Trinity.

God invites angels into the drama.

In Act II, God begins to write other characters into the story he is living. He invites others in; he creates angels. We're not given a lot of insight in Scripture about what it's like to be an angel, but notice this: nowhere in Scripture do you meet a bored angel. Whatever the angels do, they are having a ball. In Isaiah 6, when he sees the curtains parted in the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah says, "I saw the Lord lifted up."

He sees the rest of reality—he sees the glory of God and he peers into heaven at the seraphim flying around the temple. They are saying, "Holy, holy, holy," to each other. It's not a hymn. They're not singing it to God. They are singing it to each other. They are saying, "Holy, holy, holy smokes. Do you see what I see?" It's breathtaking. It's captivating. And they are in awe.

You've had the experience of the angels, often without knowing it. Perhaps you have walked up in the Rockies and come through a break in the woods, and suddenly you come upon a meadow full of wildflowers. Something in your heart says, "Ah, I wish Mary was here. She would love this." Every moment of glory is meant to be shared.

And so the angels are invited into tremendous intimacy, the heroic intimacy of God. And they love it—well, most of them.

Something else happens in Act II that's crucial for us to understand why life is the way it is in Act III. There's a rebellion in heaven. Lucifer, Son of the Morning, whom Ezekiel says, "walked among the fiery stones," doesn't want to be Best Supporting Actor. He wants to be Best Actor and the center of the story. So, as Revelation seems to say, he convinces a third of the angels in heaven to turn on this generous love, and there is war in heaven.

The end of Act II is the fall of Lucifer and his demons from the hallways and courtyards of heaven. Notice two things at the end of Act II. First, Lucifer and his demons are not chained, not yet. They are left as characters in the story. Secondly, a doubt has been introduced into the universe—a doubt about the story that was never there before. Satan suggested, "Can you really trust the heart of this God? Is he really for you?" This is one of the deepest doubts of the human heart, maybe the deepest. That doubt lingers in the story now like smoke after the battle is long over, because God wins in Act II by power—and power is not the same thing as goodness. You can be bigger and not be better. Anybody who's not a bully knows this. And now the drama is set for Act III—"In the beginning," Genesis 1.

God's love is put on trial in the creation of humanity.

In the beginning of Act III, we see the wild goodness of the heart of God because he begins by creating what we blandly call the acts of creation. He makes Maui and the French Alps and the African Savannah. He makes mangos and peaches and blackberries and cabernet grapes—go figure. He gives us the whole thing like a wedding gift, and he says, "Here. Do you like it? Take it for a spin."

He creates us to be his intimate allies. To borrow Allender's phrase, he creates us for intimacy with him and with each other and to be his allies on the earth. Why is it that most women long deeply for intimacy? Why is it that in the heart of every man there is a longing for adventure? And why do both genders long for heroic intimacy? Because you and I are made to participate in a far larger story than the little soap operas we call our lives.

You also see the wild goodness of this God because he gives us freedom to reject him. Why? He knows what beings can do. He has already suffered one massive betrayal. As Philip Yancey says, "Power can do everything but the most important thing. It cannot control love." The guards in a concentration camp possess unlimited power over you. They can make you kill your mother or eat human excrement. But there's one thing they cannot force you to do—love them. This is why God seemed shy to use his power in Act III, because his heart is on trial and the entire wager of Act III is simply this: Will human beings choose God?

Well, we kick off the honeymoon by sleeping with the enemy.

When you live in a Christianity of tips and techniques, you trivialize sin. Sin is something external. It's running stop signs. It's drinking too much. It's smoking. But God calls sin adultery of the heart. It is what you give your heart away to other than the heart of God.

It is more than paradise that is lost. God comes into the Garden, and in one of the most poignant verses of the entire Bible, he says, "What have you done? Do you have any idea what you've just done? I made your hearts for freedom, for heroic intimacy, and you have given them away in bondage to my worst enemy and yours. I made the earth for beauty and for adventure, and you have given it away." When Satan comes to tempt Jesus in the wilderness (Luke 4), he offers him the kingdoms of the world, because they became his when man sinned.

But the heart of God is about to be revealed at the worst moment in the larger story. He shows us something no one had ever seen before—grace. God says to Adam and Eve, "I'll come for you. Your lives are going to be very hard now, in ways, but I'll come for you. I will come."

What follows is the long story of the pursuit—God's pursuit of a people whose hearts will be his. First in the story of Noah and then Abraham and then for the people of Israel. We see God looking for a people who will turn back to him to be his intimate allies to join him in a far larger drama—a sacred romance.

But it breaks down. When we read the prophets, Yancey says, "It's like hearing a lovers' quarrel through the apartment wall."

Theologians who talk about the impassability of God, that God is beyond emotion, have never read Jeremiah or Isaiah. God says, "Return to me and I will have compassion on you. I will forgive everything. But you, you are a swift in heat sniffing the wind in her craving, running here and there after other lovers. I said, 'Return to me, and I will love you.' But you said, 'It is no use. I love foreign gods and I must go after them.'" Every one of us has other lovers—television, work, sports, food—something that we give our hearts away to other than the heart of God.

And then, 400 years of silence at the end of the Old Testament. It looks like God has failed; humans will not choose God. But the story is about to take an unbelievable turn. God has something up his sleeve. Here's how Kirkegaard tells in a parable what God is about to do:

Suppose there was a king who loved a humble maiden. Now, no king was like this king. Every other ruler trembled before his power. No one dared breathe a word against him. And yet, this mighty king was melted by love for a humble maiden.

How could he declare his love for her? In a way, his kingliness tied his hands. If he comes to her cottage in the woods with his whole escort—the armies, the coaches, the banners waving—it would overwhelm her. If he takes her to the palace, clothes her in royal robes, crowns her with jewels, she might say she loved him. But would she really? How could he know?

So the king leaves all of that behind—the carriages, the banners, the armies. He disguises himself as a beggar, and he comes to her door in the woods alone to win her heart.

It's the Incarnation. The Ancient of Days sneaks into the enemy camp disguised as a newborn. The great heart behind the whole story comes into our lives as a carpenter from Nazareth. That's why Paul says, "I know. I know. The evidence looks mixed. There is incredible tragedy in this life, but look at the cross. You have never been loved so fiercely."

Can you trust the heart of this God? It's the question Jesus came to answer. He came for us just as he promised he would. He's calling us to be his intimate allies once more.

Is that the end of the story? Is this it? Do you know what Paul says? Paul says if this is it—the Christian life that you have now with the promises and the blessings—if this is as good as it gets, Paul says to go home, bake a cake, and eat the whole thing. No, don't even go home. Stop at the HSeek and get hammered. That's 1 Corinthians 15. "Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." Do you know why most Christians live with a loss of heart? Because we don't have Act IV. We've lost the larger story. There is an Act IV. Something better is coming.

An eternity of joy and feasting awaits those who accept the invitation.

What is the typical evangelical response to the question "What will we do in heaven"? We will worship God. And something in your heart says, For how long? 100,000 years? Forever, ever? O heaven? Heaven is an unending church service? That's getting closer to my picture of the other place.

How does God kick off Act IV? With a wedding feast.

You've got to get images of Baptist weddings entirely out of your mind. People standing around the gym holding Styrofoam cups of punch, talking about what a lovely couple they are. Imagine this as a Jewish wedding. Push back the tables, roll up the rugs. There is feasting. There is dancing. There is drinking. Jesus says, "I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until I drink of it again with you in the kingdom of heaven." In other words, when we get there, he's going to pop a cork.

This isn't just any feast. This is a wedding feast. What goes on at wedding feasts? God takes what was supposed to be the most precious and intimate moment of human experience, the wedding night, to tell us what is coming—real intimacy, real adventure.

At the end of the Chronicles of Narnia, the last paragraph in the last book entitled The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis says:

"But the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful I cannot write them. For us, this is the end of all the stories. We can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after, but for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and title page. Now at last they were beginning chapter one of the great story that no one on earth has read, that goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before."John Eldredge is Senior Fellow for Christian Worldview Studies at the Focus on the Family Institute, where he teaches and writes about faith in a postmodern world. He is of The Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer to the Heart of God.