is no joke, sonny! I’m not talking of those who get out of it with a lot of eyewash: you’ll knock up against plenty of them in the course of your life, and get to know ’em. Comforting truths, they call it! Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards. . . . The Word of God is a red-hot iron. And you who preach it ’ud go picking it up with a pair of tongs, for fear of burning yourself, you daren’t get hold of it with both hands. . . . when the Lord has drawn from me some word for the good of souls, I know, because of the pain of it.6
These words become powerfully ironic when, later in the novel, the country priest thrusts his arm into a fire. He is “no tongs.” So is Arthur McGill, whose dialectic is heavy on what he risks as the truth and light on the “comfort”—as if, in light of the truth, the comfort can take care of itself: “Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.” The truth can be painful, which is why we are so tempted to do an end run around the truth and to go straight for the comfort. A student once gave me a poster—it was on my office door for years—which showed a rag doll with bright yellow yarn hair going through the ringers of an old-style washing machine. Her tongue was hanging out. The poster read: “The truth will make you free, but first it will hurt like hell.” “The Word of God is a red-hot iron.”
Much of the fire for McGill comes from what Karl Barth called, in the title of an early address (1916), “The Strange New World within the Bible.”7 Strangeness and newness can be fearful and frightening—and exciting, exhilarating. Barth wonders:
Whence is kindled all the indignation, all the pity, all the joy, all the hope and the unbounded confidence which even today we see flaring up like fire from every page of the prophets and the psalms? . . . We might do better not to come too near this burning bush.8
McGill risks it. Barth continues:
. . . within the Bible there is a strange, new world, the world of God. . . . The paramount question is whether we have understanding for this different, new world, or good will enough to meditate and enter upon it inwardly. . . . Time and again serious Christian people who seek “comfort” [“comfort” again] and “inspiration” in the midst of personal difficulties will quietly close their Bibles . . . the Bible . . . offers us not at all what we first seek in it.9
Barth’s essay exudes excitement and exhilaration: “It is not the right human thoughts about God which form the content of the Bible, but the right divine thought about men.”10 McGill, far from running tired or dry, exudes theological fascinations. No “apologies,” no arguments for biblical authority or truth. The real truth, the “true truth,” is authoritative and needs no defense. Defense is insult. Defense is betrayal. McGill risks and dares boldly—hence the energy and vitality of his thought.
Never is Arthur McGill far away from death. Never does it take him long to get to death; and, as we recognize however reluctantly with our apprehension of the acceleration of time with age, it does not take us long either. Death, death, death. McGill, in his “realistic,” unrelenting way is aiming at affirmation. “Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.” There is death, and there is death.11 There are different concepts of death—more than two, certainly; but let us focus on two. There are destructive death and creative death. Destructive death is demonic, the death of victimization, obliteration, extermination. This is what sin and the satanic have somehow done to death. Then there is death as donative, self-giving, death as letting loose and letting go, a creative death which is essentially a part of the dialectical dance of receiving and giving which is life—as in the life of the living, Trinitarian God in whose image we are created. McGill does not like the first kind of death (any more than you and I), but he faces it in his McGillian realism in order to press through to death two:
So long as there is death, the power of God is not primary, is not Lord. Where there is death, there is not God’s kingdom. Therefore the Christian lives under death, or rather against death. Not against death by a more secure having, but against the whole logic and metaphysics of having and of the death which gives the metaphysics its proof. (Sermon 14, p. 120)
For in this perspective [“(i)n Christ”] death has become an event in the communication of life, real and true life. And that is the meaning of death in the domain of Jesus.” (Sermon 9, p. 85)
Maddening McGill
Maddening McGill. He can take us by the hand and lead us—and leave us. Or we leave him. Either way, he’s off; and we are in the dust. Who leaves whom? McGill invites one to wonder where he is going. He is a master of rhetorical tease. “People say: God will resurrect us and will bring us back to life again. Let’s hope not. Isn’t 50-60-90 years of this life enough?” (Sermon 15, p. 127). “Who of you does not live amidst failures of love?” (Sermon 15, p. 129). McGill’s disquieting honesty meets us early and often. One of McGill’s most successful themes is failure—as in “failures of love.” “Most of our love is resentment love” (Sermon 7, p. 71).12 “Love is not our primary motive. Resentment is primary and we express this as—love” (Sermon 7, p. 71):
Are we so filled with fear—fear of the hate that is in us, and fear of the hate that may be in other people—that our love has no reality of its own? . . . Thanksgivers, unless you let your God see the exasperation and outrage that you feel at the negatives of life, unless you stop making thanksgiving a mask to hide despair and resentment, how is any movement toward authentic thanksgiving even possible? . . . Thanksgiving day should be a day of truth, love and anger, of anger making claims on love by being indignant about abuse and neglect; and of love making claims on anger by forgiveness. Thanksgiving Day should never become a lie of sweetness and light. (Sermon 7, pp. 69–70, 72–73; italics added)
Sounds like a recipe for a great Thanksgiving dinner. Family gatherings can be risky. McGill’s sermon (“Be Angry”) closes with a prayer preceded by these words: “Let us have a little more openness about our animosity. Then—and only then—can we begin to receive and exercise [receiving comes before exercising] our generosity” (Sermon 7, p. 73). “Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.”
Related failure: in his sermon on “Loneliness,” McGill advances the view that “. . . we try to build artificial bridges across the gap that separates us from one another, bridges made of such easy and faithless acts as the shaking of hands” (Sermon 1, p. 25). (Why should shaking hands be a faithless act?) “How we flee from God! How we seek to make a false god of our neighbor . . .” (Sermon 1, p. 25): the failure of “neighborolatry.” Failure: “We, of ourselves, do not worship God. We cannot” (Sermon 12, p. 108). Rather, one steps into—or is caught up in—the worship of the Father by the Son. We participate. Now participation can be freeing, can be fun because freeing. I join in singing the chorus but am not (thank God) the guardian of the verse. The freedom to fail is also the freedom to succeed, and both freedoms are the freedom to live.
Consider McGill’s investment in the body, the flesh:13 “How do we arise? Out of an embrace of flesh, tangents of our father’s pitiful lust, in midnight heat on dawnbed ease. The glory of our begetting was a twitch and gasp” (Sermon 13, p. 114).14 And death? “And how do we end? Always through our body and with our bodies. . . . The body is our Achilles’ heel” (Sermon 13, p. 114). “Every instant of life is therefore an advance of death” (Sermon 13, p. 114). “Death awaits us and death is
