God’s Love is Irrevocable

There is something wonderfully expansive about our readings today. Isaiah hears God saying, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” The psalmist cries, “Let all the peoples praise you,” and imagines God guiding all the nations until “all the ends of the earth” stand in awe. Paul insists that the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable, and that God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that God may be merciful to all. And then Jesus encounters a woman who stands outside the accepted religious boundaries of his own people—and in the end, mercy wins.

It is striking that the Gospel begins with an argument about boundaries. The religious leaders are concerned that Jesus’ disciples are eating without performing the proper ritual washing. But Jesus says they have misunderstood what God cares about. It isn’t what goes into the mouth that defiles us, but what comes out of us. “For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.”

God, in other words, is much more concerned with the state of our hearts than the state of our plates.

And I wonder if that isn’t because religious rules can so easily give us an illusion of control. Just tell me what I have to do. Tell me what I can eat and what I can’t. Tell me who’s in and who’s out. Tell me what I have to believe. Give me the rulebook, and I’ll follow it, and then I’ll know that I’m okay with God.

There is something very attractive about that kind of religion because it gives us certainty. Rules are cut and dried. Mercy isn’t.

Rules can be applied without relationship. Mercy requires us to see another person.

Rules can tell us exactly where the boundary lies. Mercy has an annoying tendency to cross the boundary.

And Jesus is saying that if our religion has become primarily about maintaining the boundaries of purity, we have missed the living heart of God. He says of the religious leaders, “They are blind guides of the blind.” And then he says something wonderfully dismissive: “Let them alone.” Don’t pay them any mind. Don’t follow them into their blindness. Because they are so preoccupied with the rules that they can’t see what God is actually doing.

But then something fascinating happens. Jesus himself encounters a boundary.

A Canaanite woman comes to him because her daughter is suffering. The disciples want to send her away. And initially, Jesus seems to share their understanding: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” When she persists, he gives that terribly uncomfortable response about not taking the children’s food and throwing it to the dogs.

There are different ways to interpret this passage. Perhaps Jesus is deliberately exposing the disciples’ prejudice by voicing it aloud and allowing the woman to reveal the greater truth. Or perhaps—and I don’t find this threatening at all—Jesus, in his full humanity, actually has his own understanding enlarged through this encounter. Perhaps this woman helps Jesus see that the mercy of God cannot be contained even within the boundaries he had understood for his ministry.

Either way, mercy wins.

“Woman, great is your faith!” Jesus says. And her daughter is healed. Suddenly the words of Isaiah are being enacted before our eyes: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” The outsider is no longer outside. The boundary that seemed so certain can’t withstand the movement of divine mercy.

And that brings us to Paul’s remarkable words in Romans: “The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” What does he mean by that?

Paul is wrestling with an enormous theological problem.

If God made covenant promises to Israel, and many Israelites had not accepted Paul’s proclamation about Jesus, did that mean God’s promises had failed?

Max King, in a fascinating book called Irrevocable, argues that Paul’s answer is far more radical than Christianity has generally been willing to admit. Paul does not conclude that God has rejected Israel because some have failed to believe correctly. Quite the opposite. Israel remains beloved. God’s covenant remains intact. Human unbelief cannot defeat divine faithfulness. Think about the implications of that.

We so often imagine salvation as depending upon the adequacy of our response to God. Did I believe the right things? Did I say the right prayer? Did I belong to the right religion? Did I follow the right rules? But Paul shifts the center of gravity away from the reliability of our response and places it squarely upon the reliability of God’s love. “The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”

And then Paul says something even more astonishing: “For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.” All in disobedience. All receiving mercy.

Maybe that “imprisonment” isn’t something God has done to us so much as a description of the human condition we all share. We are all caught in illusion. We are all limited in what we can see. We are all capable of fear and selfishness and cruelty. We are all tempted to build walls around ourselves and imagine that our little territory is the whole world. None of us sees completely.

And therefore none of us gets to stand on one side of the boundary and point toward those unfortunate sinners on the other side. We’re all in this together. And God’s response to this universal human condition is not universal punishment. It’s universal mercy.

That is hard for us. We like our binaries: saved and lost, believer and unbeliever, Christian and non-Christian, heaven and hell. We want to know who belongs where. And sometimes we even object to grace because it doesn’t seem fair. Surely somebody has to pay. Surely somebody has to be left outside.

But perhaps God’s justice is larger than our notions of fairness. Perhaps God’s justice is always restorative, always healing, always working to bring the lost home and the excluded inside. Perhaps divine Love simply refuses to give up on anyone.

That doesn’t mean faith doesn’t matter. It matters enormously. But perhaps faith isn’t the admission ticket that gets us into heaven while everyone else is turned away.

Perhaps faith is how we awaken to the living God who is already here.

Because salvation isn’t only about what happens after we die. It is about whether we experience the living God here and now. It’s whether we awaken from our illusions, whether our hearts become more open, whether fear gives way to love, whether we discover that we belong to one another and to God.

The tragedy isn’t that God might stop loving us. The tragedy is that we might spend our lives unable to experience the Love that has never stopped holding us.

Isaiah saw a house with the doors thrown open. The psalmist saw all the peoples of the earth gathered in praise. Paul saw a God whose response to human disobedience is mercy. And Jesus crossed a boundary and discovered a woman of extraordinary faith waiting on the other side.

Maybe that’s the invitation for us as well: to stop guarding the boundaries and start opening the doors.

Because God’s house is a house of prayer for all peoples. God’s gifts and calling are irrevocable. And no matter how many boundaries we draw, how many categories we create, or how many people we decide don’t belong, Love keeps moving outward.

And mercy keeps winning.