“God of the broken.”

M,

I feel I need to be clear about something off the bat. When I say He is for the broken it does not mean that He is in opposition to the unbroken. I am not saying that all the strong people of the world are excluded from the table of God. That would imply that God is petty and, despite what the scriptures might sometimes seem to suggest, He is not in the least a petty, tin pot god.

It is not that He is God of one side over the other. It is that all sides may not look alike even though they are the same. It is that everyone is broken, cut off from real purpose and set adrift from the eternity that beats in the heart of our fading human lives. When Cadmus called life absurd he was right. Life that ends is absurd. Cut off from the high calling of God to be like Him we are absurd. Everyone is broken. We have more psychology now to break it down into disorders and ailments but everyone has always been broken.

The difference is coming in from the cold and staying out in it. The difference is the solution you choose for your own personal battles with meaning.

He spoke to the poor, the oppressed, the losers, the widowed, the hurt and the criminal because they were broken in the most overt ways. They had little plaster over their festering wounds or none at all. The wheel at the centre of this fallen world had crushed their dreams so they were open to a new reality. This does not mean He picked people open to fantasy. No. He choose those open to the idea that this world was wrong and not enough.

A good analogy is the story of the addict. Imagine that we are all addicts. We are struggling with various fugue states and compulsive but destructive habits that have taken over our lives. We cannot function except to feed our addiction. We cannot see beyond that.

Now, in the brilliant programmes set up to battle addiction they tell you that at some point the addict themselves have to reach rock bottom. They have to see the end of the empty barrel they have been drinking from. Then they are open to all the other steps to freedom. Then they can start to get hold of life again. They will most likely relapse. They will fail and fall and make a thousand mistakes in-between. The vital thing is that they know now that they are broken. They know they cannot live any sort of full life with the addiction in the lead.

It does not come to us naturally to let God in. Even if we are born in a church pew we will experience that moment of crisis that will question all we believe and all we profess. Faith out of fear simply does not work. Covering the cracks simply will not last. We are all going through valleys and mountaintops, all rising and falling and making a mess while doing so.

And finally, It is not that He speaks only to the outwardly broken. He spoke to all men He encountered. He spoke to shady men and women but also pseudo Jewish kings and Roman leaders at the height of civilization of that day. The question is: who listened?