Calling all worms!

I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people. Psalm 22:6

I think it was the poet Philip Larkin who joked (I hope it was a joke, anyway) “I don’t have enemies – I just have friends who don’t like me”. Ha very ha.

I thought of that bit of self-mocking humour when we received an on-line message from someone we used to know. An open message to all his friends, it consisted of just six words: “It’s OK – I hate me too”. Again, ha very ha – except that this time I fear it wasn’t a joke…

Plenty of people rallied round with messages of reassurance that his friends did in fact love him, and I hope that brought him comfort. But, if you allowed those six words to sink in, you realised how truly painful they were. What must it be like to reach such a pit of bitter depression and self-loathing?

We are living at a time when more and more people seem to be suffering with “mental health issues”, including “low self-esteem”. Some of us find that hard to understand – our problem, if anything, is precisely the opposite, excessively high self-esteem, which, of course, we don’t see as a problem at all because we’re just too full of our wonderful selves.

The person who wrote Psalm 22, traditionally regarded as David, had that problem: “I am a worm and not a man…” he miserably, wretchedly declares, convinced that he is rejected by both God and his fellow human beings. (No wonder that it was the opening words of this psalm that Jesus took on his lips as he was dying on the cross.)

There is a strand of Christianity which tends to emphasise our sinfulness, even after we have come to true faith in Jesus. I think of it as a kind of grovelling Christianity, which seems determined to “beat yourself up”.

It’s at odds with another strand – one that emphasises the great truth that by faith in Jesus we become God’s precious children, born again to a holy and victorious new life.

This strand is well reflected in 1 Peter 2:9-10: Peter tells his readers that “you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession… Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy”. Great, great truths! But is there a danger that they can be taken in such a way as to lead to over-confidence, even arrogance?

I wonder if you see yourself in either of those characterisations? – the wormlike nonentity? or the smug triumphalist? The truth about what it means to be a Christian lies, surely, somewhere right in the centre.

The great reformer Martin Luther had a phrase for it. A deeply religious man in his early years, he had an agonising sense of his own sinfulness, so intense as to lead him to enter the monastic life. But once he had discovered the great truth that we are “justified” – that is, put right with God - purely by God’s grace through faith in Christ, everything changed. It was the most wonderful discovery of his life, and it eventually changed not just him but history, as it was essentially the simple truth that kick-started the protestant reformation.

But… Luther didn’t lose his sense of being sinful. The phrase he came up with to describe his new state was, to use his own Latin, simul justus et peccator, which translates as “at one and the same time both justified and also a sinner”. Packed into those four words is a simple testimony: “Yes, I am indeed a sinner – but now I am a saved sinner, saved through the price Jesus paid for us by his death on the cross”.

In the Bible it was the apostle Paul who did most to open up and explain this truth, in passages such as Romans 3. But Jesus, who loved to tell stories, brought it vividly to life in his “parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector” (Luke 18:9-14).

The Pharisee is a man who looks in the mirror and is mightily impressed by the person he sees: “… not like other people - robbers, evil-doers, adulterers – or even like this tax-collector” (you can almost see his lip curling in contempt, can’t you?). The tax-collector, on the other hand, as wormlike as the man in Psalm 22, has no prayer to offer but “God, have mercy on me, a sinner”.

And what does Jesus say? “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God”. Could you wish for a clearer illustration of simul justus et peccator?

My wife and I tried to convey this truth – as unpreachily as possible, of course - to our friend who wrote that sad, self-hating message. We haven’t hear back from him. All we can do is pray that seed sown will bear fruit in helping him to find the love of God. The great miracle is that God knows the very worst about us – yet still he loves us.

Perhaps, if this truth has changed your life as well, you might join us in praying for our friend. Thank you.

Father, thank you that in your sight I am “clothed in the righteousness of Christ”. Help me to live day by day in the light of this truth. Amen.