My karma sucks

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Whoever digs a pit will fall into it; if someone rolls a stone, it will roll back on them.

Proverbs 26:27 (NIV)

When I think about good and bad people I often find myself thinking how great it would be, when bad people more or less directly earn the fruits of their evil deeds. But every so often people manage to avoid mayor parts or even all of the consequences of their behavior. A politician who embezzled money has to pay a small fine and instead of going to prison is sent to his luxurious home. Or a guy like Al Capone who spend less than eight years behind bars, half of which he was still running his empire and none of which for murder. The fact that he died at the age of 48 (at his luxurious estate) from an STD hardly satisfies my human desire for justice. But then I give it another thought just to realize that I am a hypocrite. Because, to be honest, I don’t want to be punished every time I did something bad. So I and my loved ones play in a different league than everybody else. It is like in traffic, where everyone who is faster than me is a reckless endangerment and everyone who is slower than me is an unnecessary obstruction.

At my parents household it was common to quote Proverbs 26:27a every time somebody had some sort of accident (spilling a drink, bumping a toe, etc.) after being mean to somebody else. (But to be fair, the chances of having been mean right before an accident of such sort was quite high in my family. And it is great to see that we have managed to leave that pit now that we are all older.) Today’s internet culture shortened that verse to a simple “instant karma” but the idea remains the same. You did something bad and get immediate punishment.

I am not too familiar with the exact idea of karma so I looked it up on Wikipedia. It says “Karma means action, work or deed; it also refers to the principle of causality where intent and actions of an individual influence the future of that individual. Good intent and good deed contribute to good karma and future happiness, while bad intent and bad deed contribute to bad karma and future suffering.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Karma&oldid=656391242) The first I noticed was that karma, contrary to what I had thought, was not necessarily only connected to the idea of a final reckoning. So in a way it can be seen as parallel to Proverbs 26:27 or, in other words, be described with “you reap what you sow”. But I have a problem with the concept of giving out a plus for every good thing and a minus for every bad one.

Imagine a company with a policy to be nice to each other. (It’s difficult, I know…) And now there is an employee who is carrying a big box, approaching a door. His co-worker sees him and has to options now: Option 1 is to pretend like he didn’t seen him, option 2 is to open the door for him. Option 1 would be a bad deed, option 2 a good one. So when management sees him option 1 gives him a minus on his employment record and option 2 a plus. That is how karma works, right? Actually I would say, that option 2 does not give him a plus but a zero. Because he did not do something good but only what was expected of him. So I personally would not distinguish between a good and a bad deed, but between a good, a bad, and an expected deed. To do, what is expected of you, does not make you a good person. Especially if you just do it because you don’t want to get fired.

But when I now look at the list of things that are expected of me, when I look at what God said we should do, I must realize it says: “do everything good and nothing bad”. And then it hits me! I cannot do anything good in the concept of karma. I can only do what is bad or what is expected of me. I can only earn a zero or a minus. For everything good I could think of is already in the “be nice to each other”-policy. There is no way for me to eliminate my failures, to cancel out the minus with a plus. And right there, in this little “for me” lies my salvation. For it is only impossible for me.

When Jesus walked the earth he was obedient to his father in every way. He was never punished with a minus. And on top of that he willingly died on our behalf, offering us to take every single minus on him to the cross.

In one of his strange stories Baron Munchausen explained how he saved himself from drowning by pulling himself out on his own hair. As comical and impossible that immediately sounds, it is somewhat exactly what we are trying to do when we try to blot out our own failures with good deeds. And it is as useless as trying to pull ourselves out of the mud on our own hair. We need somebody else who is not with us in the mud to accomplish that. And here he comes. Our knight in shining armor. Jesus, the blameless, who takes the blame for all the evil we have done. He pulls us out of the mud by jumping into it, leaving us his armor so we can shine in his glory.

With his action he broke the cycle of sowing and reaping. Even though we have done bad things he gives us a good harvest. This news is better than everything we could have hoped for. But it also causes a problem. For it only works when we let Jesus be the judge. And he is patient with us. He knows how and when to recon with us. And we have to trust him that he will do his job right. Even with people like Al Capone. He is the perfect judge for us, but we have to let him be the perfect judge even for people we don’t like.

One Comment
  1. […] One of the things God told Adam and Eve about eating from the Tree of Knowledge was that they would “surely die”. And after spending all their lives only in His Presence seeing Him in all His Glory they still decided not to believe Him. That day they learned the hard way that God always keeps His promises. And being kicked out of Paradise into a fallen world let them experience something they had never seen before: decay. (On a less theological note: I am convinced that at this moment entropy became one of the driving forces in the universe.) And one of the things they had to watch falling apart, was their own bodies. True, they had some hundred years for that observation, but it was obvious for them non the less. And they discovered death in small doses: sickness. The fact that we are not healthy all the time is a direct result of mankind not trusting God, of the incident we call The Fall. (I am at no point here implying that personal sickness is a direct result of previous personal sin or even family curses. Jesus is very clear on that one (John 9:2-3) and I can’t understand why this theory is still tormenting the Body of Christ. See: My karma sucks) […]

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