Karma and Grace

It may come as a surprise to learn that the most comprehensive and clearly articulated views on divine justice come not from Western religions, but from Eastern ones. For Hinduism and Buddhism, what goes around does indeed come around, over and over, inevitably, across unfathomable eons of time. The wheel's turning pushes evil-doers lower and lower on the great chain of being, and elevates the righteous to higher and higher stations of being. Everything is in accordance with iron-clad, unchanging, and unchangeable laws that perfectly proportion actions and reactions in both the moral and the physical universe.

Who among law and order types could ask for a more perfect answer to the age-old question of why the rains fall on the just as well as the unjust? According to it, people get exactly the amount of rain on their parades as their wrong decisions and actions warrant, no less and no more, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. The good guys do finish first, and the bad guys last, eventually if not sooner.

It is just this kind of thinking that, in spite of every effort to keep it at bay, insinuates itself with astonishing regularity into even the most grace-filled witnesses to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faith. It is evident almost from the beginning in all three faiths. There we were, the story goes, happily sheltered in Adam's loins, only to have the promise of an everlastingly tranquil future snatched away from us by a single ill-considered judgment on our parents' part. We never even got to do the crime ourselves, before we wound up doing the time for it, in a world that all of a sudden became a prison-house rather than a garden. To wrench Abraham Lincoln's immortal phrasing from its original context, we should all tremble at the thought that God is just. Keep defying him, and bad things will happen to you in this life, and in the next …and the next…

This very tight, tie-up-all-the-loose-ends kind of thinking both answers a lot of questions and provides a lot of inspiration. Knowing how things really work in the world, we can now busy ourselves either with doing the right things out of a fear of punishment, or for the sake of jackpot rewards like having a bunch of virgins all to yourself in the hereafter for getting knocked off in a holy war on earth. (I still wonder how the virgins themselves will be feeling about their situation up there.) Whoever first put together these economics of salvation would probably think now that "he" (no woman would have ever done it this way) deserves a Nobel Prize.

No wonder St. Paul ran into such trouble with Jerusalem Christians and Thessalonikan Jews. He was intemperate enough to insist that Law enshrined in karmic-like thinking is death-dealing, not life-giving. That Christ frees people not just from the punishments prescribed by the Law, but from the force and authority of the Law itself. Not that the Law is annuled, any more than that the idea of a just God has become obsolete. But that in Christ, sinful acts are forgiven and the Law which defines them as sinful is, in instances of God's own choosing, nullified. Including the sinful act --- if it is one --- of choosing a different path than the one Christ followed, and the law that says we have to believe the right things or suffer everlastingly for not doing so.

Paul's kind of thinking is difficult to absorb, primarily because it demands so much more of us than the kind of thinking that puts everything into immediate good order by means of unambiguous statements about right and wrong, reward and punishment, present and future. For Paul, there are breaks in the karmic chain of cause and effect, work stoppages in the mills of the gods, changes of mind on the part of humankind's creator, a new order of being, an unfolding of a destiny beyond the logic of just desserts, in short, pure, unbounded, unfathomable, world-reconstituting grace. Grace, mercy, peace, love --- just the things quickly stomped underfoot by the platitudes and piety of people too certain for their own good and ours of what God has already decided for everyone else.
What I find especially ennobling in both Hindu and Buddhist thinking about karma is their characterization of it as a problem to be overcome rather than a truth to be enshrined. In very different ways to be sure, both religions offer liberation from karmic captivity, rather than baptism into it. Just as grace does.