Unless you’ve been living under a rock, which might be preferable given the current climate of our culture, you’ve probably seen many memes floating across the internet, littered on social media outlets either garnering lighthearted approval or pointed rebuff. Memes are those “virally transmitted image embellished with text, usually sharing pointed commentary on cultural symbols, social ideas, or current events.” (1) At the cost of being drastically oversimplified, memes usually highlight some sort of truth, lopsided as it may be. The word “meme” comes from the Greek word μίμημα (mīmēma), meaning something counterfeited or copied or “anything imitated.” Thus, a meme is a “unit of cultural information spread by imitation.” (2) Like all viral malignancies today, memes have infiltrated every aspect of life and culture. For better or worse, Christian theology has not been excluded. It’s our aim to dissect some of these memes and see what we can learn from them.
Welcome to Christian Memes!
In today’s meme we see a picture taken from the New Testament book of Revelation where Jesus promises, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.” (3) But in this meme’s comical rendition, while Jesus is knocking on someone’s door from outside he says:
“Hey Debbie? It’s me, the Lord.”
“Listen… You need to stop telling the doctor your health is in my hands. You’re going to have to watch your carbs and get your A1C checked on the regular, ok?”
So, what is the meaning of this meme? What truth does it convey? What cultural or social idea is it pointing us to? If I had to guess, I’d say this meme is poking fun of the fallacy usually committed by Christians who abandon all personal culpability in some area while simultaneously trusting God’s plan to resolve it. It would be like Carrie racing in the Indy 500 without having ever learned to drive and then asking Jesus to “take the wheel.” Or in this case, it’s like Debbie working hard to daily consume 10,000 calories of straight carbohydrates and sugar while claiming her failing health is in God’s hands. No wonder Jesus wants to distance his role in Debbie’s physical condition.
While the hyperbolic examples above might sound far-fetched, at least they are consistent with human nature. It makes perfect sense that the one shirking responsibility in the first place to then, in the most Christian way possible and cloaked in Christian jargon, dodge responsibility again by ascribing the undesired outcome to God and His mysterious ways.
Martin Luther King said, “One of the most common tendencies of human nature is that of placing responsibility on some external agency for sins we have committed or mistakes we have made. We are forever attempting to find some scapegoat on which we cast responsibility for our actions.” (4) As Adam blamed Eve for his disobedience and likewise Eve blamed the serpent for hers, still today we too are quick to cast our failures upon anything but ourselves, even if it is towards God himself.
If this meme’s lesson could be summarized it would be this: Don’t claim that God is responsible for things that are clearly ours to oversee.
Conversely, we should not make ourselves responsible for things that are clearly God’s. The rub though is that many matters in life are often a synergy between our actions, no matter how weak and feeble they may be, and God’s perfect supremacy.
This tightrope walk between our own freewill and culpability and God’s overarching sovereignty in our lives must be made slowly and with balance. This is difficult. So at first reaction we want to choose one or the other. As Tim Downs explains:
“All acts of balancing, whether physical or mental, are inherently exhausting . . . As the cost of failure increases, so do the tension and fatigue. Because maintaining balance is so tiring, most people who find themselves on a tightrope instinctively look for the best direction to fall. Better to be at rest in error than to have to maintain the wearisome balance of truth. This has been the source of much of the heresy in the history of the church. How can Jesus be fully God and fully man? I don’t know, so I’ll just choose which way to fall: He’s God or He’s man. How can God be sovereign if at the same time man possesses a free will? I can’t reconcile the two, so I’ll become a hyper-Calvinist or an Arminian. I may be mistaken, but at least I’m off the tightrope.” (5)
Stay on the tightrope. There is wisdom from the old saying some attribute to Augustine and others to Saint Ignatius, “Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.”
But what are your thoughts?
Micah Coate, President and Host of Salvation and Stuff
Accessed April 16, 2022 from: https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-a-meme-2483702
Accessed April 16, 2022 from: https://lsj.gr/wiki/μίμημα
Revelation 3:20 NIV
King, Martin Luther, Taking Responsibility For Your Actions, taken from sermon, July 26, 1953 Accessed April 24, 2022 from: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/accepting-responsibility-your-actions
Downs, Tim, Finding Common Ground: How to Communicate with Those Outside the Christian Community…While We Still Can (Chicago: Moody Press, 1999), 93.
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