I
guess it was about eight years ago that my wife and daughter and I went to a funky
hot springs resort up in the Sierras for a few days’ of cheap vacation. My younger brother met us there and the next
morning he made a careless mistake. I
probably should have said something when we arrived, to remind him to be on his
guard, because there we were, relaxing on the front porch of the old hotel and
making small talk with some of the other guests, when my brother nonchalantly
“outed” me as an Episcopal priest. An
awkward silence fell over the group and I braced myself for what might come
next. I didn’t have to wait long, because right away,
one of our new acquaintances, a guy of in his mid-fifties with long gray hair in
a t-shirt with a Celtic design, started to let me have it.
It
turned out he was an ex-Catholic and he wanted to know why “The Church” hadn’t
stopped the U.S. from invading Iraq. And
even though it was the last thing in the world I wanted to be doing on my
vacation, I tried to respond respectfully to his complaints. After all, there was something kind of
touching about his belief that “The Church” might still have the moral
authority, let alone the political power, that he imagined it had. But the more I talked to him, the clearer it
became that he wasn’t really interested in learning anything from me about the
real church or the real politics of the nation.
He just kept coming back around to his anger about the war, and his
insistence that “The Church” should have prevented it. Finally, all I could say was, “brother, if
you feel so strongly about what The Church should be doing, maybe you ought to
go to church.”
Jesus
was no stranger to antagonists. People
were forever coming up to him in public and starting arguments, trying to put
him on the defensive and paint him into a verbal corner. And these were high-stakes games, because in
those days the Jewish religion wasn’t just a set of private beliefs. For the Jews, religious life and identity
were the heartbeat of their nation and of that nation’s politics. It had been so since that legendary time when
Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, and Joshua took them into
Canaan, to take possession of the land. And
in Jesus’ time the Jews were in a long and profound religious and political crisis
brought on by the domination of Rome.
That
domination allowed them a certain amount of latitude to perform their
sacrifices, and celebrate their festivals, and study and teach their
scriptures. But for the Jews the purpose
of those sacrifices was to seal their covenant with the one true God, who had
chosen them to reveal his glory among the nations. And their festivals were charged with the
stories of God’s mighty acts in history, to deliver them from the oppression of
cruel foreign tyrants. And their
scriptures recounted those stories and assured them again and again of the sovereign
majesty of their God, and the righteousness of His law, and His coming judgment
that would vindicate their cause before all the rulers of the earth.
It’s
no wonder, then, that it rankled the Jews to look up from their prayers in the courts
of their temple in Jerusalem and see soldiers on the walls of a Roman fortress
peering down at them with watchful eyes.
They asked themselves how long
it would be before God would act, and when they would be truly free, and what
they should do in the meantime. And they
splintered into different sects and parties—Herodians, Sadducees, Pharisees—whose
differences of religion were also differences of policy. Their disputes about how to be faithful were
also about how to survive and how to resist.
The
hot spot of these controversies was, of course, Jerusalem and the temple
itself, and it is there that Jesus’ mission inevitably leads him. The Gospels tell how when he gets there each
one of these parties sends its best debaters to spar with him, to try to show
him up or trick him into saying something that will get him into trouble. But he parries every attack, and escapes
every trap, and so we come to this final encounter with the Pharisees. One of them asks him which is the greatest of
the commandments in the law, and Jesus gives one of his trademark responses,
one that doesn’t exactly answer the original question: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind'” he says, quoting
the book of Deuteronomy, “This is the greatest and first commandment. But this commandment by itself is out of
balance, like a picture hanging crooked on the wall, without another
commandment that is also first and greatest—the one in the Book of Numbers that
says `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'
It’s
a wonderful answer, and we could stop right there and award Jesus the prize for
“best religious teacher.” But he didn’t
go to Jerusalem to win prizes. The equal
and interdependent love of God and neighbor isn’t just a nice idea, and Jesus
shows this by turning the tables on the Pharisees and asking them a
question. It’s a question about the
Messiah, about what kind of leader God will send to free Israel from her
oppressors and establish justice and peace.
It is a question about what kind of power that leader will use to put
his enemies under his feet. Because the time for arguing about
interpretations is over— Jesus has come to Jerusalem to act, to display the
power that will make the promises of God come true. It is the power of love, and Jesus will put that power into action on the cross.
No
one ever had more to give to his neighbors than Jesus. His unsurpassed spiritual enlightenment, his wisdom
that communicated the tangible closeness of God, his uncanny ability to
perceive the inner thoughts and motivations of others, his extraordinary power
to heal and even to raise the dead: you would have to say his potential to do
good in the world was second to none.
And so, if he really loved his neighbor as himself, you would think he
would have done everything he could to live as long as possible. He would have used his gifts to political
advantage and gained as much worldly influence as he could. He certainly would not have thrown his life
away as if it were of no value, as if he were a common criminal or a rebellious
slave.
But
that is what he did, and from the human point of view, it made him a total
failure. It only makes sense as an act
of love for God. For the love of God,
love with all his heart, and soul, and mind, Jesus was willing to surrender all
that he had, all those extraordinary gifts that he used to such good effect on
behalf of his neighbor. And it was this
total giving of himself that made his unparalleled giftedness complete. Anything less, and the story could never have
taken its next turn. Jesus might have
been remembered in history as a great religious reformer, or a national hero
and a righteous king, but he never would have become the Christ of God.
And
this is where the love of Jesus for God circles back around to his
neighbor. On the cross Jesus emptied
himself, and so left open a space for us—for our gifts, our faith, and hope,
and love. In his resurrection God filled
that space with power, so that through people like us, the love of God in
Christ has reached more people, and done more good, than any merely human love
could ever have done. The power of the gospel is God the Spirit
working through human love, human prayers, human acts, and, yes, human
institutions. That is its limitation, but
also its invincible strength.
And
when we give some portion of our own lives to the Gospel, we are humbly staking
our claim to a share of its power. We
are trusting that what we surrender for love, God will use, and multiply
abundantly through the gifts of our neighbor.
This is the creative law of the universe, and the power of its health
and salvation. And there is one place I
know of where that law has a name and a story, where it has honor, and they
study and teach it and hope for its future; one place in the world where,
however imperfectly, they know they have no other purpose than to make it the basis
of everything they do—a place called “The Church.”
No comments:
Post a Comment