A Spiritual Torpedo

Is Obeying Jesus Enough?

Following the Call, August 18

Right to the depths. The whole person. Can’t or won’t? Power in the blood. In response. Your turn.

Is it too strong to call this a spiritual torpedo? These statements of Jesus [in the Sermon on the Mount] are the most revolutionary statements human ears ever listened to, and it needs the Holy Spirit to interpret them to us; the shallow admiration for Jesus Christ as a teacher that is taught today is of no use.

Who is going to climb that “hill of the Lord”? To stand before God and say, “My hands are clean, my heart is pure” – who can do it? Who can stand in the eternal light of God and have nothing for God to blame in him or in her? – only the Son of God. . . .

Jesus says our disposition must be right to its depths, not only our conscious motives but our unconscious motives. Now we are beyond our depth. Can God make me pure in heart? Blessed be the name of God, he can! Can he alter my disposition so that when circumstances reveal me to myself, I am amazed? He can. Can he impart his nature to me until it is identically the same as his own? He can. That, and nothing less, is the meaning of his cross and resurrection.

—     Oswald Chambers (Following the Call: Living the Sermon on the Mount Together)

Right to the Depths

G. K. Chesterton once quipped, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” True enough. The question remains, however, why so many of us find Christ’s teachings so difficult. It is tempting to point to the teachings themselves, as if Jesus asks us to do all but the impossible. Humans are simply not wired to love enemies, turn the other cheek, forgo wealth, or put the interests of others before their own. Who of us performs a good deed without secretly hoping that someone will notice and recognize us for it? The world we live in operates on a basis entirely different than the one Jesus calls blessed. The poor may be blessed, but who really wants to be on the bottom rung? 

What if Jesus’ words actually have a different aim than moral accomplishment? Perhaps Jesus meant not to inspire us but to awaken our consciences, to bring our weakness and sin out into the open and bring us to repentance. Maybe Jesus’ words lead us to come to terms with our human condition, making us see how unworthy we are and how short we fall in meeting God’s unconditional requirements. Maybe our problem is trying too hard, and not depending enough on the grace and mercy of Christ.

Those who think that Jesus delivered a social blueprint miss the fact that we ourselves are the problem and, as Peter Kreeft observes, cling to what all of history disproves, “that with broken bricks we can constitute an unbroken building if only we have an unbroken blueprint.”  We need to move beyond such “shallow admiration.” Granted, Jesus did not go about trying to increase our guilt. His Sermon is not a charter of despair. However, Jesus’ sermon is penetrating, very penetrating.  Chambers is right. Our very disposition must be right to its depths.

All the more, we must read the Sermon on the Mount in the light of what he did, especially in his death and resurrection. His commands are not meant to guilt-trip us into right living; rather, they presuppose the grace of God which brings about an entirely new kind of life. Without the healing power of Christ, we will not only find his teachings difficult but will be left with ourselves, found wanting.  Why try when deep down I’m not what I appear to be?

The beyondness of the Sermon on the Mount guides us to grace; it lies not just in what Jesus teaches but in the new possibility that Jesus himself accomplishes through the cross. “Its vital element,” Eberhard Arnold reminds, is the light and warmth of the Holy Spirit. Here is Christ: the essence of salt, the strength of the tree that bears good fruit.” Quite simply, it consists in what Chamber’s describes as Jesus imparting his nature in us. Do we want that new nature or not?

The Whole Person

We recoil at Jesus’ teachings. Undergoing the kind of transformation needed to fulfill his commands is hard on the ego and the flesh. Jesus goes straight to the heart of the matter – obedience to God out of a pure heart. Purity of intention and the genuineness of our devotion exemplify the greater righteousness Jesus came to bring. This demands soul surgery. Sin does not begin when the deed is complete; it is within, from the human heart, that all evil comes (e.g., Mark 7:31–23; Luke 6:45).

All the more, Jesus addresses not just our attitude, but specific actions and social practices. For these indicate the kind of heart we have. Jesus brings about an inside-out revolution. He addresses the whole person precisely because so much of life and living is off track: people taking each other to court, stealing each other’s spouses, going to blows and getting even, hording wealth, erecting walls of division.  Jesus wants our all because his kingdom affects all of life. Jesus takes the intention for the act and presupposes that a right heart expresses itself in deeds of love. He never separates the outer and inner dimensions of life, as pious believers often do. “And why should he?” Bonhoeffer asks. “The Bible is always concerned with anthropos teleios, the whole man, even where, as in the Sermon on the Mount, the Decalogue is pressed home to refer to inward disposition.” Good intention is not enough. “What matters is the whole good.” (from Letters and Papers from Prison)

Can’t or Won’t?

The brethren came to the Abba Anthony and said to him, “Speak a word; how are we to be saved?”

The old man said to them, “You have heard the scriptures. That should teach you how.”

But they said, “We want to hear from you too, Father.”

Then the old man said to them, “The Gospel says, ‘If anyone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also.’”

They said, “We cannot do that.”

The old man said, “If you cannot offer the other cheek, at least allow one cheek to be struck.”

“We cannot do that either,” they said.

So he said, “If you are not able to do that, do not return evil for evil.”

And they said, “We cannot do that either.”

Then the old man said to his disciple, “Prepare a little brew of corn for these invalids. If you cannot do this, or that, what can I do for you? What you need is prayers.”

—Anthony the Great (from Sayings of the Desert Fathers, num. 19)

Power in the Blood

How is it possible to undergo radical transformation, the kind needed to actually do all of what Jesus says? In ancient times, blood was considered vital for making atonement. The selection below points to another aspect of blood, one found in the blood Christ shed for us on the cross.

Blood has a strange power. It cleanses the body of impurities, draws away the pus from injured tissues and restores them. It even has the power of rebuilding tissues that have been destroyed. Blood has the power of controlling the development of any part of the body, a power which reaches into the future.

Thus with the soul as well as the body. The power of Christ’s blood means the power of love! If blood can bring recovery to the sores of the body, love has the power to redeem the wounds of the personality. If blood has the power to restore broken-down tissues, love can make the wounded person whole again, until he becomes a child of God.

The action of blood is universal; it functions throughout the body, feeding the nerve tissues, the digestive organs, the bones, the muscles, and circulating throughout the whole system, having the power to restore any part of it. It is the same with love. Love is endowed with the power to redeem and heal [and transform] throughout the past, present, and future, every part of the whole. The supreme manifestation of that love is the blood which Christ shed on the cross.

— Toyohiko Kagawa (from Meditations on the Cross)

In Response

In response to my previous post regarding our inability to practice the Sermon on the Mount, one reader cites Karl Barth:

As Christians we ought to live the ethic/life of the Sermon. We are human, however, and so cannot live the Sermon perfectly. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give glory to God.

Barth is onto something here. If “ought” implies “can”, and if we lack the ability to do what we ought, then it must be God who supplies what we lack. “Christ in us, the hope of glory,” (Col. 1:27) writes the Apostle Paul. “He who began a good work in you is faithful to carry it on to completion…” Indeed, we live with hope, we can work out our salvation, since “it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose” (Philip. 1:6; 2:13). Living the Sermon on the Mount testifies less to our imperfection and more to God’s supremacy, for we are his workmanship to “do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10). Glory to God!

Your Turn

Is obeying Jesus enough? What has helped you to experience the transforming power of Christ? I welcome your comments, opinions, questions, and personal experiences, and will share a selection with readers each week.