Following the Call, Sept. 1
Beyond truisms. Cafeteria lines don’t cut it. Gospel bombshells. Your turn.
The morality of most moralists, ancient and modern, has been one solid and polished cataract of platitudes flowing for ever and ever. That would certainly not be the impression of the imaginary independent outsider studying the New Testament. He would be conscious of nothing so commonplace and in a sense of nothing so continuous as that stream. He would find a number of strange claims that might sound like the claim to be the brother of the sun and moon; a number of very startling pieces of advice; a number of stunning rebukes; a number of strangely beautiful stories…. He would see a number of very daring simplifications of the difficulties of life; like the advice to shine upon everybody indifferently as does the sunshine or not to worry about the future any more than the birds. He would find on the other hand some passages of almost impenetrable darkness, so far as he is concerned, such as the moral of the parable of the Unjust Steward. Some of these things might strike him as fables and some as truths; but none as truisms.
— G. K. Chesterton (from The Everlasting Man)
Beyond Truisms
The first time I read the Sermon on the Mount I got confused and, quite honestly, defensive. I was eighteen at the time, a relatively new Christian. “Blessed are the poor, the meek, the persecuted? Turn the other cheek, love my enemy?” Really? “Do not worry about tomorrow, what you’ll eat or drink… Ask and it will be given to you… Pray and give in secret.” Come on! I’ve got exams and tuition to think about.
The more I read the more tempted I became to view Jesus’ words metaphorically. He must have been exaggerating. In my mind, to take Jesus’ words at face value would border on the ridiculous. No, I concluded, he must have been speaking rhetorically. He simply wanted to grab our attention. Right? Granted, buried underneath his radical commands were some common-sense virtues and principles—wisdom that could help everyone to live better, more fruitful lives. But Jesus certainly didn’t expect us to cut off our limbs if they happen to cause us to sin. How wise is it anyway to give to every person who begs of us? And even if God provides for our every need, certainly we must still be prudent to plan for the future.
But the more I read the Gospels and saw how Jesus (and the earliest Christians) actually lived, the more I realized that he gave little indication that he was simply exaggerating to make a moral point. As Chesterton puts it, he never dispensed truisms. In fact, Jesus seemed to threaten most everything the moralists of his age valued. “What is highly valued among men,” Jesus explained, “is detestable in God’s sight” (Luke 16:16). No, Jesus consistently pushed back against the “wisdom of the age.” If all Jesus did was hammer home some universally accessible truths, then why did he end up getting crucified?
Jesus indeed startled his listeners. He did so, however, in order to overturn conventional wisdom. When God’s kingdom breaks in, everything comes into question. Our order of things gets upset. In Jesus’ day, families divided and economies were disrupted (e.g., Acts 19:23ff). Jesus’ words about God’s kingdom were inflammatory; they were daring and provocative in the ears of the Roman authorities and upended the Jew’s expectations of who the Messiah would be and what he would do.
And what about us? Where do we stand? Are we really all that different from those who heard Jesus the first time? Wouldn’t we push back too? Or have we grown so comfortable with Jesus and his message that we simply silence him by ignoring him? The title of Philip Yancey’s book, The Jesus I Never Knew, may have something to say to us. Unless we are willing to undergo an upheaval, I doubt we will ever fully grasp the power of Jesus’ foolish wisdom. We may as well settle on being good Christians.
Cafeteria Lines Don’t Cut It
One clever way to temper Jesus’ words is to pick and choose from his teaching what we want to obey and what we want to disregard. But, as David Dockery points out in his book, Seeking the Kingdom, “the teaching offered in the Sermon on the Mount is not a cafeteria line from which we can make selections according to our particular tastes.”
Let’s be honest. Our “tastes” and “sensibilities” are more than likely not aligned with God’s. We want to defend our rights, we want to get even, we want to get ahead. These pursuits do fit in very well with God’s kingdom priorities as described in the Sermon on the Mount. Unless we recognize how much our lives and thinking are, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “conformed to the pattern of this world” (Rom. 12:2), we will not be able to hear, let alone accept, Jesus’ message.
If you want conventional wisdom, then bypass the Sermon on the Mount. The greatest obstacle to reading the Sermon is not lack of understanding or overfamiliarity, but a lack of self-honesty. Instead of being “poor in spirit”, we prefer being good or religious people who seek spiritual tune-ups instead of revolution. Am I being too harsh? “The Christianity of Christendom,” comments Kierkegaard, “takes away from Christianity the offense, the paradox, etc., and instead of that introduces probability, the plainly comprehensible.” If we are not careful, we can easily turn the cross into “something like the child’s hobby-horse and trumpet.” (From “The Instant” 5, 2-3).
Gospel Bombshells
May I suggest that if the Sermon on the Mount were truly the church’s constitution, Sunday services might be rather different? Others think they would.
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
― Annie Dillard
Your Turn
Why do you think Jesus speaks in such a striking, jolting way? What conventional wisdom gets touted today that conflicts with Jesus’ teaching? I welcome your comments, opinions, questions, and personal experiences. Please check out the “comments” section at the bottom of each Newsletter to read what others are saying or if you’d like to leave a comment of your own.
This Ain't Common Sense
Dean, what you write is so true. As you will see in my book, the selection by Christoph Blumhardt makes very much the same point. The challenge for us is that we have lost the way when it comes to knowing what it means to be truly human. We are more accustom to living life on the basis of Adam's sin, who thought he could be like God, knowing good and evil. What I mean to say is that we as fallen humans prefer to assert our autonomy in denial of our dependency. This is the main reason why we are so anxious-ridden. Like you express, we don't live in accordance with who we really are or are meant to be: children of the father.
This is so scary I know it is true. Just don’t know how to get myself where I need to be.