AS FAR AS I CAN SEE

The practice of obedience to the words of Jesus improves faith in two ways. The first is that it increases one’s discernment of God’s will. As our Lord puts it, If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether [my] teaching is from God…Or again, If you abide in my word…you will know the truth…

Discernment of God’s will is something completely different from theoretical knowledge of God. Discernment is the spiritual outcome of obedience, not of study – unless the studying itself is a practice of obedience. Everywhere in the Christian life the rule is the same: like produces like. The practice of obedience is an activity of faith, and its consequence is greater faith: deeper, wider, higher, of eternity. No amount of study, however prodigious, can increase discernment even one iota, unless that study is itself faithful.

A wise parent gives her child the keys to the car only once she is confident in the child’s ability to drive. Similarly God rewards discernment only to those who have proven they will make good use of it.

The second way the practice of obedience improves faith flows readily from our image of gravitational attraction. Each step towards Christ decreases the pull of everything in conflict with Christ. The manifestation of this movement in actual life is a growing indifference to the things of the world, most notably to the opinion of others.

Our Lord is quite clear about this. Think of the Beatitudes as rules for obedience to Christ, and notice how the list concludes: Do these things, and the world will hate you. What the world will hate is losing you, or more exactly, of losing your devotion, of losing your commitment, of losing your love. There is none more vindictive than the one no longer desired.

As we practice obedience to Christ, the things of the world begin to grow strangely dim, in the poetic image. All that is given priority over Christ fades first, then all that is not of Christ. And we must not shy from the truth here. We must not say, All the things and people I love most dearly will become even more dear to me. No, they probably will not. Unless you [are willing to] hate your father and mother… Many or even most of the things you have always found most compelling will begin to lose their interest and attractiveness to you, even the things the world tells you are loveliest. Even the things your own heart tells you are fair and true, or at least do no harm. The fact is, the discipline of obedience will reveal what is fair and true for you, and what isn’t. If you are not in Christ, you are a very poor judge of your own values. Inside of Christ, Christ will judge. That is the consuming fire, the fire that purifies one’s faith.

Be mindful of what you pray for – Jesus never healed anyone of poverty.

We’ve spoken of the second pillar of salvation: obedience. But what of belief, the first?

What is this belief? Paul tells us very succinctly that it is the sincere belief that Jesus is Lord. That sounds very simple, doesn’t it? Almost too simple to be true? It’s like believing that so-and-so is President, or that Columbus sailed the seas in 1492.

But a little reflection reveals that the belief isn’t quite so simple as that. Jesus after all was a man just like us, someone with a heartbeat and personal memories and bodily needs, someone who grew from a baby through childhood into young manhood, and then was killed. And what Paul is saying, succinctly, is that we must believe that Jesus, that man, was brought back to life and glorified in his flesh, and has now taken the place of the Son of God as the substance of the creative power of love, as the source of all coherence and meaning, and as the wellspring of everlasting life for every human being ever born. That man, Jesus. Not some unknowable Spirit. That particular man. The one with the heartbeat and childhood memories of Mary and Joseph.

When we put it that way, it seems like something that’s impossible even to understand, much less believe. And of course that’s right. The ‘belief’ cannot be arrived at by any line of rational thought, whether empirical like the scientist’s or theoretical like the metaphysician’s. Whatever this ‘belief’ is, it is disconnected from our understanding. We either have it – however tentatively – or we don’t; we’ve either been given it, or we haven’t (yet).

Let me put this another way. At the height of our loftiest speculation about God, it is possible I suppose to arrive at some conception of those qualities mentioned above: the creative power of love, the source of coherence, and so on. But that’s not what we’re asked to believe. What we’re asked to believe is that Jesus is all those things.

The man, Jesus.

The first pillar of salvation is the belief that Jesus, the man, is Lord. The second is related to the first. It is the practice of obedience, and it’s related to the first in the sense that it facilitates the power of that belief, the strengthening of one’s faith.

I say the practice of obedience because its rewards are gradual and cumulative rather than immediate. The strengthening of faith may be likened to the increased gravitational pull of Christ vis-a-vis the pulls competing with it, the steps of obedience to movement towards him, and away from oneself.

To switch to a different image, growth in faith may be likened to growth in bodily strength. The body grows stronger slowly and cumulatively, in response to a practice of obedience to a training program. A training program holds out the promise of greater strength, but the only way of testing that promise is to follow the program. Just so, the Christian promise is that growth in faith results from following a program of obedience to the discipline of Christ, but the only way of testing the promise is through obeying Christ. The results cannot be experienced prior to the practice. We live by faith, not by sight, is Paul’s way of describing the Christian life, the life of increasing attraction to Christ. Come, and see is Christ’s own formulation of the instruction.

There are spiritual responses – almost universal – that spring from levels deeper in our nature than where sentences or even words are formed. Spontaneous smiling is an example. We all smile immediately at the antics of babies, at hummingbirds darting into view, on sharing memories with old friends. These reach deeply into us and engage something there, a primordial innocence at the origin of whatever else we have become.

The Fall is not the death of our soul, but rather its subordination.

In Christian ministry, death is often imaged as a passageway leading from this world to the next, or a bridge uniting modes of existence, or a gateway through which we step from the mortal into the eternal. These are all perfectly appropriate images, but it’s important to emphasize the continuity they represent, rather than the supposed elevation.

What passes over the bridge is the essence who we are. What emerges on the far side of the door is recognizably the same personality as the one who entered from the near side. Far from turning us into saints or angels, death doesn’t even improve us. Death is transportation, not transformation. Who we are here and now is what we will be there and then; what is changed is just the nature of the world in which we find ourselves.

But what a change that will be!

When God first refused Israel entry into the Promised Land and sent the nation back into the wilderness, it wasn’t to gain time in order to accommodate the Promised Land to them: it was to cultivate a new Israel, an Israel that could flourish in what the Promised Land had to offer.

As we approach Heaven, may we profit from our own sojourn in the wilderness.

One thing we know, as a starting point: God does not speak to groups or nations or generations or ages. None of those has ears. God speaks – Jesus speaks – to individuals. Christ’s Spirit does not inhabit groups or even couples. There is no ‘soul’ of any historical period or party or country. God’s transactions are utterly individual and unique:

But you – su – when you pray, go into your closet – eis to tameion sou – and close your door – tyn thuran sou.

The Bible is not the Word of God. It is chief among the written communications inspired by God, but it is not the Word of God. Jesus Christ is the Word of God, and Jesus Christ is a person.

The living reality of the Word of God is the personal communication between Jesus Christ and oneself, and that communication is unique. It is Love’s own achievement of God’s intention in the creation of each individual.

In the beginning was the Word. In whatever way God exists, the perfect idea of each individual exists, has always existed in the mind of God.

And the Word was with God. Each idea was God’s comfort and treasure, until introduced into creation.

And the Word was God. The perfection of each created thing, most generously in God’s created children, is part of God’s self-revelation.

A new mother is extraordinarily attentive to the sounds her baby is making or might make in the adjoining room. Her attentiveness is not simply a fact about her; it has become a part of her spiritual reality, a part of what she is now. She is spiritually bound to her baby, and the material of the binding is her attentiveness.

And what is true of her is true of everyone. Our reality – Our Being-in-the-world, to borrow from Heidegger – consists largely in the nature and direction of our attentiveness. And the objects of our attentiveness bind us, as the baby binds the mother.

For example, we have long been slaves, spiritually, to the mechanical clock, or more precisely, to the flat, arithmetical nature of time that the mechanical clock postulates. Regardless of what we are doing, we do it in attendance on the clock. Our attentiveness to the clock lies deeper in our spirit even than the things themselves that we are doing, since the things we do are almost all done with reference to it. Our spirits are bound to the time. That’s why becoming utterly engrossed in something has the phenomenology of liberation, of freedom, and why becoming suddenly aware once again of ‘the time’ has the feel of being reshackled.

Although it isn’t (yet) of the same magnitude as our enslavement to the clock, in recent decades – in a demonic caricature of attending to the words of Christ – we attend with paralyzing intensity to our phones and computers. When we are not listening to them, we are listening for them, listening for their call. Our attentiveness is focused on them and, again, that focus is our spiritual reality. Our reality is a binding orientation towards the words of the world, even if we are only listening for uplifting messages and good news.

Thinking highly of oneself isn’t pride – it’s vanity. Pride is thinking critically of others, in comparison to oneself. That’s why pride is so often unaware of itself, and only revealed in our attitude towards others.

Implicit in every judgment of others is an element of pride, because judgment necessarily assumes a position of elevation over the one being judged. Those whose fundamental attitude towards the world is judgmental are riddled through and through with pride, though none of us is innocent here, and those few whose approach to innocence is nearest are mainly regarded as fools. The fact that pride is principally other directed is why even those of no achievement can be prideful; pride is in fact perhaps nowhere more common.

Pride is the Original Sin, and it is an inheritance, not of genetics, but of self-directedness, a blossoming awareness of separation from others, from the world, and from God, along with the pain of that separation. Pride is the demonic analgesic of that pain.

There is no worldly riddance from it; the myriad of attempts to do so are the text both of the human comedy and the human tragedy. It is an existential dilemma, a Catch-22: Would you be human, then must you be self-oriented, with the fear and defenses that entails. Hell is our condition, our starting point, not our destination.

The only solution to the dilemma is to lose self-centeredness. When Jesus tells us that we can’t even see the Kingdom until we become (again) like children, that’s what he’s talking about. When he speaks of regaining our family through following Him, that’s what he’s talking about. When He speaks of the greatest love being loss of one’s own life, that’s what He’s talking about.

The long and winding road back to childhood is the Way of Christ.