Ephesians 4:1-7; Luke 18:18-27
In one way or another, many of us are tempted
at times to reduce the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ to a list of
rules to be obeyed simply by our own willpower. When we think that we live up to them, we pat
ourselves on the back for being good people who have supposedly earned God’s favor. When we think that others do not live up to
them, we feel justified in looking down upon them for apparently not being as righteous
as we are. Of course, no matter how
appealing such an approach to religion may be, it has nothing to do with the Savior
born at Christmas. Indeed, it is a complete rejection of why the Word became
flesh.
The rich young ruler in today’s gospel lesson
approached the Savior simply as a rabbi, a teacher of the Jewish law. He thought that he had always obeyed God’s
commandments and wanted to know if there was anything else he should do in
order to be sure of eternal life. That is when Christ gave the young man a
commandment which He knew he lacked the spiritual strength to obey: “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the
poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” Because the man was enslaved to loving his
wealth, he was very sad to hear these words.
When the disciples were astonished at the Lord’s teaching that it is so
hard for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom of God, He assured them that “What is
impossible with men is possible with God.”
Through this
conversation, the Lord challenged the rich man’s assumption that he had met God’s
requirements as though they were a simple checklist of right and wrong
behaviors. That is how He helped the
fellow confront the superficiality of thinking that he could become worthy of
eternal life by simply following the rules. The man surely had not mastered
Christ’s interpretation of the Old Testament law in the Sermon on the Mount, in
which He taught that those who are guilty of anger and insult are guilty of
murder and that those guilty of lust are guilty of adultery. Christ called His disciples to be perfect as the
Father in heaven is perfect. By that standard, this young man obviously needed
his eyes opened to the truth of where he stood before God, Who calls us to a
holiness that transcends what humans may achieve by seeking to obey laws to the
best of their ability. The Savior did
that by giving him a commandment that he lacked the strength to obey due to his
love of money.
Like the rest of
us, the rich young ruler was not able to conquer the corrupting power of sin in
his life by simply trying to follow a set of instructions through his own
willpower. Through His Incarnation as
the God-Man, Christ makes it possible for us to share in His fulfillment of our
calling to become like God in holiness. The
Savior has done what no mere teacher of the law could ever do by uniting
humanity with God for our salvation. He became
fully one of us in order to triumph over death, the wages of sin, and make us
partakers of the divine nature by grace.
Those who
distort the faith into a simple moralism of obeying laws inevitably have a very
superficial understanding of what it means for human beings to share personally
in the holiness of God. They are at
great risk of falling into the spiritual blindness of hypocritical
self-righteousness in which they interpret religious or moral laws in a way
that makes it easy on themselves and very hard on others in a way similar to
the Pharisees who rejected Christ. Slavery to pride, anger, and other passions
are the inevitable results of such perversions of the gospel. In contrast, St. Paul called the Christians
of Ephesus “to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called,
with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love,
eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Because “grace was given to each of us
according to the measure of Christ’s gift,” we must each embrace the humility
of those who know that they are recipients of great mercy. We obviously must cooperate with God’s grace
as we struggle to live faithfully, but we never earn or merit salvation simply on
the basis of our accomplishments.
It would be
tragic if we limited the relevance of Christ’s conversation with the rich young
ruler only to the world’s billionaires, as that would let the rest of us off
the hook. So leaving the question of
great wealth aside, we should ask ourselves when we are most tempted to despair
of salvation. What commandment of Christ
opens our eyes to our spiritual weakness, to our attachment to our
self-centered desires? What in our lives makes it clear that, without God’s
gracious help, we will shut ourselves out of His Kingdom? How are we falling short of leading a life
worthy of our high calling?
A great deal is
at stake in how seriously we consider these questions. For if we think that we are already righteous
because we assume we obey the commandments or live moral lives, we would probably
be better off not celebrating the Nativity at all. For in such a state of mind,
we would have no idea Who the Child in the manger really is or why He was born. Contrary to the implicit assumptions of
self-righteous legalists, He does not come to reward or congratulate us for
earning eternal life by our own willpower, but instead to heal the sick,
restore sight to the blind, raise the dead, and call sinners to repentance. Only if we gain the spiritual clarity necessary
to see ourselves as those most profoundly weakened and corrupted by the ravages
of sin will we be able to enter into the great joy of Christmas. Only if we know in our hearts that we will
never earn admission to the Kingdom of God by our own merits will we be
prepared to receive Him more fully into our lives at the feast of His
Incarnation. For if we are blind to our
own need for a Savior to bring us into His eternal life by grace, we will not
have the eyes to behold the glory of the Word become flesh.
Thanks be to
God, the blessed weeks of the Nativity Fast provide an opportunity to open our
souls to the truth of why we need the One born at Christmas, the God-Man Who
unites divinity and humanity in Himself.
The spiritual disciplines of these weeks help us greatly in this
regard. When we devote more time and
energy to prayer, we learn that our minds wander and everything else often
seems more important than opening our hearts to the Lord. When we set out to fast, we easily become
obsessed with food, thinking more about excuses, exceptions, and loopholes than
about humbly reorienting our hearts toward the Lord as we restrain our self-indulgence.
When we give even small amounts of our resources and attention to the needy, we
usually learn how selfish we are with our love of our possessions and our time. No, we are not anywhere near as holy as we may
like to think. When we prepare conscientiously
to confess and repent of our sins during Advent, it will become clear to us why
we need the God-Man for our healing, not simply a teacher to give us more laws
that we inevitably fall well short of obeying.
Our great hope,
of course, is not in our ability to do anything by our own power, but instead
in the mercy of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ, Who lowered Himself
beyond our comprehension to become not only a human being, but One born in
profoundly scandalous, humble, and dangerous circumstances. His infinite humility calls us to receive Him
with lowliness and meekness, knowing that the measure of our lives is not in
what we call our accomplishments, but in our openness to the healing of our merciful
Lord Who stops at nothing in order to bring us into eternal life. What is impossible with human beings really
is possible with the One Who was born, Who died, and Who rose again in glory
for our salvation. He brings hope for
healing to us all, which is why He was born at Christmas.
No comments:
Post a Comment