Unreasonable

You should know right off the hop that Jesus Christ isn't who you think he is.

For what we think of Jesus is that he is a light cheerleader, but who doesn't cut in too much to what we want to do.  He's the supportive friend, the one who you call up and ask what he thinks about things, and he always says 'what do you want to do?' When you tell him, then he replies, 'Yes, I think that's what you should do, for sure.'  We love that kind of friend, because that kind of friend always finds a way to back us up, and our friendship with them seems to depend on them backing up our prior positions.  So if you're asking yourself what your position on who to date should be, how to vote, what to do with that neighbor who you are having a hard time with, whether to stay with your spouse or bug out already, if you ask that Jesus what you should do, curiously enough he will always seem to echo what you already think about it.

But that's not who Jesus Christ is.  Far from being hyper-malleable, he is hard as nails, and I do mean that very sincerely.  His positions are exacting, especially in a moral way.  And these exacting, moral positions are completely uncompromising.  Now, we have made a cottage industry of making Jesus Christ as compromising as possible, malleable and soft as marshmallow.  He's a bit of a cream puff, and we can rely on him to take on whatever form we need him to.  The thing is, though, a god who conforms himself entirely to your positions, whatever they may be, is an idol, nothing more.  That's what an idol is.  You can tell when Jesus speaks, though, because he is uncompromising, and he certainly doesn't conform himself to what you would like him to do.  Sunday's reading from the Gospel is a classic example of that.  In the reading from Luke 17, Jesus reminds his disciples that if someone sins against you, you must rebuke them.  Good so far, of course. But then Jesus rudely continues, and says 'if he sins against you seven times in a day and turns to you seven times saying 'I repent' you must forgive him.'  This is unreasonable.  We all sort of tend to follow the classic teaching from Tennessee, which says 'Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, won't get fooled again.'  If Christ were an idol, then he would say that if someone sins against you, you are well within your rights to cut them off, ignore them, spurn them and encourage your friends to do likewise. But that's not what Christ says.  He says that if someone sins against you seven times in the day, and seven times repents, you must forgive them.  Non negotiable.   

This is, of course, a hurtful thing to consider, which is what this GK Chesterton quote is all about.  That is, that the Christian ideal has not been attempted and found to be lacking anything.  Rather, it has been found difficult, and left untried even by Christians. Whom amongst us will look at these words of Christ and find them to be perfectly reasonable? Or even more so, who will look at these words, and put them into practice in his own life? To be honest, the majority of people will look at this, and say that there is no possible way that Christ actually intended for this to be the case at all.  Because Christ is only here to request not the good, but the possible.

But what else does Jesus say? He says 'Be perfect, just as your heavenly father is perfect.'  And he means it.  What he doesn't mean is that perfect is what you happen to be doing right now.  That's not what perfect is.  Perfect isn't where you happen to be at present, and that's the barometer of perfection. You know that from the words of Christ that you refuse to follow.  Rather, perfect is what is perpetually out of reach, but internally what you have always known to be good.  You may kick and scream against Christ's requirements to forgive, but ask yourself if the shoe were on the other foot, and you had wronged someone 7 times in a day, repented and came back over and over again, would you want or expect them to forgive you? Likely you would.  And I can tell how, honestly.  Because you're a Christian.

If you're a Christian, and statistically if you read this blog you are, then  you'll know something about how every worship service works.  You approach the throne of grace, and confess your sins.  And if you're a human being, you don't get forgiven of one sin and have that particular bugbear crossed off of things you do forever.  Likely, you are bringing the same exact issues to Christ over and over again.  Your sins, your issues, your disasters, all the sins you commit are sins you commit week in and week out.  You move to the throne of Jesus Christ of Nazareth over and over again, and you find yourself standing, cap in hand, before his throne with the same issues expecting the same forgiveness.  And you receive it.

This is how you know that your measure for what is good and bad, right and wrong is not based on where you are right now, because what Jesus asks of you is what you expect of him. It's what you expect of the one who is truly and wonderfully good.  That's what this is and always has been all about, you know, the reality that you don't define good based on what is possible for you, but based on what is true and right. And in the holy scriptures, Jesus of Nazareth levels a lot of heavy issues directly at you, and your job is not to take them and make them easier, but rather to say with a loud voice, with confidence, what the disciples said: 'Lord, increase our faith.'  Yes.  Do not change the definition of good to fit what I am capable of doing, rather make me more able to believe what you have said.  Help me to understand what right and wrong are, and believing that, to understand what it is that your grace covers.  Grace covers sins, the real sins that you have.  When you cheapen grace to cover essentially nothing, then you believe in nothing, and have nothing to hope for outside yourself.  

But if you believe in expensive grace, costly grace, the work of Christ that cost him his life, then something wonderful happens: the work that he came to do actually gets done.  His word does what it set out to accomplish, it does not return void.  If you believe in costly grace, then the enormity of what good is actually begins to mean something - you can see the gulf that exists between what you do and what good is.  And you can cling all the more to the cross of Christ because you can take seriously that Jesus doesn't just say things to fill space.  He tells you what good is, and more than that, that he dies to forgive you for when you are not good at all.