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March 11, 2007
Who Looks Like a Christian?
Numbers 12: 1-10/John 13: 31-35
March 11th, 2007
When you walk on campus at Purdue it’s easy to tell which women are practicing Muslims. They wear a head-covering, some a long dress. You can tell an observant Jewish man by the kippah he wears, a Sikh by his tightly wound turban and beard. You can tell who comes from India or China or Japan by certain characteristic physical features. I remember when we were enjoying our Sabbatical in Scotland that it was remarkable how these perfectly American looking girls could speak in such a delightfully un-American way.
Thus we think of people as being Muslim, Jewish, or Polish, or Scottish, or whatever by certain characteristics of dress, physical feature, or way of speaking.
But how can you tell if a person is a follower of Jesus? Back in the second century there was an anonymous letter sent to the teacher of the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius son of Antoninus Pius. The emperor, though a Stoic philosopher, and reckoned a good emperor, compared with Nero or Calligula was very harsh on Christians. This letter to Diognetus, his teacher, called attention to the distinguishing features of Christians that should make him delight in them. He said they are the very soul of the empire.
I’ve often thought that if Christians down through history had been the soul, a driving force of love surging within the boundaries of the church and spilling over into neighborhoods, market places in towns and cities and across national boundaries and continents, how different would have been the world’s story.
We read this morning Jesus’ type-casting His disciples. “By this all people will know you are my disciples that you love one another.”
I am self-conscious these days every time I emphasize love—which I’ve been told is a good bit. I’m self-conscious in harping on this theme because when I get to the bottom line in my thinking I always come up with this. This is what the Man said. Jesus stressed it. I didn’t make it up.
There is the risk of speaking too much of love these days because it seems to imply sweeping under the rug all the needful particulars of morality and belief, opting for a mush-like pluralism. This is not what Jesus meant. And it is not what I mean.
There are so many competing ideas about how to be a proper Christian. We divide as orthodox or progressive, liberal or conservative. We divide over our specific point of view on the Bible (regardless of whether we read it). And even if we’re all conservative some have a “higher” view of the Bible than others—defining its origins acutely—whether or not we read it. And if we share the highest view of the Bible’s inspiration and authority we will differ on its application. We differ on contemporary or traditional worship styles. Christians divide over their views on the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world.
Meanwhile, quietly there throbs in the background Jesus’ unmistakable word, “By this will all people know that you are my disciples that you love one another.” Jesus amplified what He meant. “Love one another as I have loved you.” This was a new commandment. The earlier command said, “Love your neighbor as yourself. The new command, “Love as I have loved you.” But this an odd kind of commandment.
Because if I cannot do what love commands from the heart it will seem an onerous commandment. When I start to compute how far to go in loving, love evaporates. I become a casuist.
Casuists are knit-pickers. They see fine points and make them big points. They compute how much and how often. It was one of these that asked Jesus, ”How often must I forgive, seven times?” And Jesus replied, “no. Seventy times seven.” And so the casuist gets out his abacus or calculator and starts to keep track—“488, 489, 490, WHAM, that’s all the forgiveness you get.” Maybe Jesus knew that after 490 times forgiveness would become a habit, just as the Bible tells us of God, “His mercy endures forever.”
For us to love from the heart, our hearts need changing. I’m tempted to say that what Darwin called “the survival of the fittest” is the natural selection of the heart. The outward flow of love runs up against the inward flow of the self and all that pertains to me and to my kind. Until the outward-flow of love replaces the inward-flow of self, it’s hard to be desire to be recognized as a Christian in Jesus’ terms. Then we substitute other identification marks of our own making of what it is to be a Christian. We put on our bracelets and bumper stickers and flash our slogans and grocery lists of belief.
How different it is when this love flows from the heart. In Thomas a Kempis’ little book The Imitation of Christ that our Wednesday evening study group has been reading we read “Of the Wondrous Effect of Divine Love.” This Dutch Christian who lived during one of the most scandal-ridden eras of Church history, focused on what is basic to being a Christian. The Imitation of Christ. What he said served then as a reminder to all who were upset with the church, “here is what is basic.” Let me read a fragment of what he wrote about the one who imitates Jesus in his soul:
The one that loves flies, runs, and rejoices. This one is free and cannot be held in. He gives all for all, and has all in all because he rests in One Highest above all things, from who all that is good flows and proceeds. This one respects not the gifts but turns himself above all good unto the Giver. Love oftentimes knows no measure, but is fervent beyond all measure. Love feels no burden, thinks nothing a trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself and all things possible. It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and warrants them to take effect, where he who does not love, would faint and lie down.
How different this outlook is from the outlook that computes what I must do. Here is what Jesus’ brother James called “the perfect law of liberty.”
Of course, there are other teachings in the Bible too that I embrace with all my heart, about faith and obedience and details describing Jesus’ virgin birth and sinless life and bodily resurrection and coming again all which many of us believe, and justification by faith. But if we may trust the emphasis that Jesus made on the centrality of love, and what the Apostle Paul describes in I Corinthians 13 of the greater importance of love to knowledge or understanding mysteries or powerful deeds of faith, then there is no escaping that loving one another is the key to recognizing a Christian.
I chose the story from Numbers 12 about Miriam and Aaron’s beef with Moses because this kind of problem typifies what happens when love leaves the church. Presumably Miriam and Aaron had heard God’s commands by now to love Him with everything you’ve got and your neighbor as yourself. But they’d gotten used to the idea. Part of the furniture of ideas that they were so accustomed to seeing that they forgot it was there.
Miriam and Aaron were Moses’ older siblings. Little brother had surpassed them in stature even though he didn’t have aggressive behavior. So they started the ball rolling of opposition to Moses—among people who knew what God said about loving Him and one another. They began by challenging the appropriateness of his wife. They called her a Cushite—i.e., from Ethiopia. Josephus tells of his marriage to an Ethiopian princess. Then they went on to their real quarrel with him and asked, “Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses?” A technical question!! Having raised the question it was like opening Pandora’s Box. The view got to festering that little Moses had gotten too big for his boots. Sure, he was the one who went up to Mt. Sinai and got the Ten Commandments and the design of the Tabernacle with its Ark of the Covenant. But did that mean he was the only one who could speak about religious themes?
How forcefully the Lord intervened in this potential rift among His people. He came down in a pillar of cloud before the front door of the Tabernacle. He summoned Miriam and Aaron. They came, I suspect with far less bravado than when they had belittled Moses. And the Lord made clear how unique was Moses’ role in His plan for Israel. “Whereas prophets spoke on the basis of dreams and visions I give them, I speak with Moses mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in dark speech; and he sees the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?”
The Lord struck Miriam with leprosy so that she was put outside the camp as though she was a living corpse. But Moses pleaded for his rebellious sister. The Lord told him if she had sassed her dad she would have been shamed for seven days, so let her be embarrassed as a leper for seven days outside the camp, and then I’ll let her back in.” Moses was not vindictive.
Miriam and Aaron had their reasons for standing against Moses. And no doubt their reasons included some religious rationale by which they dignified their jealousy of their little brother. How often it’s the case that people use sanctimonious language to describe jealousy or resentment. I wonder how often in the history of the Church Christians have said, “I prayed about it. . .” and then they go on to describe what boils down to, “I was jealous and resented someone disagreeing with me or offending my sense of personal importance.”
One last thought that struck me reveals the tie in between loving as Jesus commanded and believing in one God only. If we do not love God supremely and love one another as Jesus loved us it’s because we love something else more. We worship another god or gods. A 20th century theologian I didn’t agree with on too many things I saw his point on one thing. He spoke of God as our ultimate concern. What is my ultimate concern? That is what I worship—my God in effect.
It’s the kind of question only I can ask myself and you can ask yourself, “What is your ultimate concern?” That is, what do I think is MOST important? Then take inventory of how I make my decisions, how I come to like this person and not that one, etc. What is the unifying principle in my choices? That is my ultimate concern.
Jesus taught us, “If you are my disciple your ultimate concern WILL be this, love God supremely and love one another as I love you.” He did not say it OUGHT to be this way. Jesus said, “It will be this way.” John wrote in I John 1: 7, “If we walk in the light as Jesus is in the light we have fellowship one with another.”
We like to quote the title of a book J.B. Phillips wrote some years ago, “Your God is too small.” I’ve heard Christians with one set of beliefs accuse others with these words. Your God is too small. But if I see that my ultimate concern is centered in me, like it or not, my God is too small. If my God is as big as Jesus, my bigness will be like Jesus’ bigness of heart.
I pray that the Holy Spirit will shape our hearts so that we first want to obey Jesus and then that we may obey Jesus, loving one another as He loves us and thus proving to be His disciples. What evidence is there that I am a Christian? And you?
Let us pray: Grant, O Lord that we may desire to be identified as Jesus’ disciples. And grant that desiring this, we may love one another as He loved us, from a pure heart, fervently. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at March 11, 2007 12:40 PM