THE BEAUTY OF HIS WISDOM
It’s good to be here again. As I mentioned last week, for the month of July we are simply focusing on Christ—reflecting on various dimensions of his person that make him so beautiful. Last week we began with the beauty of Christ’s humanity, that he was truly, authentically human, and yet human in a way that is not broken like us. In him we see what our humanity was meant to be like and what he is calling us to become.
Now for people with only a marginal knowledge of Jesus, his humanity is usually not the first thing that comes to their mind. It’s his role as the “great teacher” that is often the first thing they mention, and for good reason. When you listen to his teachings, it quickly becomes apparent that Jesus had an acute understanding of life, as well as an ability to articulate it in memorable ways that have never left us. Think of the many phrases and idioms that people use in everyday speech that come directly from Jesus, even though they may be unaware of it: “judge not lest you be judged,” “consider the lilies of the field,” “don’t cast your pearls before swine,” “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” “blessed are the peacemakers,” and many, many others.
Then there are the memorable stories he told (the “parables”) that have become part of the world’s treasury of wisdom, such as “The Good Samaritan,” “The Prodigal Son,” “The Sheep and the Goats,” to name just a few. Finally, we are given a number of extended discourses by Jesus in the gospels, the most famous of which, the “Sermon on the Mount,” has been described by people from all around the globe (including many non-Christians) as the world’s most sublime description of how life should be lived.
But having said all that, it’s surprising how much of what Jesus actually taught has been either ignored or misappropriated, while his name has been commandeered for all sorts of political, social, and even military agendas. From 12th century crusaders to German fascists in the 20th century to the Ku Klux Klan in America, Jesus has been hijacked for all sorts of causes that have no connection whatsoever to his actual teachings, which is why it’s so important that we know what he really taught.
The specific content of his teaching covers a wide range of topics, but taken together there are several themes that dominate. Jesus was most unequivocal when it came to the place of God in our lives. As I mentioned last week, Jesus was a God-obsessed man. For him God was the center and foundation for everything—the essential reality that shapes everything else, the God who is both transcendent and yet close, overwhelmingly holy and yet approachable. And so when asked which was the greatest command, Jesus replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.” It’s easy to become distracted by the various threads of Jesus’ teachings and lose sight of this central motif.
For him God was the sovereign Lord and Ruler over all life, the Creator and Judge of all the earth. But at the same time, he saw God as our “Father”—the One who loves us beyond our ability to comprehend, who is always present, longing to rescue us from our self-imposed exile. All of these dimensions of God can be heard side by side throughout the gospels.
And so, like the Old Testament prophets, Jesus was emphatic that only by learning to trust in God’s care and submitting to his guidance can authentic life flourish. Only with God can we be fully known and become fully human. Jesus called the sphere in which this kind of life can flourish the “kingdom of God.”
Of course, this doesn’t mean that his followers will be spared all the everyday trials that people commonly experience—temptation, stress, injustice, accidents, sickness, or death. Rather, he taught that in the very midst of such times we can know that God is not only in control but working through these very events for our good, as mysterious and difficult as that may be to embrace. This is part of the paradoxical reality that Jesus taught—that out of suffering can come a quality of life that is far better. Think of the “beatitudes”: blessed are the poor in spirit…blessed are they who mourn…blessed are they who hunger and thirst…blessed are those who are persecuted…
Part of this paradox is that to love God before all else requires the death of our own self-absorption and ego-centric way of living. When we make God our central focus, we begin to shift from an existence that is all about me to one in which I begin to see the world through God’s eyes, a world in which other people become increasingly more important. Which is why, after giving us the first and greatest command to love God, Jesus quickly follows with the second command to love our neighbor as ourselves. And who is my neighbor? As he tells us in the parable of the Good Samaritan, my neighbor is whoever God puts in my path. Suddenly, my little, self-centered world is thrown open to the world around me.
Which leads to is another major theme in Jesus’ teaching. All this talk of loving God with my mind, heart, soul, and strength points to internal qualities, which is why Jesus emphasized so strongly that who we are on the inside ultimately determines how we live on the outside. This often runs counter to how we actually function. We tend to engage in outward behaviors that project an image of what we want other people to think we are. We usually assume that our outward image comes close to who we actually are on the inside, even though on closer self-examination we can usually see some degree of dissonance. But by and large, we dress, act, talk and respond either to make a certain impression on people or because of various social expectations. And this includes even situations when we behave in a morally admirable way. It’s common for us to do all the right things for all the wrong reasons, and as a result very little permanent good endures. As Jesus said to some of the most outwardly moral and religious people of his day, from the 7th chapter of Mar:
“What comes out of a man is what makes him unclean. For from within, out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a person unclean.”
Now this is admittedly a very challenging truth, but if we reflect on it for a while, we have to admit that these inner impulses of ours ultimately control how we behave on the outside. We may work hard to project an image of ourselves to the outside world that is admirable, but these untamed inner desires and attitudes keep popping up at the most embarrassing moments, revealing who we really are. They may appear as merely a bit of gossip or a cold shoulder or an angry outburst. But what we truly need is a renewal that begins on the inside.
And so when a highly religious leader named Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night with the express hope of understanding what it was that Jesus actually taught, Jesus replies:
“I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” “How can a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!” Jesus answered, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.”
In the waters of Christian baptism we offer God our repentance and faith, and in the outpouring of God’s Spirit into our hearts we begin this journey of deep, inner transformation. Each of these two movements are found throughout the teachings of Jesus. Unfortunately, in many quarters of the Christian world today, all we hear about is the forgiveness of God. But you can’t listen to Jesus and not discover that this is only half of the gospel. What Jesus offers is forgiveness of sins coupled with renewal in the Holy Spirit. To truly know God’s forgiveness is to be radically transformed by it.
Consequently, Jesus had little tolerance for narrow moralists who perpetuate this myth that we can be fixed by a mere modification of our outward behavior. For example, the religious elite, who would harass him for curing someone on the Sabbath or for ministering to a prostitute, were themselves thoroughly pervaded on the inside by an uncaring, unfeeling, judgmental, and censorious spirits. They wanted Jesus to join them in stoning a woman to death for her adultery, and yet they were turning a blind eye to their own sinfulness. People like this, who often focus on a handful of hot-button issues, usually end up losing touch with what God is all about, as he warns us in Matthew 23:
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”
Such meticulous outward morality was the kiss of death to Jesus. He continually exposed hypocrisy, self-justification, pride, selfishness, and unbelief. The great virtues for him were humility, contrition, faith, honesty, justice, compassion, and an active, practical love.
But having said all that, this does not mean that Christ was morally permissive or vague about our behavior. On the contrary, he could be very specific and unyielding on a wide range of moral topics like the sanctity of marriage, the need for radical honesty in all our dealings, care for the poor and suffering, the pitfalls of wealth and anxiety, the call to love all people—even our enemies.
Another huge focus of his teaching involved his own unique relation to God, something I am going to save for two weeks from today. But at this point I should confess that a single sermon like this cannot come close to doing justice to Jesus’ teaching. There are numerous themes he employed that build on what I’ve mentioned. How do we live in this world without becoming like it? What does it mean to be members of his body, the church? What is the Christian’s relationship to the law of Moses? Jesus talked a lot about the final judgment, false prophets, as well as profound insights into marriage, prayer, work, and a host of other things. Indeed, as the apostle Paul put it, “In [Christ] are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”
But equally important to what Jesus taught was how he taught. For starters, Jesus was not a philosopher, in the sense of speculating on the nature of reality. As we read at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: “When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.”
In other words, he spoke with an authority that was striking and even dogmatic sounding. He spoke as if he had an intimate, first-hand knowledge of what was true and good and beautiful. His understanding of life was as clear and concrete to him as the earth beneath his feet. And in particular, he spoke as someone who had a direct and deeply personal connection with the most important reality of all—God. As he claimed just prior to his arrest and crucifixion:
“When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me. When he looks at me, he sees the one who sent me. I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness. As for the person who hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge him. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day. For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it. I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say.”
That’s an incredible claim, isn’t it? In an age such as ours, when any claim to “truth” is looked upon with suspicion, these words of Christ can sound rather extreme and even arrogant. And to many of his contemporaries, they even sounded blasphemous. But surprisingly, Jesus was never defensive or threatened by those who refused to listen to him. Instead he claimed that everything he taught would resonate with those who were genuinely seeking God. In other words, he claimed that the truth of his teaching was self-authenticating, or as we read in John’s gospel:
Not until halfway through the Feast did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach. The religious leaders were amazed and asked, “How did this man get such learning without having studied?” Jesus answered, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from him who sent me. If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own. He who speaks on his own does so to gain honor for himself, but he who works for the honor of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him.”
You see, for Jesus, God is the one inescapable, foundational reality in life, a reality that presses in upon all of us from a thousand directions, beginning the day we are born. In the passage cited above, he claims that if anyone sets out to know and follow God, the journey itself will enable them to know whether Jesus teaches the truth or not.
In other words, it’s not the coffee-house philosopher who has access to real knowledge, but only those who seek God by seeking to live out what God is teaching them. Only by testing the thread of God’s truth in the crucible of real life can we ever discover whether Jesus has tapped into reality or whether he is deceiving us. In other words, truth can only be known in the living of it and not by abstract contemplation or debate. Jesus claimed to speak for God, and that we can validate whether he speaks for God by wholeheartedly pursuing God ourselves. In the end, what Jesus offers isn’t primarily a mystical experience or a religious philosophy or a set of rules or an ideology to mindlessly embrace, but a whole new way of life.
And I can honestly say this has proven true in my own life. I became an adult in the 1960s when my whole generation was questioning everything. Many of us didn’t want to be coddled by fantasies or controlled by social conventions or sheltered by affluence. We wanted to know reality up close and personal, even if that meant confronting unpleasant truths about ourselves. For myself, after pursuing a number of philosophic dead-ends, I began reading the gospels and hearing Jesus’ invitation to “know” the truth, to let it enter into my very bones. On the one hand, the choice was entirely mine—a journey that would require some painful honesty, as well as embracing some radically new perspectives. But on the other hand, what choice did I have when everything I knew to be real kept pointing to him?
But what gave me the confidence to even attempt to follow him was his promise to be there with me through it. And he promised that what I would discover along the way was freedom. Freedom from illusions and the pull of my own past. Freedom from all the mind-numbing influences of prejudice, materialism, and egoism. In the end, he promised the possibility of becoming human like he is human. I responded, and although I still have a long, long way to go, I would echo the witness of millions of people that Jesus is true to his word.
And for myself, what still draws me most to Jesus’ teaching is not simply how he reads the human heart in general, but how he reads my own heart. When I listen to his teachings with an attentive and open mind, he penetrates the false image I have of myself and exposes both who I really am and what he wants me to become. Most of the time the gap is enormous, but included with his searching insights are his equally abundant assurances that he is here with me—in me—working to create the very person he desires.
And over time I have actually seen his life slowly shaping mine, making it into something new, something better. He continually reminds me that even his most severe demands come from someone who has walked in my shoes, knows my struggles, and loves me unreservedly. He never compromises his demands; he still holds me accountable when I resist him, and he is more than willing to discipline me when needed. But love is always his motive.
And when I listen humbly, prayerfully, diligently, and with a heart of obedience, I am drawn into a living relationship with the Master himself.
May we all be shaped by the beauty of his wisdom, for he is the path to life.
Amen