3. Tried and True
Casting Out Demons and Cultural Traditions
Matt. 15:1-28; Mark 1:39
Graham Pilmoor
In his widely read confessions, St Augustine of Hippo famously described the attitude of his youth as “Lord make me chaste, only just not yet”. This is something almost all of us are familiar with. It is basically a variation on the idea of the spirit being willing but the body weak. The kingdom of God, like many other things such as charity or equality, is something we accept in principle but are very slow to actualise. Feeding the hungry and clothing the naked is something we are less enthusiastic about when confronted in the street. We tell ourselves, “of course I agree with the principle, but must I deal with this beggar here and now? I already donate money to a charity and they should understand that.”
It would be easy to say that our reluctance to be charitable is down to wanton materialism, but it is doubtful that many of us are so attached to a few pennies. It’s much more likely that we simply don’t want to get involved. Who knows where it will end? What if they simply won’t go away? What if they tell all their beggar friends I’m a soft target? What if they’re mentally unstable? Of course I don’t want to see people living in poverty, but I can’t commit myself to this problem. Lord make me chaste only just not yet.
The baptism of Christ contrasts with this. In Matthew 3:16 Jesus puts aside the protests of John the Baptist saying “let it be so NOW; it is proper to do this to fulfil all righteousness”. Whatever the full ramifications of His baptism, Jesus is not in the habit of filibustering. This automatically puts him in a league beyond Moses at the site of the burning bush and Jonah on the way to Tarshish. Indeed urgency is a recurring theme for Christ. Famous phrases you might recognise include “The Kingdom is near.” “I stand at the door and knock.” “Time is short” and so on. In fact a sense of urgency seems to be an intrinsic part of what we consider righteousness and is reflected in God’s church looking forward to, and indeed seeking to hasten the Second Coming. However it is worth stressing that this urgency is quite different from what we might call the pejorative interpretation of “zealous”. Whatever zeal used to be we now understand it to be the pursuit of an ideal regardless of costs. Dietrich Bonheoffer is typically explicit about the nature of Jesus’ ministry not being this particular brand of zeal.
“Christ did not, like an ethicist, love a theory about the good; he loved real people. Christ was not interested, like a philosopher in what was “generally valid,” but in that which serves real human beings. Christ was not concerned about whether “the maxim of an action” could become “a principle of universal law,” but whether my action now helps my neighbour to be a better human being before God. God did not become an idea, a principle, a program, a universally valid belief, God became human…”
Of course there are many ways in which Christ’s humanity is important, but of particular significance to the scripture reading is the word righteousness. Righteousness is not first and foremost a moral matter. William Barclay succinctly defines righteousness as “being in a right relationship with God”. In the context of this right relationship with God, urgency can then be seen to be analogous to a parent’s desire to be reunited with his/her children after a long separation, or a spouse anxiously wanting to make sure the preparations for an anniversary celebration are perfect. Flowers have to be of the right kind, the restaurant has to be one of significance, and all the endearing peculiarities of the relationship must be celebrated. Returning to the example of the beggar, our struggle is not with the moral or ideal of sharing wealth so much as the potential relational challenges we fear. Urgency can’t be brought about by ideals, however noble they are, but rather by relational feelings such as compassion, desire or wrath. Continued spiritual growth rests on putting aside personal pride and indeed personal ideals, rolling up our sleeves and engaging with God in ways that are real whether it be helping the needy, leading others to worship or taking up ascetic life in the wilderness; and doing so with a sense of urgency. To “engage” with God at arms length in purely intellectual terms is essentially saying “I accept the challenges posed by Christ in principle, but real life doesn’t work like that”, in other words “Lord make me chaste only just not yet”.
What exactly was Christ thinking when he so eagerly went into the wilderness? The scripture itself claims that he was lead by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan. Taken too literally this can be a dangerous concept. If Christ is supposed to be a role model, we must be careful not to view volunteering ourselves for the ordeal of temptation as virtuous. Christ himself says that if your right hand offends you then you must cut it off In fact, leaving ourselves open to weakness is no more sanctioned or meaningful than literally crucifying ourselves. So again we must ask what was going through Jesus’ mind when he went into the desert. These are not the conventional actions of a sane man and yet the desert offers us a strange attraction. When you go to the desert what do you hope to see? Many people have ventured into the desert intent on some kind of spiritual growth or epiphany. For some strange reason the one thing we are so sure will grow in an inhospitable climate is the soul. Images burned into the pages of National Geographic romanticise the rising and setting desert sun; a symbol of the ineffable mystery of God from the ancients onward. We imagine an incredible silence that somehow whispers precious Godly secrets that will gently seep into our consciousness, elevating us to a state of enlightenment whence we can return to our peers as sun scorched priests and rabbis. The rare man you meet in the desert is a sage, or better still one of the magi still trying to find his way home from the scene of the nativity. In truth there are few wise men in the desert, most people you meet will be feeling as spiritually and geographically lost as yourself. In truth there is no whispering. The heat is so overpowering it becomes deafening and pondering mystery is put aside as your brain focuses on your most primary needs, and yet nuns, monks and the spiritually inclined continue to make the pilgrimage to the middle of nowhere. In truth the desert very quickly robs you of what you wish to be and very quickly reminds you of what you are: entirely human and entirely mundane. The questions you find yourself asking are less concerned with the divine nature of Christ and more along the lines of ‘Must I really sleep here?’; ‘Why can’t I have a proper bath?’; ‘Why must I eat this awful food again’; “Why Me? Why Me? Why Me?” To live in squalor and still be thankful for your daily cup of water and barely sufficient shelter is not easy.
Jesus faced these challenges and must have been equally frustrated, hence his outcry later in Matthew ‘birds have nests, foxes have holes but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ So, while thinking about the harsh realities of wilderness living, it becomes evident that Jesus didn’t simply sit under a tree waiting 40 days for Satan to turn up for the date. Jesus was challenged from day one and in this long and gruelling trial Jesus too was reminded of his humanity. Living with the dichotomy of a human and divine personage in one body represents a formidable challenge in which he was at the mercy of the Father. The extraordinary thing about it is that whilst Jesus was himself divine and therefore authoritative, he continued to be obedient to the will of the Father, submitting himself to be baptised by a man, submitting himself to the psychological challenges of the desert and ultimately submitting himself to a humiliating death. Paul expresses this particularly well in his letter to the Philippians.
“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-even death on a cross!”
Anybody who claims to be a Christian and claims to live in the Holy Spirit is therefore called to have a similar sense of their own humanity; to recognise their frailty, their frustrations and their absolute dependence on God in the trials of life, not just as a forgiver of sins in the abstract end game scenario of his second coming, but as one whose grace offers transformation and sustenance in the here and now, gradually building us up to be called the body of Christ. Recalling the Bonheoffer quote cited earlier “Christ does not want us to be first of all pupils, representatives, and advocates of a particular doctrine, but human beings, real human beings before God.”
And if Christ came to restore all humanity, how can we lay claim to a humanity restored or even the promise of a humanity restored if that very humanity is something we deny in ourselves?
In Ellen White’s The Temptation of Christ in the Wilderness she says that “Christ’s work was to reconcile man to God through His human nature, and God to man through His divine nature.” p. 38
Indeed this is something we often skip over. Christ’s reconciliation of man to God could arguably have been achieved simply by being mortal and godly at once, but Christ was not content with simply being. Christ actively embraces both his human and divine natures. At once he is the man who vanquishes money changers, hypocrites and calls us to a more dignified existence with the irresistibly enigmatic words “follow me” whilst also being the man who acts in total subservience to God the Father and to his fellow man. The temptations of Christ are not simply there to show us that God was capable of resisting sin, this is something we could logically work out for ourselves, neither are the temptations there simply to portray Christ as a hero in an epic struggle as our western, Kant-influence minds tend to do. Though his collapse after the third trial shows it was difficult, the power of his responses to Satan at the time of temptation points to a man who, despite temptation would inevitably resist, simply for being the person He was. The aspects of resistance and struggle may well be legitimate, but Christ’s temptations are also there as messages of hope for people as they live this life. As Rowan Williams describes in ‘Silence and Honey Cakes’
“The saint isn’t someone who makes us think ‘That looks hard, that’s a heroic achievement of will’ - with the inevitable thought, ‘that’s too hard for me’- but someone who make us think, ‘How astonishing! Human lives can be like that, behaviour like that can look quite natural’ – with perhaps the accompanying thought ‘How can I find what they have found?’”
In his resistance to temptation Christ offers us all hope, helping as to think “how remarkable, human behaviour can look like that, that there is a human reality beyond anything the world offers” and is perhaps one way of interpreting Paul’s words in Romans Chapter 2 that we shouldn’t conform but be transformed by the renewing of our minds. This is a very encouraging notion for us all; no matter the state of our relationship with God, and no matter what temptations we face though we might fail and fail again. The first and most important steps to righteousness, as Jesus demonstrates, are found in our acknowledgement of who we are, our call for mercy and our commitment to living by His grace. It is only after showing this that Christ goes on to counsel us with the Sermon on the Mount. Paradoxically the more we realise our humanity the more Christ-like we are made and the more righteous we become. This is one of the impossible possibilities of our faith.
In the words “Follow me” Christ isn’t first and foremost looking for you to give up smoking or stop fantasizing about the girl behind the bar, though these things come with time, rather he seeks the urgent confession of a sinful humanity and the commitment to transformation under His grace through discipleship, not in a fortnight of cold turkey conversion, but over a lifetime. A lifetime commitment to the Christian path may seem daunting, but it is less so than attempting to instantly exorcise our foibles with a Levitical tick list. That would simply be self help under a Christian label. Now knowing as we do, that the persons God has elected us to become requires a lifetime of growth in righteous humility and humanity there seems neither time nor reason for any of us to say the prayer “Lord make me chaste only just not yet.”
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1 comment:
You write very well.
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