I’ve written before about the difficulty of walking in Christ’s footsteps. Jesus’ teachings are challenging, to say the least, and today’s readings point once again to some of the most challenging of them all.
The Old Testament reading, 2 Kings 6:1-23, is a rather long and rambling collection of deeds by the prophet Elisha. Towards the end, it relates an episode where Elisha, with God’s help, blinds a Syrian army raiding
Israel and leads them into a trap where they are captured by the Israeli army. The king then asks Elisha, “Shall I slay them?” (which would have been the normal way to deal with a captured force in those days) but the prophet tells him no, to instead give them food and drink and send them back to their master in Syria. An unexpected act of kindness and mercy leads to an unexpected outcome: “And the Syrians came no more on raids into the land of Israel.”
Paul’s epistle, 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, is hardly a gentle remonstrance, rather a typical Pauline scold. The thrust of his message is to handle disputes between Christians (“the saints”) within the community internally, not by lawsuit, but there are some subtexts that I find intriguing in Paul’s arguments. For example, it is clear that one of the justifications made to Paul about why these lawsuits are being filed is that the members of community don’t feel adequate to the task of judging the merits of the disputes. Roman law, like law today, was highly bureaucratic and complex, behind which stood the awesome edifice of ultimate authority, the State. Roman citizens naturally deferred to authority not only in law but in daily life; a pater familias, after all, held the right of high and low justice against all in his household, a right that was both very arbitrary and yet also codified into Roman law. Members of the Christian community, Paul argues, are not to be so slavishly devoted to authority, but are by God’s grace fully capable of judging disputes for themselves and amongst themselves:
Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more matters pertaining to this life!
This speaks to my individual conscience in a way that is hard to avoid: Authority can’t determine for me right and wrong, good and bad, friend or enemy. I am responsible for my choices, for making these judgments about myself and others.
Finally, there is the Gospel reading, Matthew 5:38-48, which contains the famous “turn the other cheek” lesson. As I’ve written before, this admonition is greatly misunderstood as a lesson in passivity, an invitation to be a doormat for every bully and strongman that comes along. Rather, it is an invitation to step outside the conventional and do the unexpected. Jesus references Jewish law (“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”) but then asks his disciples to set authority aside and look into their own hearts for a response in tune with God’s grace. The key, Jesus explains, is quite simple: “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Really? I struggle to be merely adequate, let alone perfect! I can’t do this. Yet, Paul says I can, that God’s grace gives me the ability to do things I’ve never contemplated doing before, and that it is my responsibility to step into the hard choices. Elisha’s mercy towards the Syrians produced the right result because it was the right thing to do, even if unexpected and unconventional.
So where does this take me? Perfection is an ideal easy to give up on and, no matter how inspired I may be by the pursuit of perfection, I honestly can’t say that I believe it to be possible. But this is what God, through Jesus, does: he reminds me that I am not perfect, that it is at my own peril that I grow complacent with my relationship with God and my level of commitment to living the Christ-like life. There will always be a further step to take, a further hill to climb. I sometimes feel like Moses, standing on the mountain and seeing, with sight that goes beyond what eyes can see, the promised land, but denied the actuality of it. But that’s God’s other promise, also through Jesus: I will get there, through the gateway of death, after a life lived in joyful tension between perfection and reality.
