(Preceded by the song Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better from Annie Get Your Gun)
That song has no theological meaning whatsoever, and yet I can’t help thinking about it every time I hear someone trying to make a deal with God over something. Perhaps it’s something selfish like, “God if I win the lottery I’ll donate so much to charity.” Or the ridiculous: “God, if we win this game I’ll go to church on Sunday.” Or even the deeply sincere: “God, help me develop this skill,” Or, “God save him through this surgery,” “…because through that I can serve you better.” To all of which God can genuinely reply, “Why? Anything you can do I can do better. I can do anything better than you.”
While we may not get into a childing argument over it, the truth is just the same. We are reminded of the doctrine of the utter depravity of the soul. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that we can offer to God. We have no talents, no skills, no resources, no wealth that God can’t get better some other way. You know the old saying, “If you want something done right you’d better do it yourself.” The saying could easily go for God! If God wants creatures better than humans it is a simple matter of creating them.
Perhaps your mind wanders to scriptural passages like Hosea 6:6 where God says, “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” Or Psalm 51:17, “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
These passages make it sound like God is pleased by us having a certain life attitude or direction before God. But that is not what these passages mean. God does not need nor desire our praise, or a certain attitude from us. That would suggest God is some sort of egotistical maniac wanting proper adoration from his creatures. We’ll come back to these passages later. For now, we turn to our gospel reading where we meet a young man who asks Jesus about inheriting eternal life.
It is easy to turn this man into a caricature of greed, but that is a mistake. I like to describe him as a model citizen. If you are a parent, this man is the sort you want your children to grow into. He is polite, reverent and obedient. He addresses Jesus as, “Good Teacher.” And he does that multiple times. He has kept all of the commandments. He is successful. Clearly he is a critical thinker, hard-working, and reliable. He is a model of integrity and authenticity. You want to have him on your team at work. You want to have him in your neighborhood. You want to have him in your church!
But despite all of these superb attributes, he sees things the wrong way.
The clue to his wrong way is his first address to Jesus, “…what must I do to inherit eternal life.” “Inherit” is legal language. That is the way his faith operates. If you are going to inherit something it means that you are somehow close to a person who has died. Most likely you share family ties. You are a blood relative, or maybe adopted into the family. You have exhibited some qualities the deceased appreciates, and/or trusts with their life’s work. Or perhaps you are a charity or a church or some organization whose principles align with the life goals of the deceased. You don’t just inherit money from a person you have no connection with! Even though you haven’t actually earned what you are going to inherit there is something about you that makes you favored.
So the young man comes to Jesus and asks, what must I yet do to get God’s favor so that God rewards me? What does God want from me?
God could very easily reply, “Anything you can do I can do better. I can do anything better than you.” Despite the superbness of who he is, he still has nothing to offer God.
Jesus’ reply yanks the rug out from under his entire life. Jesus says, “Go, sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
Said differently: lose your ability to do anything better than others. Give up your self-reliance. Then you will in a place for a genuine relationship with God.
Let’s be clear. This is not a different relationship with God that will then get him eternal life. This is about chucking out that whole way of being. The new way of being wouldn’t even ask, “What must I do to inherit eternal life.”
The passage turns to the disciples asking who then can be saved if not rich people. We have to remember that in those days wealth was generally considered to be a sign of being blessed by God. A person was obviously living the right way and God was rewarding them. Sure, wealth could be corrupted. Wealth wasn’t a guaranteed sign of God’s love. But in the case of this upright and hard-working young man, the cultural assumption was that he was doing life right; and being rewarded by God for it.
So if those who are doing things right are not being rewarded by God with eternal life for living their lives right, then who can be saved?
We return again to the idea that we have nothing to offer God. God created us and loves us. That’s all there is to it.
God does want to be in relationship with you. But that is not a transactional sort of relationship at all. It is the sort of relationship where by you recognizing that you are created, held, and loved by God, you then interact with the world in a way that is healthy and fulfilling. It is that you recognize God’s love coming to you and you sharing it outwards.
I can’t come up with a good example that fits in our age of digital technology, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. Perhaps though, if you’ve ever driven an old car that has just been perfectly tuned up, you can get it. Or the example that works for me is when I operate my family’s antique John Deere Model B tractor in the fields. (If my uncle is online, as he sometimes is, he’ll get it.) It takes some skill to do it, but when you are working in the fields you are tying to adjust things such that every gauge on the instrument panel points exactly straight upward. That’s ideal engine temperature and ideal oil pressure, and everything else monitored operating exactly where it was designed to operate. The entire machine is operating exactly where its designers intended it to operate for maximum power and efficiency. When you reach that point you can hear it in the way it runs. You can feel it in the controls. You can even smell it. It feels strong, responsive, and unstoppable.
That is what God wants for you for your life. God does not want you to live being motivated by what would make God happy, or what would put you in the place to inherit eternal life. Of what value is that to God? God can do anything better than you.
What you can do is live according to your designer’s design for you. You are not an accident. You are not a careless collection of molecules that happen to be animated for a span of time called life. It is as if you are precision engineered by God. God wants his love to be the fuel that makes you perform at your best. And God does not want you to sacrifice that for poor substitutes.
Our gospel scene concludes with Jesus saying, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sister or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age – houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions – and in the age to come eternal life.”
That is life as God intended it for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment