The Perfection of Jesus is Irrelevant

Jesus being perfect does not matter.

 

I think we probably need to stop here. We tend to react strongly to a statement like the one above. The social gospel folks, the ones who reject the orthodox view of Jesus, shout for joy when they read something like this. The conservative branch of the church, on the other hand, violently slaps the heresy sticker on this short and simple sentence. 

But, before we judge merits of this particular statement, we must define the essential term – perfect.  

The highly reliable, hilarious, and usually inappropriate urbandictionary.com defines the adjective “perfect” flawlessly according to our culture. Multiple users on Urban Dictionary define a perfect person as someone without flaws. These people have accomplished a fullness of being in a particular aspect of their life. They live a flawless moral life; they live a flawless professional life; they live a flawless relational life. While we consciously know perfection is unattainable, we subconsciously hold ourselves and others to the standard of perfection. We even tend to characterize peoples actions as perfect – as flawless. If we were to think of an individual who embodies of perfection, we can instantly think of something or someone in our immediate life or at the very least, on the periphery of our current experience.  

Maybe it is a friend or pastor who is squeaky clean morally, never transgressing against God’s law or the law of the Christian subculture. This person may or may not even consider themselves a Christian, yet they live perfectly within clear, perfectly acceptable moral standard. This perfection, at least in our minds, might be attributed to them because they humbly recognize their imperfection. Their humbleness only further validates the way we view them.

Or, maybe it is your office mate who fills out their paperwork without error, every time, never late, and in their uncanny joy of the monotonous, corrects the items you overlooked because of your disdain for the mundane. Now, I have no doubt, that these latter folks actually have reached the pinnacle of perfection! But, that is merely an aside…

For they have obtained perfection in every sense of our cultural definition – they are without flaw. We all know those who seem to be spotless in one way or another. You are probably thinking about them now. They come in all shapes and sizes; they are Christians and Muslims, atheists and agnostics. Within the construct of our society, they are perfect, and we view them as such. They are perfect in our eyes. We lift them up as the standard of how we are to live our own lives. “See how they fill out their reports. It is perfect. I must replicate their work!” They receive a plaque, and probably a semi-awkward picture, with the title of “employee of the month,” hanging on a wall in plain sight so all the others can be motivated by it. They would probably win the award every month if it wasn’t against company policy.

This mindset on the nature of perfection has become the telos of salvation. We have taken sanctification and marked its finality as flawlessness and being without moral blemish. Every moment of our life, every progression in faith, is a movement toward sinless-ness. We work to rid ourselves of all sins, real and imaginable, in order to be marked as righteous, not only by our Father, but also by those we live life with. We abstain from certain pleasures because of this desire to be perfect. If we were to indulge ourselves, we might accidently cause someone to stumble and our witness would be ruined.

But if we really thinking about it, what is our particular witness? What is it that we are witnessing to? Is it the hope of a flawless life? Is it even, teleologically, the primary hope for a life to come?

I’m not so sure that it is any of those things. Instead, I tend to gravitate toward another hope – a hope containing the former, but only as a byproduct of something else. The hope? A life filled with the Spirit, given to us as a beautiful, free gift because of Jesus’s perfection.

So with that, we come full circle, back to Jesus’s perfection. What perfection then did he obtain? Why does Jesus’s perfection not matter if it is the very thing which brings us the Spirit?

 

While Jesus was not doubt flawless, without sin, those around him did not see him and think he was “employee of the month” material. The CEOs of the time, the Pharisees, the ones who doled out the ancient awards, did not turn to their followers and say, “See this Jesus guy? Emulate him.” Instead, as we all know, they took offense to his radical understanding of perfection.

As my friend Kolby Kerr preached today at church, the Pharisees, in legislating new aspects of God’s covenant to the Israelites, intended to keep God’s people in communion with the Father out of fear for what God might do to them if they transgressed again. All too often the Israelites followed their own passions and desires, leading them to break their end of the bargain. In turn, God’s love revealed itself in the form of exiling his people – a form of discipline to grab the attention of those who sinned.

So, the Pharisees logically deduced the reasons for their problems and applied the following “if, then” syllogism to correct their past mistakes: If they follow this covenant flawlessly – perfectly – then God will stay his wrath. The original covenant, and the new bylaws ratified to create an extra level of security from God’s loving hand, must be scrupulously followed – or else, for Israel and the sinner.

Then, out of heaven, this perfect being comes into the picture and begins breaking the extra-covenantal rules and claiming, in the process, a supernatural relationship with the one the Pharisees were hoping to satiate. And people began listening to him. They began following him. You can imagine the fear welling up in the leaders’ hearts. A deep, multilayered fear predicated upon the remembrance of the past. Would Israel’s new desire to follow this radical new leader lead Rome to turn against them and ruin their fairly stable relationship with the Empire? This threat of God using his paddle on his people once again led to the eventual death of the perfect one.  

Other than those seeking a right relationship with the Father understood that Jesus’s perfection did not rest in a flawlessness according to the culture’s standard. Jesus, in only a handful of ways, actually lived a perfect cultural existence. Society as a whole, religious rulers and their followers, probably saw Jesus as a terrific sinner and heretic.

Because of this, we need to qualify the type of perfection we refer to when we talk about Jesus being perfect. Naturally, we correlate his perfection with the actions he did and did not participate in since that is our cultural tendency. But, the perfection Jesus actually obtained was much different.

If we were to define the term “perfect” in connection to Jesus, it would be defined as such: a nature shared flawlessly with the Father. Jesus and the Father were perfectly one. Their souls were intertwined in such a way, you know, since Jesus was God incarnate, that his life fully represented the life of his Father.

As we seek perfection, I pray we (I!) begin to seek communion with the Father through the grace of Jesus the Christ instead of an outward perfection celebrated by our different subsets of secular and Christian societies. I pray, by God’s mercy, we begin to share more and more in his nature -- a nature filled with his Spirit, making us more like his Son, on the earth as those are in heaven.

Humbled by a Six Year Old

When my niece Conley (my oldest niece or nephew out of 6) was around two years old, I used to go with her and her parents to the pool. It was just as she was beginning to swim. Her dad would place her on the edge of the pool and encourage her to jump. As the first born, you can imagine she wasn't keen on the idea. She shuffled her feet every so slightly and ever so slowly to the very edge. Once again, her dad called out to her, "Go ahead and jump. I will catch you. Trust me." She dragged her feet a little bit closer to the edge, so much so that her toes hung over and clutched the rim. She didn't have to tell anyone she was afraid -- her toes told the whole story.

While Conley is a first born, she has two older cousins who are fearless. Coming from the far corner of the pool, her cousins egged her on impatiently, "Jump Conley, jump!" With her dad's hands up in the air, waiting for his only daughter to make the plunge, Conley released the death grip and splashed into the water, arms flailing as if she was in a Harlem Shake video. Interestingly enough, her dad didn't catch her. He let her sink just enough to create in her a helpless panic, a striving to escape the tortures of the zero gravity so strangely experienced in the depths of a vast unknown. Unbeknownst to my initial observation, his hands actually surrounded his daughter -- they sat waiting to reach down to his sinking girl in order to pull her out of the all encompassing fear. As her father, he knew best. He knew what she lacked in that particular situation -- trust. Trust in the elements and trust in her father. When she emerged from the water, gasping for air and blinking furiously to remove the beads of water from her stained red eyes, she cried out, "Again Daddy, Again!"

And off she quickly waddled, to the same edge as before. But instead of latching on to the edge of the pool, she latched on to the trust she learned from her father. She is free -- free to love the water (and boy does she!).

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On Easter Sunday, Conley, as a beautiful 6 year old, was baptized. As I made my way out to Aledo, TX for the ceremony, the story from above resonated in my memory. Yeah, I could analyze the whole water motif, but that is obvious. I want to go a different direction with it all -- a more personal direction. 

I am typically cynical to the idea of a child being "saved" -- to a child with the intellectual wherewithal to grasp the heights and depths of justification, grace, the gospel, and the kingdom on earth and in heaven. If I am completely honest, I'm not sure if middle school students are capable of the necessary spiritual and intellectual aptitude to understand these complex theological axioms. I mean, I am 25 and I wrestle with the particulars of Truth, so how can a six year old understand it!

God created me a melancholy. While the term connotes something negative, I do not mean it as such. Its a particular state of being that one is naturally disposed to. Some are naturally joyful -- in Christ or out of Christ -- for it is the state of being God gave them. As a melancholy, he granted me certain gifts and certain weaknesses. One of grave weaknesses is a tendency to sadness. When I encounter these states, oftentimes the question I pose God is, "Why me? Haven't I suffered enough? Haven't I been sad long enough?" 

On my quiet and peaceful ride to the baptism of my niece, I was struck, not with a cynical attitude to the actions about to take place, but a humbled spirit. Flashed in my mind was the often quoted verses from Luke 19:

¹⁵ People were also bringing babies to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. ¹⁶ But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinde

r them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. ¹⁷ Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”

Oftentimes we attribute Jesus's words to mean that we should never examine the intricacies of our faith. Instead, we should live a life of dull intellect, only loving God with our heart, soul, and strength. The mind be damned! But, I'm not sure that was Jesus's intention...

Our understanding of this passage hinges on our definition of faith. If we believe faith is merely this ethereal, cloudy connection of heart to soul to the divine, then the passage will be viewed through the lens of the previous interpretation. But, if instead, we see faith as trusting in an ever present God, a God who cares not only about our eternal future, but our current state, one bound to the kingdom on earth, then a spiritual freedom is gained through the blood of Christ. 

My struggle in trusting God usually doesn't revolve around money or vocation. It revolves around my personal holiness and brokenness -- does his grace really extend to me? can he really make me whole in the midst of my melancholy-ness? Usually, my heart screams emphatically, "No!" But as I saw my beautiful niece, in front of the whole church, explain her trust in the father, and be buried with Christ and raised to walk in newness of life, I realized that I was also on the edge of the pool, toes clinched and synched, only needing to trust as a child -- trust that my father's hands wait for me as I plunge into the pool. While I sink, he is there to bring me out of the depths, but it occurs in his timing, and not my own. 

My Father knows whats best for me. I only need to trust. 

A Fond Adieu

I was standing in the middle of an empty house -- in the living room. Light sauntered in through the windows, ever so discreetly, reflecting off the planks that demarcated the outside from the in. The walls, formerly stroked with greens, and frames with pieces jauntily assembled by tiny appendages unknowingly guided by the voices above, beside, behind, and moments frozen in time marked in pen as if to scream, "Yes, it happened" -- they all hung so delicately and undisturbed on the wall.

But no more.

I stood there in the dark. While light enveloped me, it didn't do much revealing. Light gives clarity to the unseen edges, gives form to the formless, gives order to chaos. The light that wrapped me only revealed the bareness to the reality once known -- a pure reality predicated on light. No, no, this light was no light, not the light that I had come to know, but a mere phantasm masquerading and parading.

I stood there in the dark. My soul confided with my spirit -- do you remember those times you soared in the air, pining for the football your dad launched from his chair? do you remember the mini knee hockey games? do you remember waking up in the mornings to mom reading the word and praying for you? do you remember your bear-like, invincible dog, laying motionless in the corner, wide eyed, as if to say, "No, no, the light will not give way." you said good bye, and so did he.

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When you sell a house, and you have your last moment with it, soaking up its barrenness as memories overwhelm your consciousness, you experience a sense off loss. Your final solitary moment, the one where you stand alone and entrenched in the fading memory of the past, in no way encapsulates the memory of your former home. You stand alone -- physically and emotionally. This loneliness is accentuation because the capsule that ordered an entire period of  your life is stripped away and you stand in recognition of that. You know a new life stands ahead and is ordered in a new way. You will never be able to go back. Only a vague memory remains.

This is a powerful picture of the soul, and how God moves in the soul. St. John of the Cross refers to the moment when the soul stands alone in the darkness of its house as the dark night. What is the dark night?

"The dark night is an influence from God upon the soul, which purges her of her ignorance and habitual imperfections, natural and spiritual...wherein God teaches the soul in secret, and instructs her in the perfect love, all act on her part being limited to fixing her attention lovingly on God, listening to his voice and receiving the light he sends."

God purges the intellect and senses to leave the soul barren and only able to progress through the perfect love of Christ infused by God himself. You stand alone, left alone with the faint light of God, stripped of all you used to hold dear. Its the moment when Jesus calls his disciples, and they drop everything to go and follow the light directed toward them.

You can imagine the possible thoughts that flooded their minds in between the call and the actually releasing of their nets. All the fish they caught from the Sea of Galilee flashed before their eyes, the fillets they grilled over an open fire on the sea's banks, the storms that rocked them near to death, the days the sun shined meekly upon their dark skin -- all of it for naught -- all stripped away -- for the call of a Carpenter. You can imagine a darkness overwhelming the soul. What am I doing? Am I really thinking about following this guy?

But, it was only a mere flash, similar to the flash the man had as he stood alone in his living room. It was not a darkness similar to the darkness of evil, but instead, a darkness intended to illuminate the dwelling place of the most high.

In actuality, their darkness would be similar to the darkness experienced by the one who searches for a house to purchase. They have moved out of their old house, and they stand in a new house -- barren, but full of potential. The light reflecting off the fence and into their living room sharing with the buyer new nooks and crannies never noticed before. You can only notice them when the sun is set at certain angle in the sky. Yet, there they stand. A stop motion-like image interjects itself into the mind (from an outside source) of the potential buyer, placing himself in those nooks and in those crannies -- the glistening yellows protrude out of the previous greens, the new frames envelope the reds smeared with pristine whites, there is lack of signatures needed to validate the past. The present clearly marks the past.

The purpose of the dark night is to lead the soul out of the darkness and into the light of union with the father. In this union, the father recreates the soul to be more and more bound to him -- in heart, mind, spirit, and strength. God infuses the vision into the soul of the potential buyer.

After some back and forth, the buyer relents, and he settles into his new home. New memories are made in the house designed by the designer. The old house, the old memories, occasionally come back, but the buyer would rather be curled up by the fireplace, warmed by the radiant yellows and whites of his new reality.


In honor of the home which is no longer mine.

The Response of the Anointed: A Listening Guide

"Since it appeared impossible to save the Jewish people who were being methodically annihilated by the Nazi-organized killing process, a sense of obligation grew among Jewish record-keepers (they say so explicitly and repeatedly) that they must at least preserve the evidence of the very process of destruction.

"We should read in these efforts an intuition that one could effectively oppose, indeed frustrate, the Nazis' plan of annihilation of the Jews if only a record of the Nazis' evil deeds were preserved. Victims of the Nazi crimes apparently believed that engraving the whole story in memory and preserving it for posterity effectively canceled the very essence of the Nazi project." -- Jan Gross, Neighbors.

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As Christians, we have been called to do the work of Christ. In the Greek, the word "Christian" is Χριστιανός (Christianos). It is simply defined as someone who is a "follower of Christ" -- a follower of Christos, the anointed one. 

In 1 Samuel 9 and 10, Samuel anoints Saul with olive oil, recognizing him as the first king of Israel. Similarly, this process continues for those subsequently placed on the "throne" of Israel. The original anointed and the anointed descended from less than ideal kingly situations and ancestry. 

Saul and his predecessor David were the most unlikely of kings -- Saul a Benjamite "from the smallest tribe of Israel...the least of all the clans of the tribe of Benjamin" and David, the runt of Jesse, "the youngest...[who merely] tends the sheep.”

But in the same vein, Jesus, the anointed one and "son of David," became king over all -- the physical and the metaphysical -- from the womb of a woman seen as an adulterer and into a trough for slop.

The way Jesus performs his kingly duties correlates with the degrading manner in which he was born. He reaches out to the marginalized and degraded. The opium of the evangelical church, the cliche that resonates from youth pastors and pulpits, is, "since Jesus hung out with the prostitutes, the homeless, the tax collectors, the adulterers, etc., as followers of Christ, we must too." And to that, I completely agree. 

Oftentimes though, the implementation of this spiritual exhortation manifests itself with the lay person enacting "preacher" mode. Preacher mode is the systematic way in which you construct a good for the teleological end of justification. The actuality of it comes in various forms -- actual preaching, feeding the homeless, fighting for the rights of the wronged, etc. Another way of saying it might be, and this is probably a subconscious reality within the minds of Christians, "In order to do X (glorify God), I must do Y (preach in order to justify)."

The impression of "preaching" from the "congregation" could possibly be complentarianism in a philio-like relationships. The preacher is greater because he has all the answers, and his people are below him and need to assimilate all that is said into his own life in order to obtain a state of salvation. There is definitely truth to the idea -- God, in his love and grace, poured out his spirit on me, so I want others to experience it as well. But, we don't attribute our grace to our messenger, our Apollos or Paul, but to the spirit himself! You can boil it down to this -- we view the Gospel as completely soteriological and my actions directly influence the soul of another.

But, there is another mode. Some might view this distinction as splitting hairs or merely a debate of semantics, but the distinction needs to be made. This other mode you can call "pastoral mode." The word pastor derives from the Latin pastorem (nominative pastor)  which means "shepherd." King David, the man after God's own heart, was a shepherd. Christ himself is the "Good Shepherd." What does the pastor, the shepherd, do?

"I know my sheep and my sheep know me— ¹⁵ just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep. ¹⁶ I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd." -- John 10

The beauty here is the fact that the sheep and the shepherd know each other and the shepherd guides them back to the flock when they stray. Jesus, the king, the anointed one, stepped down from heaven to serve and to know those who wandered away. To know someone implies the transfer of experiences, love, and knowledge to another. To know is to cut to the core of another, and carry whatever you find their on to your own shoulders. To know assumes pain. 

When the blind man calls out to Jesus, and Jesus guides the man to himself in Mark 10, he doesn't instantly preach the gospel of salvation to him, but instead asks him a simple question: 

“What do you want me to do for you?” 

The blind man said, “Rabbi, I want to see.”

⁵² “Go,” said Jesus, “your faith has healed you.” Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus along the road.

Before any sort of restoration occurs, a transfer of knowledge and experience occurs. As soon as he is healed, Jesus, in a way, takes on the pain of the one he know. Because of this, with his new found sight, he saw the anointed one, his salvation, and followed him. The man was not thinking justification. His end was not soteriological but christological. Now, eternal salvation and justification comes to a man who follows Christ, but that was not the point, it is a byproduct (and a great one at that!), and I also don't think that was Christ's aim. He longed for his people to be with him now -- in the present kingdom that he reigns over on this earth. And by being with him in the present, he is with him in eternity. The anointed King and his kingship manifests itself through his pastoral ministry of leading his sheep to himself through the act of knowing the ones he loves.

By lowering himself and making himself like those within the created order, the relationships with his brothers and sisters is similar to "the core of Vygotsky's theory...the sense that children must be actively involved in teaching/learning relationships with more competent others who both learn from children and draw them into fuller membership in their cultural world" (J. Tudge & S. Scrimsher, "Lev Vygotsky on Education"). Jesus, while God, is also man, and he walks beside us as the "more competent other," the shepherd leading his sheep, the pastor guiding his flock.

Because of this pastoral mode, a mode so often employed by Jesus, one of the true gifts a Christian can give to another is the gift of listening to another's story, just as Jesus listened to the blind man. It can be a greater material gift than food and shelter while also being a greater gift, at times, than the explicit gift of sharing the notions of the soteriological gospel. 

The quote at the beginning of the post shows the Jewish mindset during the Shoah. While their suffering undoubtedly caused them to cry out for their pain to cease, they believed that by recording and passing down the horrors done against their people, that in some way or another the Nazi project, in all its deviance, would be cancelled out. The art of story telling and the reception of the story by their listeners could lead to the destruction of the German's grave sin.  Thanks to those who documented the destructive nature of the holocaust, man is more in tuned to the capabilities of man in his depraved nature.The power of this story cautions us to certain actions and presses us to treat all of mankind as image bearers of the father.  

The act of listening, of walking along side the broken (which we all are), leads people first and foremost to the blood of Jesus, the anointed one. This is an act of service -- one that takes all of us -- our heart, mind, and strength. It frees us to love the person as they are and not as an object to preach at for the sake of justification (which is something we can't even control). It frees us to be a guide, a shepherd, a pastor, a Beatrice (so to speak) and not a knight perched on his towering white horse on a crusade to conquer souls for the heavenly kingdom. 

It frees us to be more like Jesus. 

I pray that I can be more pastoral. For I am neither a preacher nor pastor. I pray to shepherd those to Christ, in all humility, as Christ did for those who he called and those who called out to him.

"Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!"