"Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you... Give to everyone who begs from you... But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return... Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you."
Lots of us recognize these words as coming from Jesus. We know that Jesus says, "Love your enemies." Many of us can say the Lord's Prayer from memory, including that part where we ask for forgiveness, conditioned on our promise to forgive others. We know all these things. But we also know how hard it can be for us to forgive, how much we prefer to hate our enemy, get back at the one who hurts us, and reassure ourselves that the man on the street corner with a sign asking for help is probably scamming people.
What Jesus asks of us is hard, so hard we can't quite imagine really doing it. And so we decide that "believing in Jesus" somehow gives us a pass.
For the very first Christians almost 2000 years ago, their basic statement of faith was, "Jesus is Lord." We still invoke this title for Jesus, but it seems to me that at the core of our faith, many of us have traded Lord for Savior. We want Jesus to "save" us, though we often have very different ideas about what we need saving from. But we're less interested in Jesus being our God, our Master, the one who we will follow and obey. I try to obey Jesus to a point, as do many. But what Jesus asks is hard, sometimes very hard. Surely some of it is optional. And surely Jesus will forgive me anyway.
Sometimes I think that what I most need to be "saved" from is my own half-hearted way of following Jesus.
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