Commandments and Counter Narratives

Too often, I think of what I should have said long after the conversation is over. It happened again on Sunday. A church member spoke with me regarding the reading from the Sermon on the Mount. In it Jesus works his way from the commandment against murder to saying that being angry is equally problematic, and he says that calling someone a nasty name makes you liable to hell.

Diane, the other pastor here, had preached what I thought was a very well done sermon that was gentle yet also called people to embrace Jesus' call to live differently. But I don't think this person I spoke with was reacting to her sermon. Rather, he seemed to be focused on the scripture itself and on what seemed to him the near impossibility of its demand.

I took various approaches to helping him take Jesus' call seriously without being driven into some sort of despair, none of them very successful. Only later did it occur to me that Matthew's gospel also reports Jesus saying, "For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." Surely that means Jesus does not expect us to despair about his call not to be angry, to reconcile with any who have something against us, not to look with lust at women (I take that in part to mean not viewing women as objects.), etc. I don't think Jesus is simply heaping up demands on us. Rather he is describing what life looks like when it is motivated fundamentally be love.

That point is really hammered home in today's epistle reading. "I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. Whoever says, 'I am in the light,' while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves a brother or sister lives in the light, and in such a person there is no cause for stumbling."

Neither Jesus nor the writer of 1 John expects that we will never fail as we seek to be faithful. 1 John says as much at the opening of today's verses. But both expect that our lives will be transformed when a divine-like love motivates and undergirds our lives.

There has been an unfortunate tendency, especially in Protestant Christianity, to view God's commandments primarily as things that drive us to despair and into the arms of God's mercy. I don't want totally to discount this, but I do think we horribly overemphasize it. Jesus clearly thinks his commandments are in some way doable, and he expects that we will discover a new way of life as we seek to embody them.

In my own, Reformed Tradition, John Calvin spoke of something called the "third use of the law." He was adding to Luther's idea that the law first restrained evil and secondly caused us to despair and turn to God's grace. Calvin accepted both of these, but added that when we are brought into new relationship with God through Jesus, the commandments become for us a guide be becoming more holy. They are not things by which we are judged for doing or failing to do. Rather they are a road map for the life we long to live.

I've always been fond of this third use of the law, but I wonder if Calvin went far enough. Beyond simply being a map to get us somewhere we long to be, God's commands might also be seen as a way of living, or of trying to live, that have power to shape and form us into people who long for the same thing God longs for.

Compare this, for instance, to the way of living, the practices, that our society encourages. Above all, our culture calls us into practices of consumerism, practices that form us as people who think that happiness and fulfillment come from acquiring "more." Even much of the hunger for spirituality in our culture is understood out of this consumer model. And you don't need to be a perfect consumer to be powerfully shaped and formed by its teachings. It is enough that this striving for more becomes the dominant narrative of people's lives.

I his teachings, Jesus tries to instill in us a counter-narrative. He understands the law and commandments not as restraints on aberrant behaviors like murder, but as practices that shape us for life in God's new day, practices that embody God's mercy and love. It is not necessary for us to keep his commandments without fail for his narrative to shape and form us in powerful ways. Indeed, Jesus becomes transforming for us when his narrative becomes the dominant one of our lives, when we aspire, above all else, to the sort of life he envisions for us.

What is the dominant narrative that drives, motivates, and makes sense of life for you? And to what degree is that narrative compatible with what Jesus taught and the life he invites us to live?

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