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"Obedience and Selfishness"
You get what you get because you do what you do. In a reward oriented society, people do what they do to get something. Our society celebrates the doing; and is sometimes envious of the getting. The process is essentially selfish, if we are not careful and diligent. Transferred to the process of living the Christian life, it is destructive. There is too much self and hope of reward in that kind of discipleship. Part of the struggle to be Christian is to get ourselves out of our obedience, and get God and God's vision for all creation into our obedience. Obedience can be selfish. "Getting" is a selfish word: "What's in it for me?" "What do I get?" We do not make progress toward Christian obedience by appealing to self-interest.
It is possible to do a good thing for the wrong reason. That is true of most good done. Good needs to be done. But we are Christians that means we need to work on the reasons for doing, work on getting self out of obedience. When that happens, obedience becomes something entirely different. God's commands are not to be obeyed as a means to get what we want. We are to obey because this is what the holy God commands. These commands are not a technique for achieving our selfish desires. They are God's means of revealing our selfish desires and remaking us into God's people, people for whom faith is a matter of bending, of aligning our lives to conform to God's desires rather than a method of achieving our own desires. People often think of Christian obedience as a kind of bargain in which God says, "If you keep a lot of rules, I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing." If you get what you get because you do what you do, then the doing and getting have to be refocused. It becomes a matter of loyalty and allegiance. It becomes a matter of struggling with why we do what we do. Only God can be the why for us. That is our quest, our goal, our struggle. It is a matter of disposition: a chosen, cultivated, long-term attitude of the heart and mind that will not abandon commitments. Much is at stake. This is why Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is so forceful. He knows how much obedience is corrupted by selfishness:
He does not identify who these hypocrites are except by their boasting and self-centeredness. Yet we nearly always identify these hypocrites as somebody other than us, never thinking that these words might apply to us. They do apply to us first, and only then and perhaps a long way down the road to others. The meaning of Jesus’ words becomes startling. Prayer should be directed to God but it is not in this case. It is done for human approval. It is not a quest for communion; it is a quest for advantage. It is a question of authenticity versus reward from human beings. It is assumed that the slightest desire for public notice destroys the authenticity of the act and automatically substitutes reward from our neighbors for allegiance to God. If it starts out selfish, it will stay selfish. God demands from every person sincerity and integrity. Struggle this is? Yes! We may count on God's presence in all places and times. God's powerful love is in operation, never in doubt. God's forgiveness is the only way we dare hope. But the human heart needs to be purged of its pretense and selfishness. For that selfishness can corrupt everything even prayer. We may get from prayer, exactly what we seek. If our aim is to be seen, we will be seen. If that is the reward we desire, it is the reward we receive and we are paid in full. That is the thought involved in the word "get." It is so easy to confuse blessed with get: I am blessed, I got what I wanted. "There is a persistent temptation to identify as the will of God what simply seems to promote selfish concerns and goals, which are often given high-sounding labels."[1] The whole of the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus' effort to undercut our self-interest by forcing us to give priority to God, and to our neighbor's or an enemy's needs. If we are to become children of God, it is by behavior like God's that we become God's sons and daughters. Each of us sets our heart on what we count important, and this allegiance determines the direction and content of our life. Praying in secret is the test of the sincerity of that commitment done without praise and reward of human beings. We know what Jesus means: looking to other human beings for their desires and wishes, so we may do what we do to get what we tell ourselves we have to get. We are called to recognize, root out, or discipline within ourselves those obsessive emotions, attitudes, desires, and ways of acting that blind us in our dealings with ourselves, each other and the world, and which corrupt perfectly good and useful impulses. Such corruption destroys, takes away our freedom to love. Powerful consequences follow from Jesus’ teaching. It means God is not a vending machine to get what we want. Prayer becomes a relationship between God and us through which God can communicate God's will, rather than as a tool we can use to manipulate God into fulfilling the requests we think will make us happy. Does God's true happiness consist in our being granted what we want, or rather in our finally, with pain and struggle, coming into line with what God wants for us. The two are not the same. And they dare not be confused. If Jesus is right that means that God issues demands on us. These demands, commands are not performance driven to improve us so that we can get more of what we want and think we need. No! God wants justice done is this world, the needy cared for, compassion to flourish, and violence to be halted. The test of love for God is loving our neighbor. The now-neglected virtues of reverence, restraint, humility, a sense of limits, the ability to listen and respond to human distress are virtues the market does not provide or encourage.[2] In fact they are virtues that selfishness masquerading as obedience destroys. If Jesus is right that means earnest self-forgetting. The selfless love that Christ teaches, shows, and urges upon us is the tough ability to see beyond ourselves, to see someone or something other. And when we look at ourselves, we are called to see ourselves accurately, as God sees us. Love, as an ultimate goal for Christians, is the freedom from self and self-aggrandizing fantasies--not simply the freedom to choose and get what we want. "Freedom,'' says Iris Murdoch, "is the disciplined overcoming of self," in order to see what is real--painful though that action may be.[3] "It is precisely because we are finite human beings – and, if that were not enough, fallen ones as well – that we must take a rather modest approach to human knowing."[4] We don’t know it all and that all we think we know is so selfishly driven. The daunting task is to keep reminding ourselves that at the heart of Jesus’ teaching lies the insistence that we remain sinners. We are regularly, and repeatedly, tempted to an arrogance and self-centeredness that corrupts our lives, our ethics, our commitments, and our visions. Selfishness in the guise of obedience, the more power we possess, threatens to destroy us all without mercy or justice. If Jesus is right that means the Christian life is lived in a certain direction away from self toward God. The direction is assigned to us by what we know of God, by what we know in Jesus Christ of the character and nature of God's love. The Christian life is lived in appropriate reaction to God's action for us. Loved, we are called to be loving. Forgiven, we are called to be forgiving. If we love to sing the old hymn "Amazing Grace," then we must be amazingly gracious. Life is lived in a loving direction. The purpose of Jesus’ strong, difficult teaching is to get us out of ourselves and into the world, our neighbor, and God. Every time you do what you do, the opportunity is there for you to turn the central part of you into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are turning your life into a gracious, loving creation that is in harmony with God, and with your companion creatures and with yourself. Or else you are turning yourself into a self that is in a state of competition with God, and with your companion creatures, and with life itself. Each of us at each moment is progressing toward one or other. Do not despair. This same Jesus gave himself for us all and God raised him from the dead and by the power of the Holy Spirit he still is at work among us. This same Jesus wills life for us all: loving, fulfilled life. "While we were yet sinners Christ Jesus died for us." "God has poured God’s love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to us." But the challenge is still before us to follow in his path. We have an important question to answer. Why do you do what you do? Wouldn’t Lent be a good time to wrestle with a better answer? _________________ |
F.
Harry Daniel