The Gospel passage for last Sunday was about as familiar as a New Testament text can be. A pharisee asked Jesus, "Which is the greatest commandment?" And Jesus responded by quoting two foundational passages from the Old Testament, The Shemah, "Love the lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind," and the last lines from the restatement of the Ten Commandments found in Leviticus 19, "Love your neighbor as yourself." I'd written a reasonably good sermon around that text which I might actually get to preach someday. What "came out" as I spoke was quite different from what was planned. Here's an abbreviated version of what I heard myself saying on Sunday morning.
Jesus said, "all the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments." He also said, in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, "I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it."
One of the great failings of the American Church of the last half century has been our willingness to assume that Jesus obeyed the law for us. We hate the idea of punishment, so we love the idea of "substitutionary atonement." The only thing we like better than the notion that Jesus took the "whooping" that we deserve is the idea that Jesus also did the obeying that is called for in scripture from beginning to end. We've been told that, when we get to the "Pearly Gates" and Peter asks us why he should let us in, all we have to do is point to Jesus and say, "I get in because HE obeyed."
Hogwash!
Jesus did not come to obey the law for his children. He came to make it possible for his children to live the life for which we were created and to which we are called. In the words of Old Testament Theologian, Gerhard, Von Rad, "The purpose of all God's redemptive activity was to created for himself a people wholly capable of obedience." (Old Testament Theology). Either the complete obedience to God's law, which, by the way, has always been the "Law of Love," IS possible for all of God's children in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit or the whole redemption story is a crock.
I'm just about convinced that our willingness to let Jesus do all the obeying is behind at least a couple of issues in and around the modern American Church.
First, our failure to live lives of obedience, our failure to live lives organized around undivided love for God and energized by undivided love for neighbor is the main reason the "world" doesn't think much of the church today. Jesus said that our obedience (The way we love God and the way we love one another) would be the way the world knew that we were his and that the Kingdom had come.
Second, our willing to settle for "substitutionary obedience" is the reason there is so little genuine "victory," so little joy, and so little to celebrate in the church today. We don't see changed lives because we don't expect changed lives.
I'm not sure how we got here. Most of what's wrong with the church I like to blame on "T.V. evangelists." I do think we've bought into a generic evangelicalism that seeks to sell faith the way folks sell cars; no money down and payments anyone can afford. But beyond that I think we've forgotten that the obedient life, the life lived out of an undivided heart of love for God and neighbor is not the "old heart" retrained. It is the "New Heart" reborn. God let Ezekiel in on the secret when he said, "I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh."
Somewhere, somehow, I think stopped calling our people to pray for a "New Heart" and started helping them "settle" for what they could accomplish by trying to retrain the old one.
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