What
Does the Lord Require of You?
July
23, 2021
What does the
Lord require of you? What does the Lord require of me? I don’t mean require
something that brings salvation. We already have salvation. We have it because
God is a God of infinite love and infinite, universal, unconditional, unmerited
grace. So when I ask “what does the Lord require of us” I don’t mean require
before God will save us. Our salvation isn’t up to us, it’s up to God. God has
already taken care of it. So if I don’t mean require of us to effect our
salvation, and I don’t, what do I mean by that question that I have of course
cribbed from Micah?[1] I
don’t actually think God requires anything from us, but by this question I mean
what is our appropriate response to the grace in which we stand.[2]
I don’t think God requires any response from us, but I do believe that God
wants and may expect some sort of response to God’s unmerited grace. Beyond
that, when we truly know in the marrow of our bones that God has already saved
us we feel compelled to respond in some way to the unconditional love with
which God surrounds us. But how? Das ist hier die Frage, to quote Hamlet
in German for no particular reason.[3]
In broad strokes
at least there are at least two possible answers to that question. One of those
responses comes from the Gospel of John. At John 6:28 some people ask Jesus
“What must we do to perform the works of God?” In verse 29 Jesus replies, “This
is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” The Gospel of
John gives that answer to our question over and over again. What God wants from
us is that we believe in Jesus. The Greek word always translated as some form
of believe doesn’t actually mean what most people today take it to mean. It
doesn’t mean accept as true certain supposed facts about Jesus. It means
something more like put your trust in Jesus or give your heart to Jesus.[4]
Still, whatever believe may mean, in the Gospel of John what God requires of us
is that we believe in Jesus Christ. For John that’s what Jesus came for, to
convince first his disciples then the rest of us to believe in him. When John’s
Jesus says from the cross “It is finished,”[5]
he means primarily that his mission of getting people to believe that he is who
he says he is has been completed. Whether you contend that we must believe in
Jesus in order to be saved or (as I do) that God calls us to respond to God’s
action in Jesus with belief, John’s answer to our question is that God requires
us to believe in Jesus.
Other New
Testament books tell us that God expects or at least calls us to offer a quite
different response to God’s grace. When I read John 6:29 recently, the verse
that says that the work of God is that we are to believe in Jesus, my first
thought was: Go read the Synoptics![6]
Those new Testament Gospels give us a very different answer to our question of
what God requires, or at least wants and perhaps expects, us to do in response
to God’s grace. That response is to work at building the realm of God on earth.
It is to start by cleansing our bodies and souls of the worldly corruption that
unavoidably lies in them.[7]
Then it involves creating a nonviolent world in which all have enough because
no one has too much.[8]
There will be no billionaires blasting themselves into space in the realm of
God. Scientific research yes, ego gratification no. The realm of God is a world
in which everyone who is in need is taken care of.[9]
God calls us to complete the work of building the realm of God nonviolently.[10]
We may of course do these things because we believe in Jesus, but this answer to
our question tells us that God is more concerned with what we do than God is
with what our motivation for doing it might be.
These two
scriptural answers to the question of what God requires of us give us two very
different images of just what God really does require of us. Those two answers
are not at all mutually exclusive, but they really are two very different
answers. They give us two very different images of what the life of faith is
about, of what the life of faith looks like. Each of them has its plusses and
its minuses. Let’s take a look at both answers to see what some of those
plusses and minuses might be. I’ll start with the Gospel of John’s answer to
our question.
John’s answer,
that what God wants from us if that we believe in Jesus Christ, has the
positive characteristic that it keeps before us the truth that Jesus Christ
wasn’t and isn’t just another ordinary human being. Believing anyone other than
Jesus to be God is idolatry. It is making our god someone who isn’t God. Belief
in Jesus isn’t idolatry because, to us Christians at least, while Jesus was
fully human he was and is also fully God. John is the Gospel of incarnation. In
John Jesus really is God. He is that for me too, and I hope that he is that for
you. That’s why it is appropriate for us to believe in him and indeed to
worship him. Understanding the work of God to be believing in Jesus keeps Jesus
as God Incarnate ever before us.
But, perhaps
unfortunately, John’s answer to our question has significant minuses as well.
Especially when we operate with the most common understanding of what belief is
among us, this answer reduces Christian faith to a purely cognitive function. People
who see faith only the way the Gospel of John sees it usually are convinced
that belief in Jesus is what saves us and that anyone who doesn’t believe in
Jesus is damned because of their unbelief. They tend to be fond of Acts 16:31, which
includes the phrase “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”[11]
For so many people statements like the one at John 6:29 and the one at Acts
16:31 establish that all we have to do to be in good relationship with God,
indeed, all we have to do to do what God wants from us, is to go around
believing in Jesus, whatever that might mean.
Yet along with
Marcus Borg and many others I want to ask: Does God really care that much about
what’s going on in our minds? Yes, in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says some
things that focus on what is in people’s minds.[12]
In the broader context of what God calls us to do in response to God’s grace,
however, it just seems highly unlikely that the response to grace to which God
calls us is to stand around thinking proper thoughts about Jesus. In the Gospel
of John Jesus is all about getting people to believe that he is who he says he
is and that he came from heaven and will return to heaven. In most of the rest
of the New Testament, including the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus isn’t about our
thinking proper thoughts about Jesus at all. Yes, Jesus calls us to exorcize
Roman legions, that is, the ways of empire and of the world generally, out of
our souls. But that exorcism isn’t an end in itself. It is rather a necessary
first step if we are truly going to be about building the realm of God on
earth. Yes, thoughts matter. I am more convinced of that truth that most people
are. But thoughts by themselves are sterile. No matter how good and true our
thoughts may be they do nothing for anyone in themselves. That, I think, is
what the Letter of James means when it says that faith without works is dead.[13]
Thoughts are important but not in themselves. They are important when they lead
to action. Understanding that truth is something many people who consider
Christianity to be primarily about believing in Jesus lack.
So what about the
other answer to our question? Again perhaps unfortunately, the understanding of
the proper response to God’s grace to be working to build God’s realm of peace
and justice has its own spiritual trap. Seeing faith as being primarily about
the work of peace and justice too often leads people to neglect other central
aspects of faith. Christian spirituality gets lost in an exclusive focus on
justice. I’ll use my own United Church of Christ as an example. The UCC has a
long and noble heritage of being committed to working for justice. The UCC or
its predecessor denominations, especially the Congregationalists, led the way
on the abolition of slavery, the ordination of women, and the ordination of openly
LGBTQ+ individuals and has taken progressive stands on many other social and
moral issues. I would never suggest that the UCC abandon its commitment to
justice.
Yet the UCC seems
to me and to at least some others to have lost interest in other aspects of the
Christian faith. Compared, for example, to the Roman Catholic Church, the UCC
is frankly spiritually impoverished.[14]
We just don’t pay much attention to spirituality. To see what I mean log onto
ucc.org, the denomination’s national website. Any time you do you will very probably
see several entries and links having to do with justice issues. You will very
probably find no entries or links dealing with spiritually, or at most you’ll
find one or two. For the most part the UCC doesn’t understand why the woman who
anointed Jesus with a costly ointment of nard was right when she used the nard
to anoint Jesus rather than sell it and give the money to the poor.[15]
She was right because what she did when she anointed Jesus was to confess
through an action rather than through words that Jesus is indeed the Messiah,
God’s Anointed One. For us Christians that confession must always come first.
It must come first
for various different reasons. To begin with, if our social justice work is not
grounded in our faith in Christ it’s no different from social justice work done
by secular people or people of other faiths. There is of course nothing wrong
with secular people and people of other faiths doing social justice work. That
is indeed a very good thing. But if our work is not anchored in Christ it isn’t
and can’t be a witness to the Good News of Jesus Christ. Moreover, if we don’t
ground our social justice work in Christ we will quickly become disillusioned
or even burned out. We won’t be able to keep at it. When we do ground our work
in our faith in Christ we always have available to us a source of renewal and
strength, a refuge to which we can return time and again to get the spiritual
nourishment we need to keep building the realm of God in a world that so
strongly and consistently opposes our work and rejects our Christian value of
justice achieved through nonviolent action.
There is also a
more fundamental reason why we must always put our faith in Christ first. Yes,
God created us as physical beings, and God found our physical nature to be
good.[16]
We have physical needs, and God knows that we must have those needs met. Yet we
are not merely physical beings. We are also spiritual beings. God created us
with both physical bodies and nonphysical spirits. Just as we must feed our
bodies, so we must also feed our spirits. We do that by practicing our faith.
We do it by turning to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior intentionally and
regularly. We pray to him and with him. We engage in other spiritual acts like
communal worship and participation in the holy sacrament of the Eucharist. We
are the whole, healthy people God intends us to be only when we tend to both
our physical and our spiritual needs. That is the primary reason why we must
always put Jesus Christ first.
So what does the
Lord require of you and of me? Nothing to gain salvation. We already have that
immeasurable gift through God’s grace. God has already taken care of our
salvation and everyone else’s too. Yet God calls us to respond to God’s grace
both as the Gospel of John calls us to do it and as the other Gospels call us
to do it as well. Yes, believe in Christ Jesus. For us Christians that belief
is foundational. It is what makes us Christians. And yes, do God’s work on
earth by working to build God’s realm of distributive justice and peace for all
people. If we will do those two things we will both please God and satisfy our
own souls in the knowledge that we are indeed doing what the Lord requires of
us. Amen.
[1]
See Micah 6:8.
[2]
See Romans 5:1.
[3]
The usual translation of Hamlet’s “that is the question.”
[4] See
Borg, Marcus, The Heart of Christianity, Rediscovering a Life of Faith, HarperSanFrancisco,
2003, 39-41.
[5]
John 19:30.
[6]
The Synoptics are the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John, so called because
they are sufficiently similar that we can “see them together,” which is what
synoptic means.
[7]
See Mark 5:1-13.
[8]
See Matthew 19:16-22.
[9]
See Matthew 25:31-46.
[10] See
Matthew 5:38-44.
[11] I
have never understood why this verse is translated as “believe on the
Lord Jesus” rather than “believe in the Lord Jesus.” Perhaps that translation
is a holdover from the King James Version which translates the verse as “believe
on” not “believe in.”
[12] See
Matthew 5:21-22a and 27-28, which have sayings about murder and adultery.
[13]
James 2:17.
[14]
Many people, including many Catholics, are not familiar with the depth and
diversity of the spiritual practices in Roman Catholicism. I learned of them
when I was studying for my MDiv degree at the Seattle University School of
Theology and Ministry, Seattle University being a Jesuit institution.
[15]
See Mark 14:3-9; Matthew 26:6-13, and John 12:1-8. Luke also has a story of a
woman anointing Jesus, but it is very different from the other three. See Luke
10:38-41.
[16]
See Genesis 1:31, where the “everything he had made” to which the verse refers
includes us.
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