Revealing the Unknown by the Known: NT

By now you can probably see how the ideas Micah and I were grappling with at the time sort of overlap and complement each other. In fact, when he and I actually sat down to talk over some of what we'd been pondering, it was like finding out you've each been working with half of a puzzle. Everything one of us said sent the other on a tangent of "Oh, here's how this connects all these things I've been thinking about!" It was a fun conversation . . . and probably, now that I think about it, one of our long car trip conversations. Always the best.

So now that Micah's introduced his idea of divine change management, let me take you back to my half of the puzzle, and talk about how God continued in the NT to reveal the unknown (himself and his ways) through the known (what we know or accept to be true about the world, God, and how God works). My favorite example of this is the Sermon on the Mount.

The Sermon on the Mount is the name people have given a long teaching section in the Gospel of Matthew. It's found in chapter 5 with the Beatitudes (the "blessed are . . ." sayings), and moves from these straight into a discussion of the Mosaic Law that sort of frames the rest of the sermon. If you haven't read these chapters, do. They're a fantastic snippet that catches the heart of Jesus' teaching on ethics, lifestyle, and godliness.

The Sermon can be a bit confusing at first read, though. It feels like a list of impossible rules and ridiculously high expectations. In fact, it feels so much like a list of laws that Jesus' introduction feels false: "I have not come to abolish [the Law and the prophets] but to fulfill them." How can he call it fulfilling the Law when he spends just about the entire sermon telling his audience to follow his laws and not the old Laws?

Well, it might help to look at how Jesus' contemporaries thought about the Mosaic Law. The whole point of law, regardless of your religion or legal system, is to create a code that carries penalties for breaking it--penalties harsh enough to "encourage" people not to break it. The focus of law, then, is to prevent bad behaviour. The Pharisees took this one step further. They were so concerned about inadvertently breaking the Law that they created a whole host of extra rules and traditions that built, as they said, a "hedge" around the Law. In other words, the Pharisees had created an incredibly complex, elaborate, and ever-growing system of rules that focused on keeping you from even coming close to breaking any of the Laws of Moses.

At first glance, Jesus' approach doesn't seem that different, except that his standards are even higher and more impossible than the original Mosaic Law. His statement, then, that he's come to fulfill and not abolish the Law demands that we take a closer look at what he's doing. And here is where I have to credit a lot of my thinking to a class taught by Tom Thatcher, and to a book I read a year or so later, Kingdom Ethics.

It helps to look at how Jesus frames the Sermon on the Mount. He starts with a nifty little poem describing ways of being, of living and thinking, that move one toward godliness. He doesn't waste any time setting up boundaries between good and bad behaviour, suggesting that prohibiting bad behaviour is not what he's trying to accomplish here.

Instead, Jesus is looking to see what a person produces--actions and words--to tell him who that person is. Again, this is not like the Mosaic Law, prohibiting bad behaviour. It's about becoming the kind of person to whom the behaviour Jesus describes comes naturally. The point is that Law can never on its own produce people who just do the right thing. It can only produce people who don't do wrong things. Jesus' point is summarized in Matthew 5.48: "So then, be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." This isn't about some ridiculously impossible standard. What a lot of translations fail to communicate is that the Greek word for "perfect" is the same word used for "complete, finished." Jesus isn't demanding perfection before he'll accept anyone. He's calling his followers to continually seek integrity between their beliefs, thoughts, words, and actions: to be complete, whole, and true in the focus of their lives. He's calling his followers to a revolutionary way of thinking about words and actions as proof of your allegiance and identity.

It's about practicing your way into right behaviour and godliness. Every thought, word, and action is an opportunity to demonstrate who you are and to reflect God more and more truly.

If you read NT Wright, it's what he would call reclaiming your original calling as God's image-bearer: to be and live out in this world the image of God's perfect, complete, holy being.

So what does this have to do with known vs unknown? Well, Jesus took the accepted understanding of Law--prohibiting negative behaviour--and used it to explain the unknown--a new way, a way that reflects God more clearly and opens our eyes to a new understanding of how God works. Jesus took the known--the Law of Moses--and stepped it up a notch, injecting an unexpected element that would cue his audience to look a little more closely at what he's really saying. The sheer impossibility of complete perfection, as we see it, combined with Jesus' claim to fulfill but not erase the Law, cues us to study his words a little harder to see the unknown he's trying to communicate. And the result is that we see a new way of being, a way of becoming who we were created to be, reclaiming our heritage one step at a time toward godliness.

And we as Christians have an extra boost in our quest: we have God's own Spirit living in us to provide the guidance, strength, and even power to pursue this amazing agenda of kingdom living.