The letters stand for "What Would Jesus Do?" We are assured that doing the same thing is the goal of real Christians.
But can we really aspire to do what Jesus did?
Would it be wise ... to call national religious leaders "whitewashed tombs, pleasant enough to outer appearance, but inside full of dead bones and every rottenness" (Mt. 23.27)?
Should [we] imitate Jesus when he says, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but never will my words pass away" (Mk 13.31)?
None of those who want to imitate Jesus should proclaim that "I am the light of the world" (Jn 8.12) or that "I am the path" to the Father (Jn 14.6).
These are just a few samples of the way Jesus acts in the gospel. They were acts meant to show that he is not just like us, that he has higher rights and powers, that he has an authority as arbitrary as God's in the Book of Job.
He is a divine mystery walking among men. The only way we can directly imitate him is to act as if we were gods ourselves -- yet that is the very thing he forbids. He tells us to act as the last, not the first, as the least, not the greatest.
And this accords with the common sense of mankind. Christians cannot really be "Christlike." As Chesterton said, "A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it." The thing that we have to realize is that Christ, whoever or whatever he was, was certainly not a Christian.
Garry Wills What Jesus Meant, pps. xv - xvii, 2006.
2 comments:
And yet the Scripture has Jesus saying: "Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matt 5:48)
Is there inherent in Christianity an invitation to "Christification" and/or deification of the believer? Do we perhaps misunderstand both humanity and divinity so badly that we cannot see their intersection? I don't know the answer to this question.
I appreciate your visit and your comment.
Are we having Bible Study on Thursday, 6/8? Isn't St. Gabriel's carnival underway?
Is there inherent in Christianity an invitation to "Christification" and/or deification of the believer?
Well, I think so. I mean, I'm here with an eye towards, not what I'll be spared, but what I'll become when it's all said and done.
When Wills claims that we humans can't really be Christlike, he is ultimately challenging the Catholic priesthood who serve in persona Christi.
But I used his quote to challenge some namecalling done in Christ's imitation on another blog. I mean, the reasoning on the other blog was that since Jesus calls evil people nasty names in the Gospels, we Christians can to.
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