"Speak to the whole assembly of the children of Israel and tell them:
Be holy, for I, the LORD, your God, am holy."
That just seems out of reach so we mitigate it. We read it as: be a little holy for the LORD is holy beyond limit or compare. Yet it is not mitigated in the text. Nor is it abstract:
"You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
I am the LORD."
Yet we don't. And we don't love ourselves enough to begin with. He asks of us honesty, justice, and mercy. Simply don't lie, don't defraud, don't take advantage. Help when help is needed. Yet still we don't. We constantly gauge our response. We measure it. We are looking for reasons to hold back and to not love fully. We are looking for excuses to turn inward. We are looking for rationale to put ourselves first.
We need Jesus to recontextualize this for us.
"Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me."
Finally we can see beyond our games of balancing giving and getting. We can see the one who has given himself completely in spite of what he has received from us. For who has received worse at our hands than him? His absolute love can now be discovered in the faces of those from whom we used to turn away. Woe to us if we turn from that. Not simply because our eternity is in peril, though it is, but because we are missing so great an invitation.
"Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world."
Not just at the end but now. The kingdom comes when love reigns. Reign in me, LORD, "my rock and my redeemer."
No comments:
Post a Comment