14 March 2013 - selfless help

14 March 2013 - selfless help

What makes our testimony about Jesus tenable?  

Jesus said to the Jews: 
“If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not true.

We aren't at the center of it.  The main character in our story is no longer us.  This is observable by others but impossible on merely human strength.  

How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another
and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God?

If we try to turn Jesus into an self-improvement project we are not credible.  Self-improvement can trap us within ourselves and make us self-centered.  It can be the very opposite of love.  Of course improvement is necessary for us all.  If we try to do it on our own we will inevitable do it according to our own models and goals.  And our vision is too partial and imperfect to be without selfishness.  The only one who is perfectly capable of walking the way without selfishness is Jesu.  He is the only one who doesn't need improvement.  Yet he walks the way regardless, becoming obedient unto death, death on a cross.  Therefore "it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered" (cf Hebrews 2:10.).  He brings our human nature with him and perfects it precisely because we cannot do it on our own.  This empowers us to lead lives directed toward others and toward love.

Then he spoke of exterminating them,
but Moses, his chosen one,
Withstood him in the breach
to turn back his destructive wrath.

Will this kind of outward focus overwhelm us?  There are so many different ways we might help and so much that can go right or wrong with any of them.  Isn't this being pulled into a future which is not yet, rather than trusting God who says that the day's evil is sufficient for itself.  Don't the self-help advocates have it right when they tell us to live in the moment?  Sort of.  But the moment is not isolating.  It is not ultimately a place of selfishness.  And yet it can be just that for the self-help crowd.  It becomes for them a place of escape.  It becomes a place to run from the world and from others.  But the moment is fundamentally relational.  It is a place of meetings.  It is meant to be a place of love.  To truly be present in the moment is to be fully available to others and, even more importantly, to be fully available to God.

For us, then, the moment does not exclude love.  For example, to intercede for others is one of the most profoundly present acts we can undertake.  And this is why God honors such acts so highly.  When we are present to God and to the need of our brothers and sisters God lets his transformative and redemptive power flow into the world through us.

So the LORD relented in the punishment
he had threatened to inflict on his people.

Jesus lives this way perfectly.  He is the one who transforms us that we might live it.  It is precisely in being so transformed that we become credible witnesses.  The world can see that we aren't in this for ourselves.  Any means we have without his aid is insufficient.  But in him is the fullness of life eternal.

You search the Scriptures,
because you think you have eternal life through them;
even they testify on my behalf.
But you do not want to come to me to have life.

Let us come to him, for he never ceases to call us!