A Different Kind of Life

Whose Feet Can I Wash?

If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I gave you an example that you also should do as I did to you.
--John 13:14-15

How influenced are we by the world around us? A simple question, yet one that is not easily answered. We live in the midst of a society obsessed with money and possession, blinded by power and privilege, and mesmerized by sex and beauty. Yet underneath each of these desires—giving them their power and driving them onward—is a deep, abiding selfishness. At its heart, we live in a world driven, fueled, and motivated by self-interest. Everything is centered on the fulfillment of our own urges and wants.

Each of us, I think, would readily agree to such an assessment—it is virtually impossible to deny this characteristic of modern society. Yet I wonder whether we would so readily agree to our own participation in this mindset. Put simply, it is easy enough (and at times quite fulfilling and self-justifying) to say that everyone around us is selfish, yet it is much more difficult to admit to such darkness in our own souls.

Jesus’ words here stand in stark contrast to such self-interest. In Jesus day—a world devoid of advanced transportation—virtually all travel was done on foot by way of dry, dusty roads. As such, the feet of any traveler would quickly become unbelievably filthy. Thus, it was the job of the lowliest servant in any given house to wash the feet of guests prior to the meal—not only for concerns of comfort and sanitation, but also as a sign of respect and honor for the guest.

Yet interestingly enough, Jesus here—at the beginning of his last supper with his closest followers—takes on such a menial, demeaning task. Why? Why would he take both the time and dishonor to do such a thing? Would there not be someone else capable of the task?

Of course there were others capable—Jesus did this intentionally. He takes these significant, fleeting, precious moments to teach his followers one of his greatest lessons—that this was the manner in which they were to live their lives. In direct opposition to the selfishness of both then and now, he states by these simple actions and words that life—the true life that God intended—was meant to be lived differently. Rather than a life characterized by blind self-interest, we are to live in wanton self-sacrifice and generosity.

So a question for us all—whose feet can you wash today?

The 'Set of My Soul'

Even if I am imperfect in so many ways, nonetheless I want my brothers and my family to know my mettle, so that they may clearly recognize the set of my soul.
--St. Patrick, The Confession of St. Patrick 1:6

This is an interesting thought. I have been fond of this quote for a long time, and I ran across it again the other day. If you are not familiar with the story of St. Patrick, it is quite a compelling tale. According to legend, Patrick, a young British boy, is captured by raiders at the age of 16 and taken as a slave to Ireland. After six years of slavery, he manages to escape and return to his family in Britain. Some time later he becomes a priest, and feels God calling him to return to Ireland to minister to the people who had once enslaved him. This particular quote is part of a larger work attributed to him which contains letters to various individuals as well as a kind of running diary of his thoughts and experiences.

All that aside, the idea that is particularly compelling to me is this: do people know my mettle? Do those around me recognize “the set of my soul?”

What I mean is this—the vast majority of people lead lives that are commonplace, obsessed with the ordinary and trivial things of existence, focused on accumulation of decaying possessions and fleeting social status. Am I one of them?

Or, do I live life differently? Do I live my life in pursuit of a compelling purpose? Is my life shaped in practical and observable ways by a deeper belief about life and God?

It is a question for all of us: can those around us clearly and easily recognize the things we stand for—the “hills we die on?” If not, do we really stand for them at all?

Zacchaeus the Thief

Meanwhile, Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “I will give half my wealth to the poor, Lord, and if I have overcharged people on their taxes, I will give them back four times as much!”
--Luke 19:8

The story of Zacchaeus is absolutely fascinating—a man encounters Jesus and his life and outlook are completely and utterly changed as a result. Yet I find that a great many people fail to recognize how significant the change really is. In order to fully grasp what is going on here, it is necessary to understand the backstory at work.

First of all, Luke states that Zacchaeus was a “tax collector.” Unlike our modern day IRS workers, who are paid by the government, tax collectors in Jesus’ day actually paid the government for the right to collect taxes in an area. Potential tax collectors would bid for the rights to a particular area, and whoever had the highest bid won the right to collect the taxes. Once the rights had been awarded to a particular area, that was the end of the Roman government’s involvement in the matter—as long as they received the predetermined amount of taxes for an area, they did not care how much was actually collected. So a tax collector made his profit on any additional taxes he was able to collect above and beyond his predetermined amount. Needless to say, these guys weren’t particularly popular. (You can imagine how well-liked a “chief tax collector would have been.”)

Second, you also have to keep in mind that Zacchaeus is a Jew. To become a tax collector in Jesus’ time was to essentially side with the Roman government against your own people—tax collectors were seen as traitors, heretics, and outcasts from Jewish society. Again, not a very popular position (although a very lucrative one.)

For the third element, let us return to the story itself. After he has encountered Jesus and spent some time around him, he states that he will give half of his wealth to the poor and pay back those he cheated four times the amount. Here’s the significance of this: to begin with, he’s giving half his wealth away off the top, no questions asked. Beyond that, there are three categories of theft in Jewish law:
1. Intentional theft—you steal it, and you sell it or kill it (in the case of livestock). You must pay back four times the amount.
2. Intentional theft—you steal it and you still have it. You must pay back double.
3. Disregard for property of another—you borrow something and break it or it is stolen from you. You must pay back the full amount.
So according to this scale, Zacchaeus falls into the second category. Yet he willingly places himself into the first category—why?

You see, he encountered Jesus, and in so doing he recognized for the first time the condition of his own heart. He recognized what his wealth had done to him and the lives around him, and he realized what needed to be done to make it right.

This is a complete and utter change of heart and life—this is what happens when someone authentically encounters Jesus.

What Happens at 4 am...

In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning, I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation.
--Psalm 5:3

Let me just preface everything that I am about to say with the following statement: I hate mornings. I really, really hate mornings. It is my personal belief that nothing should ever start before 10:00 for any reason.

With that in mind, I woke up this morning at 3:30 am. I didn’t wake up because of a noise in the house (no more than usual), or because it was hot in the room (which is a shock for me), or even because I was in an uncomfortable position (even though I was—thank you very much, dog). I just woke up, and simply could not get back to sleep despite my best efforts. So, after a half-hour of laying there in futility, I decided to just give up on it and get up. Keep in mind that even though I am wide-awake at this point, I’m not really happy about it—in my mind, there is no acceptable reason to be up at 4 am.

But I discovered something this morning, something that I knew but had never really experienced firsthand. It is really still and quiet in the morning—particularly the 4:00 am part of the morning. I think that today was the first time in my life that I have ever been completely awake at this time in the morning, coherent enough to really take in the experience.

As I said, everything is still and quiet in the morning. It was one of those kinds of quiet where you could almost hear your thoughts out loud; a quiet where there is absolutely nothing to distract you from contemplating God, your life, or anything else. I understand now why monastic orders throughout history have placed such an emphasis on this time of the day—there are no distractions, no pressures, nothing to interrupt the peaceful moments that God longs to give us.

It was at that point I realized—when was the last time that I have been absolutely still before God? When was the last time that I didn’t come to him in a rush, demanding solutions to my problems or solutions to my suffering? When was the last time that I simply sat in his presence and waited on Him to speak?

I honestly don’t know, but I know after today that it has been far too long.

Reconciliation as Worship

So if you are standing before the altar in the Temple, offering a sacrifice to God, and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there beside the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God.
--Matthew 5:23-24

I have been thinking a lot lately about how the church/Christianity is viewed by modern society—how the world looks at us who claim to follow Jesus. I am interested in the impressions that we give to the world, the stereotypes we carry (or contribute to, unfortunately), and the way that we live out the faith that we claim.

One of the charges that I have seen leveled against followers of Jesus is that we are only interested in “religious stuff”—that we lack an authentic connection to or concern for the “real world.” In the same vein, it seems that God is viewed in a similar light; after all, if his people are only concerned with “church stuff,” then it must be that that is all he cares about as well, right?

Yet here Jesus goes completely against the grain on this idea. Keep in mind that in the Judaism of his day, offering a sacrifice in the Temple was the foremost method of worship to God—it didn’t get any more “religious” than that. Offering a sacrifice was the most important thing that you could do religiously. But essentially Jesus tells this crowd, “Even if you are doing the most important ‘religious’ stuff that you can do, if you remember that there is reconciliation that needs to happen between you and another person, then that takes precedence. Go and do it, then come back and do the religious stuff.” It is a complete reversal of their framework.

So what do we make of this for today? After all, Jesus seems to be saying that our relationships with people—how we interact, how we treat them, what we do with conflict, and so on—are a crucial part of our worship and pursuit of Him. Put simply, that if we claim to be following him, then it must bear fruit in the way that we deal with other people. If we believe what Jesus seems to be saying, then it seems that perhaps the “religious stuff” is not nearly as important to God as is commonly assumed.

What do you think? Have I blown this out of proportion, or is reconciliation really that important?

You Know Plenty--What Do You Want?

The Jewish leaders surrounded him and asked, “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus replied, “I have already told you, and you don’t believe me. The proof is what I do in the name of my Father.”
—John 10:24-25

As I was reading this passage today, it struck me how remarkably similar it is to things that get said about God in contemporary society. Things like “If God is real, why doesn’t he just show himself?” and “Why didn’t Jesus just spell everything out exactly? Why do we have to have faith?”

I find it interesting that people in Jesus’ day asked him the very same things—but interesting for a couple of very different reasons. First, I think it is interesting because our society tends quite easily toward “chronological snobbery”—the assumption that people in ages past were far more ignorant than we are. I will freely grant that we are far more informed than they, but as any teacher will tell you, information and intelligence are nowhere near the same thing. We have a far greater stock of information—details about the world, laws about how it works, records of what has occurred—but I find it difficult to believe that we are any more intelligent as a whole than people of Jesus’ day. (See the dreck that passes as entertainment through most of our society for proof of this.) If for no other reason, the fact that they understood life well enough to ask the same question of God that we do lends itself quite strongly in this direction.

Second, I find it interesting that the Jewish leaders asking this question actually had God there in front of them in physical form to answer the question. We ask each other these questions, but they actually got to ask God himself. And what was his answer? “I’ve already told you.” That’s kinda frustrating, but it fits. He’s saying, “Look, I’ve already shown you enough to believe on—if you don’t want me on this basis, then you won’t want me regardless of what I show you.”

Once again, I see that it is not a question of knowledge or understanding, but one of desire. It’s not , “Do I know enough?” but rather “Is this what I really want?”

How's this for self-realization...

Now before the Feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come that He would depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He showed them the full extent of His love…Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and He had come forth from God and was going back to God, got up from supper, and laid aside His garments; and taking a towel, He girded himself.
—John 13:1, 3-4

A great deal is made in modern society about self-analysis, self-realization, and the like. “Know thyself,” “Get in touch with your inner self,” or “I’m just trying to find myself” are all phrases which are all-too-common to modern ears. It seems that virtually everywhere you look, people are obsessed with the self and its condition. However, much less frequently, it seems, does such introspection result in more than increased attention to that very thing—the self. Yet, just as one would expect, Jesus’ moment of self-actualization results in the complete opposite—and he calls his followers to the same.

In John 13, we see the episode of Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet; it is a familiar enough scene, yet the above passage which introduces it tends to be neglected in the overall discussion. Here John says that Jesus was fully aware of three crucial things which throw his subsequent actions and words into stark relief. He knows that he is about to “depart out of this world” (aka die), that God had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God. Let us not underestimate the oppressive weight of these realizations on the psyche of a man who, while he is indeed fully God, is also fully man. To realize not only the imminence of your own death but also your own supernatural origins and significance in the salvation history of all creation is a mental and emotional weight that we cannot begin to imagine.

It is at this moment that Jesus chooses to do that which is in direct contrast to all of human nature (his own included). He turns to his disciples and without saying a word, begins to do the work of a slave. It is interesting that in this moment—this fleeting space between the press of the crowds, the weight of his self-understanding, and the shadow of his impending death—he chooses to show his disciples what he believes to be the most important lesson that he can teach them.

It is an important lesson to learn in an introspective society—any understanding of self must drive us back to deeper service to others…even if the price that must be paid is nothing short of our own self.

Sacred vs. Selfish

Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good!
--Genesis 1:31

In continuation with the ideas raised in yesterday’s post, I would like to offer a bit of what I see as a part of our ongoing creation responsibility to “do the work of God in the world.” This involves something that doesn’t seem particularly religions per se, but in truth really gets to the heart of how we see God and the world that He has made.

I have been captivated recently by the idea of “going green”—by the ongoing effort to reduce the imprint of our lives on the physical world around us. More specifically, I was listening to a sermon the other day in which the speaker said that if we were going to call ourselves the church or the people of God, then we should be leading the way in taking care of that which God created and which He apparently loves and thinks very highly of.

Put simply, I like this idea, and yet I am very humbled by it. I am totally on board with the idea that God loves his creation (not just people, but all of the created world), and that since it has value in His sight, then it should have value in ours as well. But at the same time, I know my own laziness, selfishness, and greed. I know the darkness in my own heart, and I know the voice that says “Don’t worry about it…it’s not your fault….it’s someone else’s problem…you’re not that bad…” and so on.

So how do we deal with this? I guess the root question that I am asking is not really how do we take care of the earth, but rather how do we address this selfishness in practical, significant, and lasting ways?