Willing and Doing

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven."

-- Matthew 7:21

Our theme for this Sunday is the old one of hypocrisy. Surely all religions include repeated warnings and exhortations against professing with one’s lips and denying by one’s deeds the truth of the religion. Our Gospel lesson today, from the climax to the Sermon on the Mount, seems quite simple: if you act on the Sermon you will have a sturdy faith like a house founded on a rock; if you do not “walk the walk” but merely “talk the talk” your faith will be like a house built on sand that will collapse in a storm.  Our OT lesson from Deuteronomy says the same thing in different terms. If you perform the commandments they will be to you a blessing, if you do not perform them they will turn out to be a curse.

It all seems so simple, and so many religious people have tried to live the faith at this simple level. Find out what God wants by reading the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, and then do it and all will be well; but the truth of the life of faith is far more complicated than that. Ask Job, the nub of whose anguished protest is that he did everything Deuteronomy required and it turned out to be a curse not a blessing.  With Job in mind we cannot read the Sermon on the Mount as if it were simply Deuteronomy all over again.  Whatever it may be, these three chapters of Matthew’s Gospel are not law; perhaps they are Gospel, a new category, which we have yet to understand? The downside of this simplistic faith that reads the Gospel as if it were a Law, is so steep, that it is worth spending some time with it.

One of its outcomes is called legalism. Some Christians interpret the Bible as if it were the instruction manual for life. For such this climax to the Sermon on the Mount means that if you follow the instructions your life, like a piece of technology, will work, if you do not it will crash.  Others interpret the Bible as if it were a book of laws; if you obey them you will stay out of trouble if you do not you will become guilty and subject to punishment. Communities of legalism are characterized by guilt, anxiety, depression, on the one hand, and the violence of moralism usually disguised as love and concern, on the other. “We know why you are suffering, and what you can do about it! If only you would listen to us!” said Job’s merciless comforters. Life is a matter of conformity to rules, and those rules can be clearly known because they are stated in the Bible, and if your life is not going well it must be because you are not following the rules.

Another stop on the downside slope is self-deception. Life is basically simple and the human world is fundamentally good and moral, says self-deception. We all know what is right and if we just do it things will go well. This is the point of view of much Western religion. I remember hosting the Jewish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel at Stanford. He presented a searing lecture on the clandestine correspondence of Jews who worked for the executioners in the death camps, luring fellow Jews into the “showers” where they were gassed rather than deloused, and then dragging the bodies out. At lunch the next day I asked Wiesel whether in the light of all he knew he did not find the doctrine of Original Sin attractive; at least it explained why and how such numbing atrocity is continually committed by cultured people, even by those who were once the victims of it. He was adamant in his rejection of the doctrine. I have wondered why ever since, and the only conjecture I can come up with is that if the human race is mortally wounded in its spirit and incapable of avoiding evil, the only alternatives are redemption or despair. We must find a Savior or despair. He did not wish to admit that we need a Savior, for obvious reasons. (This is only my speculation, not a reliable guide to Wiesel’s reasons. I use him simply as an occasion to make this point).

Notice, I do not say that we are incapable of doing good, but rather that we are incapable of avoiding evil. I need not remind you I hope of the dismal history of relentless evil in the human world, of how doing good can cause evil by the doctrine of unintended consequences. Let me give you a current example. In the Sudan the Muslim northerners are enslaving the southern Christians and selling them in slave markets in the north. Christians, in this country mostly evangelical Protestants, but in Europe some of the mainline Protestant churches, are buying freedom for these slaves, and the going price is $50 a head. This has led not to a curtailment of the trade but to a greater efflorescence and a burgeoning fraud. People are allowing themselves to be sold to the American and European Christians over and over again and splitting the proceeds with the slave traders. Now this is a ludicrous example to be sure, of how the simple impulse to do good can be corrupted by the built-in perversity of the human world; but it is not an exception or an aberration, it is the rule and the norm. This is the way things usually go!  We can do good but we cannot avoid evil because the structures of the human world are bent and twisted.

I could go on multiplying examples, but I do not want to dwell with the pessimists who are so aware of this state of affairs that they find in it a reason to do nothing at all. There is always something to be done, but it must be done ever and only with the awareness of the all-pervasiveness of sin, and therefore, for us, always and only in the name and power of the Savior of this twisted world, Jesus Christ. All I want to establish for the present is that the life that God wants us to lead cannot be undertaken without a Savior. This is what in my opinion makes our Christian faith pre-eminent in its grasp of the human reality. We are spiritually sick and wounded, and the question is ultimately only, “Is there a balm in Gilead? To heal the sin-sick soul? And we answer, “There is, and we know his name. It is Jesus.”

I attended a very sobering seminar last week at Stanford where Mr. Shankar Bajpai retired Ambassador of India to Washington and Beijing, and Mr. Rifaat Hussain a Pakistani military analyst said that both sides were prepared to use nuclear weapons over Kashmir, and a senior military analyst from Israel made a chilling slip of the tongue when he asked, “Are you saying that if Pakistan does not control these terrorists Israel, I mean India, will use nuclear weapons.” Afterwards one of my former colleagues, a world expert on the nuclear situation between India and Pakistan, and a pre-eminent historian of the Cuban Missile Crisis said that the present situation in South Asia is worse than the Cuban Missile crisis in terms of the possibility of nuclear war. Another of my former colleagues, a Nobel Prize winner for founding the group, ‘International Physicians against Nuclear War” in the depths of the Cold War, told me that he had been invited to LA by the emergency agencies, - fire, hospitals etc.- to describe the effects of the detonation of a nuclear weapon in downtown LA, and advise how to prepare for it. He said we are back where we were at the height of the nuclear scare in the eighties, and more so.

Why do I tell you this? Simply because I want us to realize how much more complicated doing good is than just knowing the rules and observing them. Our faith knows this viscerally and from within, because our God is revealed to us in the cruel death of an innocent man. We are those who know that this world is crueler than anyone can imagine, that its evil is impacted and impenetrable by any human observance of any rules and laws. Indeed, such observance usually makes things worse, as fanatical Jews and Muslims are showing us at present. It’s not the lukewarm adherents of their respective religions that bring war to the world, but the zealous ones who simply read and do. About such religion all I can say is, “Bring on the non-observant ones. Let’s have more hypocrites and slackers !” 

So to return to our text, to “…do the will of my Father that is in heaven,” must mean something other than treating the Sermon on the Mount as a set of laws to be observed or directions to be followed. Clearly, it means more than the lip service of hypocrites who claim to prophesy, exorcise and work miracles in his name, all the vapid show biz of over-heated self- stimulation, but that is a minimal interpretation. To do the will of the Father must be more than simply that, given what we have said about the world. What could it be, this will of the Father, if it is not a law?  For an answer I turn to John’s Gospel, 6:27-29, and read: Jesus said, “’Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you; for on him has God the Father set his seal.’ Then they said to him, ‘What must we do to be doing the works of God?’ Jesus answered them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.’” So the true work of God is to believe in the Savior of the world, and that makes all the sense in the world, because if there is not a Savior all our good work simply bears within itself the seeds of the next problem. If there is a Savior and if our good work is done in praise of his name and as part of his saving work in the world, like the seed that falls in good soil it will bring forth “thirtyfold, sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” So there is a big and puzzling gap between willing the good and doing the good, but God has provided a bridge over the chasm in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.