Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

Scale and form

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Acts 6:7
The word of God continued to spread, and the number of disciples in Jerusalem increased greatly; even a large group of priests were becoming obedient to the faith.

No one gives up power easily, but first John the Baptist, and then Jesus, shows us how. John's fame had spread, his words were taken seriously, then Jesus himself submitted to baptism. "He must increase, while I must decrease" (John 3:30), were John's humble words. John continued his work but also realized his task was accomplished. Imprisonment and assassination awaited him.

Jesus' own path down into death followed immediately upon an increase in his fame and effectiveness among the Jews. They praised him on his entry into Jerusalem and called him the son of David. They compared him to Elijah. Jesus was for them the once and future king. All that remained was for him to follow that path into glory.

But he did not. Instead, with blood-curdling screams and a whip, Jesus tore out the temple's moneychangers. He attacked the Pharisees in the most blunt terms possible. On the sacred day of Sabbath he illegally healed beggars who had no social or political clout. His preaching and teaching became both more clouded and more blasphemous, his words implying that he was the Messiah becoming more explicit by the day. Jesus took the path toward Golgotha even as his star was ascending.

A few of the Jewish priests glimpsed through Jesus' actions into his new way of seeing God and God's kingdom. A few chose to follow him down, to leave power and glory behind. They chose, as Jesus did, to decrease so God would increase.

But many did not. Most did not. Why? They were afraid, of course. But what else? What held them in the iron fist of their education, of their assumptions, of their "knowledge"?

In a book entitled The Way of Ignorance, farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry writes about how much and what we can know, and about living a good life. We must realize who we are, how we are "shaped", in what form:

We come to form, we in-form our lives, by accepting the obvious limits imposed by our talents and circumstances, by nature and mortality, and thus by getting the scale right. Form permits us to live and work gracefully within our limits.*

Accepting limits, allowing myself to "decrease" certainly means realizing that I know less than I think I do. Is Jesus the Messiah? I can't "know" the way I know the way to San Jose. How can I know?

Mr. Berry calls on us to live with "personal decency and personal humility." In this way I learn to assume I know less and not more, experience less self-delusion, and - with a little direction - learn to live a life of faith. "Of course the way of ignorance is the way of faith," Berry says.

The Jewish priests had been waiting for the Messiah. By embracing "the wisdom of humility, giving due honor to the ever-renewing pattern, accepting each moment's 'new and shocking valuation of all we have been'," their minds could have stayed far more open to the specifics of when and how the Messiah came. And rather than reject, they might have received the Gospel, as a mystery "to live their way into, trusting properly that to their little knowledge greater knowledge may be revealed."

Lord, I know so little. But, Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief. Let me rest in your knowledge, not my own.

*All the quotations are from three essays in Wendell Berry's The Way of Ignorance. The essays are titled: "The Burden of the Gospels," "Quantity and Form," and of course, "The Way of Ignorance."

Devotions Archive

Scale and form

Sunday, May 22, 2011