Before we discuss our participation in the good news of the Gospel, it is well to clear
away two misunderstandings of the message of salvation. Tom Skinner once said that before
a person can hear the good news he must understand what his bad news is. His illustration
concerned a pimp in New York City, a man with expensive suits, luxury cars, and all the
food money and women he could want. It is no use to tell him he needs to be saved. He
thinks he has all he could want. Until he understands his bad news, he cannot receive the
good news.
Two New Testament passages relate particularly to this matter of understanding our bad
news. One is the story of the rich young ruler; the other is that of the two greedy
disciples.
THE RICH YOUNG RULER
Luke 18:18-30
One day during the years of his ministry, Jesus was approached by a young man who was,
to say the least, unusual. He was rich, young, and a ruler, yet he had kept the
commandments since childhood. The question he asked of Jesus seemed like a sincere and
valuable one, "Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"
Jesus’ answer seems shocking. It came like a slap in the face. "Why callest thou
me good? None is good, save one, even God." It hardly strikes us as a tactful way to
encourage an inquirer, though I suspect that if we had been there we would have been able
to perceive Jesus’ tone and his look a tenderness and love which the words by
themselves don’t appear to carry.
Jesus saw through the question to the heart out of which it came, and his response was
calculated to reveal to the young man his real need, the bad news. In calling Jesus
"Good Teacher," the young man was effectively placing himself on the same plane
as Jesus. He was lifting himself above the level of the surrounding crowd and implicitly
claiming to possess a degree of spirituality comparable to that of Christ. For the young
man’s sake, Jesus sternly rejects that assumption. He is really saying, don’t
call me good unless you are prepared to recognize me as God.
Then as Jesus proceeded to respond to the question. The young man felt that he had kept
the commandments, but he had a gnawing sense that something was missing, that some further
goodness on his part might still be required, that there could be one more step necessary
before he could be sure of entry into heaven. So Jesus cited for him five of the last six
commandments. It was a trap, lovingly and longingly laid in an effort to open the young
man’s eyes to his real need. The young man fell into the trap completely.
"I’ve kept all those since I was a child," he said.
Jesus’ response was deceptively simple. Yes, he said, you do lack one thing. Go and
sell all you have and give it to the poor, and come and follow me. You are rich; you must
become poor. You are a leader; you must become a follower. In terms of the illustrations
in the previous issue, Jesus was saying that the young man must recognize that his
self-concept as an imagined ULTIMATE ORIGINAL was totally false.
The words fell on the young man’s ears like a judge’s verdict of the death
penalty! Jesus was saying to him, You do not understand your bad news. You think that you
are on the way to heaven with your obedience to the commandments. But the way to heaven
for you is not up; it is down. You must work your way back down the commandment ladder by
realizing that you have not really kept the spirit of those commandments at all. You have
not committed adultery with a woman, but you have made your wealth and your leadership
into idols for which you have forsaken the true God. And that is spiritual adultery. You
have not killed a man, but you have eliminated God from the place of lordship in your
life. You have robbed Him of His glory and falsely asserted your own righteousness. In
these ways you have failed to honor your parents. So you need to break with your idols and
wealth and power and come in your weakness and helplessness to me. I can give you what
will really satisfy the hunger your heart feels.
It was too much for the young man. He went away sorrowful. What happened later as he
thought back on the encounter, we have no way of knowing. But it is clear that the way to
heaven is not via good works. We must approach God in our weakness, not in our supposed
strength.
GREEDY DISCIPLES
Mark 10:35-45
The other New Testament incident probably strikes closer to home for most of us. We
understand, or think we do, that doing good works is not the road to heaven, although I
continue to find Pharisaic attitudes in my own heart which make me wonder how well I
really do understand that. But this incident is one we can identify with more easily. It
relates to an ongoing discussion that Jesus had with his disciples all through the last
weeks of his life. Their competitive attitudes as they strove to outdo each other for
privileged places on the coming kingdom must have been like salt on a wound as the dark
cloud of his coming loss of the sense of his Father’s approval settled down over his
heart.
What happened was that two of his disciples came to him with a special request. The
request grew out of a competition the twelve were involved in during those last days of
Jesus’ life. Though he had told them he was to die, they could not believe it. We
would doubtless have had the same difficulty. If he is really God, he can’t die, can
he? But he certainly was deeply preoccupied in those weeks, and the idea apparently
occurred to the twelve that maybe the kingdom was about to arrive. In that case, they
thought, it would be well to clarify beforehand who is to have what position in the
kingdom. Who is to be Secretary of State, Treasury, War, etc. Their competition for first
place comes out here as it does in Matthew 18. Now Peter and John, two of the inner three
favorite disciples, approached him with the request that they be assured the two places at
his right and left hand in the kingdom. One of the other gospels indicates that they even
approached him through their mother, putting in her mouth the request that they felt Jesus
would not deny if she made it. The other disciples were furious, but we will come to that
in a moment.
The underlying mindset out of which the two disciples made their request was what
Bonhoffer calls "cheap grace." They thought that since salvation was free, they
needed only to ask and they would receive these two prized places as well.
Jesus’ answer was patient but penetrating. He asked what they wanted, and, on hearing
the request, he asked if they could drink his cup and be baptized with his baptism. Both
the cup and the baptism referred to his coming death. He was telling them that they must
go through some sort of dying, some stripping off of their assumed eligibility, before
they could think about having the best places in the kingdom. Salvation is free, but it is
not cheap. It cost Jesus everything, and those who would be his true followers must expect
to participate in his suffering. In his case the suffering was undeserved and vicarious;
he did it for our sakes. For us, there is an "old man" that must be daily put to
death in order that Christ’s new kind of life can reveal itself in our lives. This is
why he spoke of losing our lives if we try to save them and receiving them back again if
we give them up.
Jesus then explained to James and John that they would indeed drink his cup and be
baptized with his baptism but that the allocation of the places next to him was not in his
hands. One thing this probably means to us is that we must expect to face painful and
difficult experiences in the process of becoming conformed to Christ’s likeness. We
have so little an idea if the depth of brokenness within us that we assume, as James and
John did, that we are quite fit to have the places on Christ’s left and right hand.
When we find the Christian path narrow and steep, as he promised it would be, it will be
helpful to remember that the trials are not a sign that he doesn’t love us but that
he loves us enough to put us through whatever is needful in order to make us like himself.
The other disciples were incensed that James and John should have had the effrontery to
try to get in ahead of them. It was particularly galling that they had tried to use their
mother’s influence in the process. So Jesus called the group together to use the
occasion for a further lesson in discipleship. When we remember the weight that was
pressing down increasingly on his own heart, his patience and forbearance with the
competitive twelve is almost beyond our understanding. What it shows is that he regarded
human relationships as the most important thing in life. We need to cultivate that
attitude. In a culture which is as consumption oriented, as ours is, that is not an easy
task.
What he said to the twelve was that in the world people like to have power and to lord it
over those under them. What a commentary on the perils of bureaucracy in our day! But, he
continued to say that is not the way to be among you. He who wants to be great in the body
of Christ must make himself a servant to others. Greatness is to be found in servanthood.
That is what discipleship is all about.
So there are two kinds of bad news that we must be aware of before we can appreciate the
good news. One is the bad news of thinking that heaven is to be gained by good works. The
doctrine is not too difficult to understand, but knowing it in our heads is not equivalent
to knowing it in our hearts. If you are like me, you find in your experience a continually
recurring desire to have some spiritually of your own which you can count on. You know it
must come from Christ, but you would like to feel he has given it to you in such a way
that even if he were to go away, it would still be yours. But that cannot be. "God
forbid," said Paul, "that I should glory save in the cross of Christ by which
the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world." Coming in poverty and following
him is the only way to come at all. We are all Pharisees at heart; that is part of our bad
news.
The other bad news is the assumption that, having become his disciples, we can rest on our
laurels. All we need to do is ask and we can have whatever we would like from him. And he
does make promises that sound just that generous. "If you abide in me, and my words
abide in you, you may ask what you will, and you shall have it." I knew one dear
saint who could never understand why the Lord didn’t give her more money with which
to help people she knew needed help. She asked, but it didn’t come, and she was
puzzled by the seeming failure of the promise. The Lord doesn’t always explain the
intermediate steps to the fulfillment of the promises. As we learn to drink his cup and be
baptized with his baptism, we will find our requests changing and our confidence that we
know for sure just what needs to be done waning. And then we will find our prayers being
answered more and more.
With these two explanations of our bad news, explanations which I owe to teaching received
long ago from Mark Fakkema, we are better prepared to listen to the good news, that is, to
consider how we can partake of the benefits Christ died to provide for us. That we will do
in the next issue.
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
