Pages

Monday, September 13, 2021

Growing as a Disciple of Jesus


Can we be disciple of Jesus and do things the way we have always done them, the way our friends do them?

The answer depends upon what we have always done and what our friends do. If we have always been kind to other people and considerate of their feelings, the answer would be “Yes.” Being kind to other people and considerate of their feelings fits with what Jesus taught and practiced.

On the other hand, if we tend to dominate every conversation, give other people little opportunity to say anything, and then find fault with whatever they say when they are able to get in a word, we need to give serious thought to changing what we do. It does not fit with what Jesus taught and practiced. Hogging the conversation is not treating other people as we would wish them to treat us. Neither is dismissing everything that they say.

If our friends are always going out of their way to help someone else out, the answer would also be “Yes.” Lending other people a helping hand even when it is not convenient to us fits with Jesus’ teaching and example.

On the other hand, if our friends like to gang up on someone, bully them, and otherwise treat them badly, we need to give serious thought to not doing what they do. Being cruel and callous toward other people does not fit with Jesus’ teaching and example.

If we are going to follow Jesus, we cannot be selective in how we follow him. We cannot accept one group of people and turn away from another. We must be loving toward everybody. We cannot play favorites. We cannot confine our love to those with whom we may identify or toward whom we may feel sympathy. This is why the love of others to which Jesus calls us as his disciples and which he himself exemplified is so radical.

Loving other people as Jesus loved them does not mean we condone everything that they do. Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery. At the same time, he told her not to repeat what she had done.

We love other people without treating everything that they do as acceptable or harmless. From the perspective of what Jesus taught and practiced, they may be thinking, speaking, and acting in ways that hurt themselves or hurt other people. The feelings and emotions that may be motivating them are not the kind that Jesus tells us we should nurture in our hearts. They may be hanging onto anger or resentment. With these bitter feelings they may be entertaining a desire to inflict hurt or injury on those whom they have perceived as having wronged them in some way or to whom they have taken a dislike for some reason.

The wrongs that we suffer at other people’s hands may be intentional. They acted on their own desire to inflict hurt or injury on us, to cause trouble for us, or to upset us, to make us feel bad. Their motives may have been simply dislike or more complicated. They may have been hoping to influence our behavior. For example, a young woman may date other men to make her boyfriend jealous and to show her more attention. This strategy has a strong likelihood of backfiring because the young woman’s behavior is also likely to cause the boyfriend to be less trusting of her and trust is an important element in a relationship. 

I was involved in such a triangle. I was the "other guy." The young woman was immature and I was naive. It was an emotionally traumatic experience for me. The young woman's relationship with her boyfriend did not last. 

The wrongs that we suffer at their hands may, however, be in our minds only. We choose to see what someone else said or did as not treating us in the way that we would wish to be treated by them—with respect, in an honest way, in a way that shows that they value us as a spouse, a partner, a friend, or a fellow human being, and so forth. Their motives for their actions may be fairly innocent. They did not intend to offend us and did not realize that we might choose to take offense at what they did.

Other people do not control our reactions. We do. They may unwittingly fire an emotional trigger in us, but how we react is our own choice.

We take a dislike to someone for a variety of reasons, some more complicated than others. Whether we may recognize it as such, dislike is a choice. We choose not to like someone and the reason we tell ourselves that we do not like them may simply be a rationalization of our choice, something that we dreamed up to justify our decision. We could easily choose to like them.

When we choose not to like someone, we will look for things in the individual that we have chosen not to like, which we can use to reinforce our decision to not like them in our own mind. We will look for their bad points and overlook their good points.

The danger here is that what we are seeing as bad points may not objectively be bad points. We are choosing to see them as bad points. We may draw what we see as their bad points to the attention of friends and coworkers and encourage them to take our view of the individual to who we have chosen to take a dislike. We are seeking validation of our view of the individual whom we have chosen not to like. If we cannot find any bad points, we may dream up a few.

Among the reasons that we chose to take a dislike to someone are that we have found someone else to whom we have chosen to take a liking. Having found someone else to like, we have decided to unlike them. We could, of course, like both individuals. We may have become bored with the first individual and find the second individual more interesting, more exciting, more enjoyable to be with, and so forth, and we no longer feel a need to maintain a relationship of any kind with the first individual. We may view them as a hindrance to a relationship with the second individual. So, we unlike them.

We may choose to dislike someone because our friends do not like them, and we want to please our friends.

We may choose to dislike someone because liking them causes us to feel embarrassed or self-conscious. We may see our liking of them as something that the other people in our lives will disapprove of and which will cause us to lose their respect. They will not hold us in the same esteem as they once did.

We may choose to dislike someone because they keep embarrassing us in various ways and creating awkward situations for us from which we must extricate ourselves.

We may choose to dislike someone because we are confused in our minds about how we feel toward them. It is easier to choose to not like them than it is to deal with our mixed feelings toward them.

The reasons that we choose not to like someone may be unrelated to them. We may choose to dislike them not as a reaction to anything they have said or done but to the situation in which we find ourselves. We may find ourselves faced with emotional challenges with which we are not prepared to deal, and which cause us a high level of discomfort. A particular situation may trigger unpleasant feelings associated with past traumatic experiences.

In teaching us to love everyone, Jesus is telling us that we need to undertake a radical shift of attitude toward other people. This involves us changing the ways that we relate to them. Some things that we do, or our friends do, are not congruent with this attitude shift. If we are going to live in harmony with Jesus’ teaching and example, we must replace these patterns of behavior with ones that embody what Jesus taught and practiced. This I admit is very challenging. By our twenty-fifth birthday we are pretty much set in our ways.

When the apostle Paul and others talk about the new life, they are talking about learning new ways to replace our old ways—new ways of thinking, new ways of feeling, new ways of speaking, and new ways of acting. It may entail reestablishing or establishing a trusting relationship with someone whom we have chosen to dislike, reining in any aversion that we have allowed ourselves to develop toward them, refocusing our attention on their good points rather their bad points, real and imagined, and taking other steps to do things Jesus’ way, and not our own.

I can think of several things that I need to change in myself.

All of us are works in progress. God is working invisibly in us to make us more like Jesus, to make us more loving, more compassionate, kinder, gentler, more openhanded, more tenderhearted, more patient, and more forgiving.

How then do we rise to the challenges that we face?

We study Jesus. We study his person—who Jesus is. We study his character—the qualities that were distinctive to him. We study his work—the reasons he became a part of the human story—to put things right between God and us, to teach and show us what God is like, to teach and show us how to live, to be a lasting influence on us, and so on. We study his life and his teaching. We begin with the Gospels, then the Epistles and Revelation, and finally the Old Testament. Our focus, however, is Jesus. We do not let us get sidetracked by other things in the Bible such as the details of the construction of Solomon’s Temple and its ornaments.

The purpose of our study is not to cram our heads with knowledge about Jesus. We are endeavoring to learn more about Jesus so we can emulate his character, his teaching, and his life—the example that he set for us. The purpose of our study is to follow him as his disciples. We want to know Jesus so we can meet him in our daily lives, so we can walk with him every moment of the day. When we emulate Jesus, we experience Jesus. When we abide in him, keep his words, he and the Father love us and come to dwell with us. Our union with God, our experience of God, grows deeper and more wonderful.

We lean into our growing understanding of Jesus. We make a serious effort to mirror his character, to put his teaching into practice, and to follow his example. We work hard at it.

A concept that I find useful in envisioning our relationship with Jesus is that of sensei. Sensei is the generic Japanese term for teacher. It is used for schoolteachers, doctors, professors, martial arts instructors, and the like. It also used for someone who is our spiritual teacher. One of the ways that Japanese learn from their sensei is to practice what they have been taught. Their sensei not only provides them with instruction, but he also guides them in their practice of what they have learned.

Jesus provides us with this kind of guidance too—through the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus, who makes his home in us; through sacred Scripture, in which are recorded the character, teaching and life of Jesus; and through our fellow disciples who are our companions in the way. The Holy Spirit reminds us of how Jesus treated other people and what Jesus taught and exemplified, nudges us to emulate Jesus’ character and to follow his teaching and example; and draws our attention to thoughts, feelings, words, and actions, which are not in keeping with the same.

Sacred Scripture helps us to discern the source of the prompting that we may be receiving. Is it the Spirit nudging us? Is it our inward desires tempting us? Is it the enemy, the spiritual forces that are working in the world and which oppose Jesus, urging us to do something that will harm us or someone else? 

Our fellow disciples may have garnered wisdom in their walk with Jesus, which may benefit us. They offer support, encouragement, and companionship in our faith journey.

We open our hearts and minds to God’s grace working in our lives. God works in us to give us the will and the power to achieve his purpose, which is to become like Jesus. God also works through various external means in which he shows his grace toward us and through which he influences us—prayer; the reading and study of the Bible; sermons and other forms of instruction; the singing of hymns psalms, and spiritual songs; the performance of acts of kindness and deeds of mercy; being of service to others particularly the last and the least; spiritual conversations with fellow disciples; and the sacraments.

Most of all we trust God’s goodwill toward us. We trust that God has our good at heart. In Jesus God revealed the fullness of his love for us. God in the person of the Son suffered and died on the cross, to reconcile us to himself. God in the person of the Son came among us, showed us how much he loved us, and taught and showed us how we should live, loving our fellow human beings with the same kind of love with which he loves us.

No comments:

Post a Comment