24 February 2024 Matthew 5:43-48
Inadequate discipleship is certainly a problem.
Adequate discipleship is a problem, too.
Adequate discipleship doesn’t call attention to itself. Adequate discipleship is meeting minimum expectations. Adequate discipleship is always inside the lines. Adequate discipleship risks little, offends no one, and attracts no criticism. Adequate discipleship shows up on time, sings on key, puts a little something in the offering, and leaves right after the benediction (sometimes a little before the benediction if there is a game on).
Adequate discipleship is fine, if all you seek is an adequate Messiah and an average heaven.
It’s fine if this is your psalm – “OK is the Lord, and passably to be praised.”
The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) proposes not merely adequate, but extraordinary discipleship. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, ‘Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you’” (Matthew 5:43-44). Extraordinary discipleship doesn’t leave anyone out. It is aimed not just at friends, but also at enemies and persecutors. Extraordinary discipleship recognizes that we have enemies. Those enemies are serious, very powerful, and they are coming for us. They have said so. Extraordinary discipleship puts on the whole armor of God, and gets right in the enemies’ faces, saying, “I am praying for you. Your soul is disordered, and your thinking confused. God can order both rightly again. You should want that.” Extraordinary discipleship lives boldly right in front of enemies and persecutors to show them what a rightly ordered soul looks like, what clear thinking sounds like. Extraordinary discipleship identifies the dangerous and irrational ideological colonizations of these days, calls them out, and proclaims to them the gospel that can mend and redirect them.
Extraordinary discipleship seeks not adequacy, but perfection: “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:48). The word for “perfect” in Greek refers to a strategy that leaves no one and nothing out. Every created thing, every person, no matter how base and imperfect, must be approached with the gospel and redeemed, which means that all created things must submit to a kind of death. But on the other side of that death is a rising into goodness and glory of unimaginable power. That gospel is perfect. It is also here, and available. Now.
Ordinary discipleship is not sufficiently distinguishable from non-belief. It doesn’t call attention to itself. It may engage believers, but does not attempt to engage non-believers. Ordinary disciples may do nice and thoughtful things, but you don’t need to be believers to do nice and thoughtful things. Ordinary disciples may acknowledge the existence and oneness of God, but that is not a very bold claim; as St. James says, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe, and tremble” (James 2:19). Ordinary disciples are comfortable appearing to be not very much different from the “basically good” people around them, leading the “basically good” to believe that “basically good” is good enough, to which Jesus asks, “Do not the tax collectors do the same?... Do not the pagans do the same?” (Mathew 5:46, 47). What use is discipleship that can’t be readily distinguished from “tax collectors and pagans”?
Inadequate discipleship is certainly a problem, but merely adequate discipleship is a problem, too.
“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (5:20).
We live amid extraordinary challenges and dangers. Such times cannot be ministered to by the merely ordinary. Extraordinary and extravagant discipleship is the new normal.
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