Become as You Are!
Toward an understanding of Christian identity
A look at Matthew Chapters 5-7
This phrase puzzled me the first time I came across it. A popular Reformation era slogan, I’m told.
But what does it mean? The Army recruiting ad-jingle, “Be all that you can be” is more familiar and seems
to make more sense. This is not surprising. In our world of rapidly advancing technology we are continually
offered new goods advertizers assure us we must own, services we must utilize, and opportunities we must seize
if we are to fully realize our potential. There is also psychological technology marketed with the promise of
personal empowerment and increased selfesteem. This all pre-supposes that we are less than we can be, or want
to be. I wonder if what we hear is not so much be all that you can be, but rather be all that you
ought to be.
To the Christian, the idea that you are less than you can be or ought to be is
especially out of place and yet in the
contemporary Christian culture the
message is not much different from the
Army recruiting ad. If you have been to a
Christian bookstore lately you know that
“how to” secures a good deal of the shelf space.
It seems that the message “Be all
that you can be” is being promoted here as
well. Because, of course you know that
you are less than you can (ought to) be,
right? Your prayer life is weak, your
devotional reading life is pathetic, you are
a lame witness, your church isn’t growing,
your Sunday morning worship is irrelevant
to outsiders, your family life is deficient,
your marriage is sure to fail, your children
will probably be lost to the world because
the schools are full of liberal, abortion
happy, friends of the gay and lesbian
community who will inculcate your
children, against your will, with the
materialistic no place for meaning theory
of evolution. And of course someone has
devised a plan for you to follow, a method
to employ, a technique to utilize that will
“empower” you to rise above it all to be all
that you can be -- to the Glory of God of
course.
At one level self-improvement is a
worthy pursuit and there are realities that
we ought to be concerned about, but as
concerns our standing before God, the “be
all that you can be” message has no place
what-so-ever. If we learned anything from
the beatitudes we learned that God does
not employ the same values as we do in
assessing the degree to which we have
become all that we can become. I cannot
help believing that the “be all that you can
be” message is given such a large hearing
in Christendom only because we really do
not realize
who we are. Such is a product
of our fundamental human insecurity, our
crisis of identity. Humanity actively seeks
a savior, but a savior who will merely
provide the tools, the method or the
technology that will empower the
individual to seize the opportunity to be all
that the individual can be. The human
person is not only insecure about whether
or not he/she will fail to be all that he/she
can be, but the human person also bears a
spirit of independence that demands
control in the process.
This need for independent control
coupled with an insecure sense that
something is really not as is should be is
expressed in the various religious systems
of the world. All religions believe that
spiritually there is something amiss with
humankind. All religions have an
explanation for what is amiss, they have a
plan or path for making things right, they
have some notion of what things will be
like after the wrong is righted and where
the restored person will move on to. The
aspect that truly sets Christianity apart
from all of the worlds religions is its
insistence that mankind is utterly incapable
of ever righting the wrong by his own
effort however great his ability, however
sincere his desire. All other religions are
based on independent human effort to appease
God(s) and/or solve its own spiritual
problem.
In Matthew chs. 5-7 Jesus speaks
powerfully to crush anything like a religion
based on human effort. The Pharisees of
the Jewish nation had reduced their God to
the level of all other world religions; their
God was a God who was dependent on
their efforts or activities. Taken in its
entirety the sermon on the mount is an
exposition on what it means to be right
with God. Being right with God is what
the Bible calls righteousness. The
righteous are those who are in a rightly
ordered relationship with God. In the
sermon on the mount we find the Christian
religious system taught by Jesus in all its
radical differentness from anything that
human kind could ever conceive, imagine
or dream.
Before considering a pivotal portion of
the sermon on the mount I would like for
us to gain a clearer sense of what
characterizes the rightly ordered
relationship to God; what characterizes
righteousness? If we go back to the
beginning, to Adam and Eve, we find that
first of all creation was God’s idea; He was the
initiator; He created the heavens and the
earth and all that is in them. He provided
everything that the creation would need to
exist. He put Adam and Eve in the garden
and provided
everything for their
sustenance. God was the initiator and
provider, Adam and Eve, the whole of
creation for that matter, simply responded
to God’s initiative and lived dependent on
God’s provision. God is
independent creator; human beings are
dependent
creatures. The garden was wonderful
because the relationships were thus rightly
ordered. Righteousness, before the fall,
was dependent on Adam and Eve’s
continued dependence on God. Taking the
forbidden fruit was an exercise of
independence and this one act of
independence brought death to all creation,
it destroyed the rightly ordered relationship
between the created and its creator, it
brought alienation from God that spread to
all of mankind. This is what the Bible tells
us is amiss with humankind. For all of our
created greatness, our intelligence, creative
imagination, physical self-sufficiency, we
are completely lost, dead in trespass and
sin, morally corrupt, willfully disobedient
enemies of God; lovers of darkness rather
than light, raw meat without salt in a
progressive process of decay. Not that we
are as bad as we can become, but rather we
have a deep infection for which we have
no cure.
When we read the sermon on the mount
we must keep the principle of
independence and dependence in mind.
We must also be mindful of how Jesus
employs both the Law and the Gospel in
proclaiming to us the way back to our
original state of righteousness, the
righteousness that is a stumbling block to
those who trust in their own efforts to
attain it, the righteousness that is
foolishness to those who trust in their
intellectual power of reason to make
perfect sense out of it in order to secure it.
Jesus, in the sermon on the mount, turns
prevailing attitudes concerning human
effort and human reason upside down.
After he made completely objective
statements, about no one in particular, in
the Beatitudes he turns directly to His
disciples to make some very subjective
statements; that is, statements that speak
directly to the disciples personally. He
says YOU ARE SALT; YOU ARE LIGHT
and in vs. 16 he tells them to Become as
they ARE. He does not say you should be
salt and light; he does not tell them “how
to” become salt and light; he says you are
salt and light, now be who you are. All
other religions seek to put you on a path
that may or may not, eventually, make you
complete, self-actualized, or favorable to
God. Only Christianity tells you that you
are right with God, you are forgiven, there
is no need to begin or maintain a spiritual
quest because the journey has ended. Jesus
Christ has trodden the path that you could
never set foot on, He has accomplished
everything that you could never even
begin, and He calls you to let go of your
attempts to reach the goal on your own
feet, to abandon your attempts to be all that
you ought to be; in short, stop trying to
save you because Jesus Christ has
delivered you to God the father, perfect
without wrinkle or spot.
Salt is either salt or it is not salt.
Likewise it is absurd to conceive of
lighting a light in a room so that you could
sit in a dark room. The light is either on or
off. Jesus shows his disciples their true
identity; it is an identity that they can be
secure in because He is the source of their
identity. This identity seeks to put to death
the insecure human identity in order to
bring the human person back to the rightful
source of identity.
But how is it that we are salt and light?
Our saltiness is a derived saltiness; our
light is a derived light. Jesus is the source.
Again God is the initiator, the provider; we
are the responders to God’s initiative, the
receivers of His gracious provision. Our
light is like the radiance of a lamp shade,
the shade it self has absolutely no ability or
potential to produce light, but when a light
bulb is placed within it and the power
turned on, the shade lights up and
broadcasts light all around. John 1:6-9
says, “there came a man, sent from God,
whose name was John. He came for a
witness, that he might bear witness of the
light, that all might believe through him.
He was not the light, but came that he
might bear witness of the light. There was
the true light which, coming into the world,
enlightens every man.” In John 8:12,
“Again therefore Jesus spoke to them, saying, I
am the light of the world; he who follows
Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall
have the light of life.”
As you rely on the truth that Jesus is
who He says He is that you can trust that
what He says about you is true. In order to
do this we must first let go of our own
independent understanding of who we are,
we must deny our own independent
convictions about how we can be all that
we can or ought to be. To do this is to
begin understanding and arriving at
convictions based on what God considers
“blessed,” it is to begin to accept ourselves
as who we are in Christ, no longer alone in
independence, but united with one another
in the body of Christ.
Now as we come to vs. 17, we come to
the main theme of Jesus’ message. Here
Jesus begins to describe the righteousness
that believers must possess, display, and
proclaim in the world for its salvation.
To many scribes and Pharisees, Jesus’
contempt for most all that they had come to
hold near and dear implied that He had
little or no regard for the Law of God.
Jesus was quite critical of the traditions of
the scribes and Pharisees; the people saw
His criticism of tradition as criticism of the
Law of God. The question in the minds of
the scribes and Pharisees and the people
was, “Does Jesus intend to do away with
the Law of God?”
Jesus says, “Do not think that I came to
abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not
come to abolish, but to fulfill.” Every
word that Jesus proclaims concerning the
righteousness that is required, the
righteousness that is theirs in Him is in
perfect harmony and compliance with both
the Law and the Prophets. Jesus proclaims
His full adherence to the entire Old
Testament. When Jesus has finished
working the entire Old Testament will be
fulfilled. He did not come to expand on
the Law or to bring any new prophecy; to
fulfill paints the picture of a vessel that is
filled to the brim. The Old Testament is
complete, it only waits to be filled full by
who Jesus is and by what He does. He
only did what was prophesied he would do;
He only obeyed the Law as it was meant to
be obeyed--perfectly. Furthermore every
part of the entire Old Testament will
remain until the end of time; even then it
will not be destroyed, lost or forgotten,
rather it will stand forever filled to the full.
After proclaiming His own work of
fulfillment Jesus turns in vs. 19 to His
disciples and their treatment of the words
of God. In particular He focuses on the
fundamental requirements which are (1)
Repentance--which is nothing other than to
accept the full force of God’s Law and to
turn from our rebellious independence to
once again be dependent on God--and (2)
Faith--which is nothing more than resting
securely in the promise that Christ in fact
has reconciled the world to God, that He
took the initiative to act on our behalf and
to provide for us what we could never
obtain of ourselves.
The scribes and Pharisees had made the
Law a servant of their natural insecurity
and spirit of independence. They
depended on their own independent
mastery of the Law only to hear that the
Law was far more demanding than they
would ever allow. The scribes and the
Pharisees were highly esteemed among the
people. So when Jesus says, in vs. 20 ,
“that unless your righteousness surpasses
that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you
shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,
the disciples were bound to tremble at the
thought and be left to say each one, “I’m
either in big trouble or Jesus is talking
about a righteousness that comes by a way
other than my own devoted effort or
activity.”
From here Jesus moves on to describe
what it means to have a righteousness that
surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees.
Jesus does not lay down a new Law but
simply proclaims the full Law of God in all
its killing force culminating in vs. 48 with
“Therefore you are to be perfect, as your
heavenly Father is perfect.”
Luther says, “What now is the better
righteousness? This, that work and heart
together are pious and directed according
to God’s Word. The law will have not
only the work but the pure heart which
throughout goes hand in hand with the
Word of God and the Law. Yes, you say,
where will one find such a heart? I do not
find it in me; thou, too, not in thee. What,
then, shall we do about it? We have no
high righteousness and yet we hear the
judgment that, unless our righteousness is
better than that of the scribes and the
Pharisees, we shall not enter the kingdom
of heaven. This is what we are to do:
besides all the good we are able to do we
are to humble ourselves before God and
say, Dear Lord, I am a poor sinner, be
gracious to me and judge me not according
to my works but according to thy grace and
mercy, which thou hast promised and
prepared in Christ. Thus this doctrine
leads to this, that the Lord would warn us
against spiritual pride and would bring us
to the knowledge of our unclean, wicked
hearts and sinful nature and thus lead us to
the hope of his grace.”
Only by faith in Christ’s fulfilled
redemptive work
for us are we Christ’s
disciples. Thus alone are we the salt of the
earth and the light of the world. Only in
Christ are we all that we can be. Only in a
rightly ordered relationship of dependence
on God who is independent from us in
every respect do we receive the provision
that we need to let our light shine before
men so that they may see our good works,
and glorify our Father who is in heaven.
The life of the righteous is to manifest the
righteousness of faith, the righteousness
that comes from God through faith in Jesus
Christ. The life of the Christian is not to
live as though what we do determines how
God thinks of us; the life of the righteous is
not to give the impression that the
righteous assume that God is more or less
pleased with them than with someone else;
the life of the righteous is to manifest, to
show to the world the righteousness of
faith. Not one part of our relationship to
God has anything to do with what we do,
rather it has everything to do with what
Jesus Christ
has done on behalf of all the
peoples of the world.
Don’t just set out to be all that you can
be, rather become as you are. Repent and
believe the good news, the kingdom of
heaven is at hand, the world has been
reconciled to God in Jesus Christ.
Amen
Written by Kevin Fenster
Winter 1996
www.soundwitness.org
