Week 21—Tuesday 1 Corinthians 15:9-10
Week 21—TUESDAY
THROWS A DART AT SELF-SUFFICIENCY
The Sermon opens with the Beatitudes. It is the Be-attitudes, not the Do-attitudes. In this Jesus was realistic, for the doing comes out of the being. A good tree brings forth good fruit. This is not the attempt to get human nature to do good apart from being good which is the basic unrealism of moralism. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” So he goes straight to the fountain knowing if that is pure, the stream will be pure.
His first beatitude is “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The word for “poor” is anav, a chosen poverty. It could be translated, “So poor that you are willing to receive and became the receptive in spirit.” The two ideas put together could mean—the surrendered and receptive in spirit.
Here Jesus strikes the keynote of the Christian faith. All other faiths are a struggle upward, a whipping up of the will. You try to climb the ladder to God to find God at the topmost rung of worthiness. This is the egocentric attempt to find God—persons lifting themselves by the bootstrap method. This says that salvation can be earned by what we do—the system of merit. Every single approach to God, including the Jewish, must be classified under this category of self-salvation—it is what we do that procures it. And every single one ends in self-stultification. Every single one centers you on you—saves its life and loses it. This includes modern character-development. The concentration of your own character, even to develop it, it is self-defeating. It leaves you self-preoccupied, leaves you self-defeated by the very nature of the quest. Jesus threw a dart in his opening sentence at the very heart of this off-the-track attempt.
O Jesus Lord, we do thank you for this opening sentence. We don’t have to be good—we have to be open to Goodness. For your Goodness is a seeking goodness. Make me receptive to that Goodness. Then I shall be good—unconsciously good. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I commit myself to God—sufficiency, and self-sufficiency—God is my sufficiency.