Reflections on Ch. 4 -- Who is Really Well Off?

Our culture is obsessed with the question of what is the good life? and its corellary, who deserves this good life? In our rush to achieve the American dream, we've quashed the deeper question -- what makes a good person and a good life? -- that is, Willard argues, the main question that Jesus wanted his disciples to ask and answer. We've left this question to the hyper-religious, who define it mostly in terms of what a good person will not do, and to the marketplace, which simply says "it's all good."

Both these answers actually flow out of the cultural desires rather than critique them -- which is what Jesus actually did in his culture. For many Christians, the "good" question boils down into a series of things that prevent them from screwing up the good (mainly material, but not always) gifts God has blessed them with. For many other people, it is mainly "if it feels good, do it" -- both the asking and answering of which is driven by the marketplace and the false desires conjured up by consumerism.

Jesus answered all these questions in the section of the sermon on the mount known as the beatitudes -- the "blesseds." These texts are often used to comfort us in our mourning and weakness, or to spiritualize the state of the poor and broken. But what are we to really make of them today? Or as Willard puts it, how are we to live in response to them?

Willard suggests looking at these texts as an extension of Jesus' primary message: the kingdom of God is available to you here and now. He notes that Jesus proclaims and lives this message out in Matthew 4, and then immediately teaches his disciples, pointing to the crowds seeking healing who have followed them as object examples, his critique of the religion of the day. The official view of the temple was that those who keep the law and purify themselves can come near God. Jesus' message is precisely the opposite, that the kingdom of God is available to the strong, the tempted and the weak not just the legalists and spiritual supermen. In his view Jesus intends neither to excuse or exalt the states of spiritual poverty and weakness, but to imply the radical notion that God works in and through them.

• How do you read this argument? Is this just a call to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps (otherwise known as works-righteousness) or a radical inclusion of people in God's kingdom?
• Which is Jesus turning upside down -- the conception of who we need to be or our idea of how and with whom God works?

Jesus' teaching, Willard argues, uses a method by which he uses examples from daily life to indicate why the common wisdom is extremely common but not very wise. His teaching by its very nature is not designed to hand down a set of rules to follow but to cause the disciples to think, what is really going on here? He forces the hearer to go beyond his words to his meaning, which has to be thought about, probed and processed.

Take his understanding of the parable of the rich young ruler in Mark 10 (see page 108). Jesus overturns the common assumption that the rich are rich because of God's special favor, which astonishes his hearers. Yet it's too simplistic to view that as a condemnation of wealth per se. Jesus' teaching, Willard says, is that we, ultimately, have to put our trust in one place. We may have wealth and faith, but when it comes time to choose between the two, which will it be? When Jesus put that question to the rich ruler, he chose to trust in what he could control (his riches) rather than God's provision. Jesus is saying that we make these choices all the time and they have consequences.

American culture/civil religion today views the rich, the healthy, the 'together' as receiving God's special favor as well. I remember a colleague telling me of her time in hospital chaplaincy. She developed a close relationship with a woman whose child was seriously ill. The family were members of a conservative, evangelical church, and during the child's long illness (the child eventually died) the pastor of the church came only once the ordeal, and then was called away in a few minutes. As my colleague tells it, the underlying cause was the theological understanding in the church that illness was the result of some unconfessed and un-dealt-with sin.

• Where are the "rich young rulers" in our culture? How might we read this parable, in light of Willard's interpretation, in our culture?

Jesus uses this method in many of his familiar teachings, such as the story of the Good Samaritan, which forces the hearer to reconsider the seemingly obvious question of who is my neighbor?

The point, Willard argues, is to look at these teachings as proclamation of the kingdom -- not to commend states of being as the way to get to God, because there are many, but to indicate that the kingdom is available here and now. Within these and many states of being not addressed directly in the Beatitudes, the possibility of living in the kingdom of God is real -- perhaps more real than it is for those whose "having it together" makes seeing the world in a new way unnecessary and even unattractive.