No one who measures his life by Jesus' teachings can ever say: "I have done everything I should in living the Christian life. I have 'arrived.' "No one, that is, but a deluded fool or an insufferable prig.Does this mean that Jesus' teachings are so far beyond us that they are irrelevant? Some people come to this conclusion. "Jesus was too much of an idealist," they say; "he expects too much of us. His demands are so impossibly high that we'll always fail. So why bother?" Other people feel that this is giving up the fight too quickly, and pose the problem in this way: "How can we make Jesus' absolute demands relevant to our own situation here and now?"This is the "sixty-four-dollar question" in Christian ethics. Here are four starters toward an answer of your own. 1. The absolute demands of agape furnish us with a standard by which to judge our motives. If this seems academic, remember that an action is not judged simply by its "effect"; its true value may depend upon the motive that prompted it.
Suppose you are walking across a bridge and see two men jump into the river, one after the other. It looks as though they have both done the same thing. Actually, they have done very different things.
The first man jumped into the river to commit suicide. The second man jumped into the river to save him. The first man was motivated by the desire to destroy life. The second man was motivated by the desire to save life.
Thus the motives made the two actions as different as night and day.
The absolute demands of Jesus give us an absolute standard against which our motives can be judged.
2. The absolute demands of agape can show us the ideal possibility in any given situation. Agape can furnish a standard by which to judge what we ought to do. Most of our choices are not black and white, wholly good or wholly bad. They are all mixed up and confused together, some shade of gray. In choosing between various courses of action, no one of which is wholly good, we can receive help by asking the question, "Which choice comes closest to the ideal of agape?" Thus agape is always relevant, even if never fully realized (see further, Chapter 22).
3. The absolute demands of agape stand as a judgment over everything we have done. No matter how much we "accomplish," the demands of agape always remind us that we should have done more. Here is one of the places where agape is most relevant. If the Christian ethic were pitched lower, it would lose its relevance the minute it was attained. But it never is attained; the Christian can never rest on his ethical oars, feeling that the finish line has been crossed. He has a perpetually "uneasy conscience."
4. This disturbing fact suggests another way in which the absolute demands of agape are relevant. They help us to see our situation as it actually is. If the ethical demands are the whole story, we are in a situation of frustration and condemnation, since we do not do all that is demanded of us. (Do you honestly "love your neighbor as yourself"?) If Jesus is simply a great ethical teacher, he leaves us in despair, since we cannot live up to what he asks of us.
But ethical demands are not the whole story. If Jesus is also the Savior, the one who meets us in the midst of our inadequacy and wrongdoing, the one who says to us, "My grace is sufficient for you" ( II Cor. 12: 9), the one who heals and redeems -- then we can face life with confidence and hope, rather than despair, conscious that there is a "peace of God," which, while it "passes all understanding," is nevertheless a reality. Those who approach God with humble contrition and penitence, asking God's forgiveness, find that they are not alone, but that God is with them, and is empowering them to face the struggle once more.
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