Recently, in preparation for a Retreat theme, “Adventure With a Capital ‘A’: Life With Jesus Beyond the Edge,” I spent some time reflecting on the fact that the life Jesus calls us into, like any Adventure worth the billing, is quite risky. I remembered something I had read in a book, The Jesus Model. This book is written by David McKenna, formerly President of Seattle Pacific University, and later, of Asbury Theological Seminary. In the book, McKenna, whose academic preparation included extensive study in the Behavioral Sciences, looks at the life of Jesus from a psychological perspective.
At one point in this fascinating study he looks at what he calls a “Maturity Model” and measures Jesus life against that model. He notes, in the development of that model, “Harvard Psychologist Gordon Allport’s three criteria by which to measure maturity.” The third of these is a “unifying philosophy of life.” In examining this “unifying philosophy” he notes that Allport sees such a philosophy to be, among other things, “heuristic.” For something to be “heuristic” McKenna writes, it must have an “element of faith.” He quotes Allport. “It is characteristic of the mature mind that it can act wholeheartedly even without absolute certainty.”
Did you get that? Someone who is healthy; who is mature will act when he or she doesn’t know all the facts. Does that mean that a perfectly sane person will take chances? Does that mean that risk takers are not always crazy? Yes, I think so. Applying this to the life of a follower of Jesus, McKenna recalls something a Quaker scholar, Elton Trueblood, said to him. “A Christian is a person who is willing to bet his life that Christ is right.”
We may, initially, nod in agreement. But shouldn’t we ask, “right about what?” What is the essential message of Jesus? What about Jesus is a true believer willing to bet his life is right? When you attempt to reduce all that Jesus stands for and everything he taught to its simplest form you’re left with the very thing he, himself, told someone was most important to God. Namely, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.” “Love,” then, to simplify the matter even further, is the focus of Jesus life and the thing a true believer is willing to wager his very life is right. “God,” someone said, “bet the life of his only Son that love could win the world.” Jesus himself said, “By this – i.e. by love – all people will know that” someone who claims to be a follower of Jesus is.
So, Jesus decision to love all humankind is the thing a true believer will bet his life is right.
The risk in such a wager is not so much that Jesus might be wrong. It’s that the wager will require loving. And love itself is so very risky. Nowhere have I seen this risk better described than in C.S. Lewis’ book, The Four Loves. Read what he writes. “In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Augustine describes the desolation in which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him. (Confessions, IV, 10). Then he draws a moral. This is what comes, he says, of giving one’s heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away.
… Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering.’
To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. … And who could conceivably begin to love God on such a prudential ground …? Who could even include it among the grounds for loving? Would you choose a wife or a Friend – if it comes to that, would you choose a dog – in this spirit? … Eros, lawless Eros, preferring the Beloved to happiness, is more like Love Himself than this.
… We follow One who wept over Jerusalem and at the grave of Lazarus, and, loving all, yet had one disciple whom, in a special sense, he ‘loved.’ …
Even if it were granted that insurances against heartbreak were our highest wisdom, does God Himself offer them? Apparently not. Christ comes at last to say, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’
… There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason. ‘I knew you that you were a hard man.’ Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armor. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.” (The Four Loves” Pgs 110 – 112)
In my opinion it is precisely this “faith;” this “throwing away all defensive armor,” and loving with abandon, that is the distinguishing characteristic of the “mature Christian.” Risky? You bet!
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