Everything Necessary


Dear Eugene,

I was again reading Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" last night, this time a new translation that came out not too long ago.

  "While Lara, slowly going around the praying people, copper money clutched in her hand, went to the door to buy candles for herself and Olya, and went back just as carefully, so as not to push anyone, Prov Afanasyevich managed to rattle off the nine beatitudes, like something well-known to everyone without him.

   Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are those who mourn … Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness … 

   Lara walked, suddenly shuddered, and stopped. That was about her. He says: Enviable is the lot of the downtrodden. They have something to tell about themselves. They have everything before them. So He thought. It was Christ’s opinion."

Enviable is the lot of the downtrodden...some "opinion" Christ had...

When I was young no one in church ever helped me to make sense of what Christ meant by His "greatest sermon ever," the "Sermon on the Mount."  Naturally I thought (as I think most still do) it was about a set of high moral ideals, supreme ethical principles if one actually gets to practice them in the real world, "nice work if you can get it"...

Years ago Rowan Williams preached one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Christmas sermon I've heard, in which he quoted also from Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago":

"Everything necessary has been given us in the Gospels. What is it? Firstly, the love of one's neighbour – the supreme form of living energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And secondly, the two concepts which are the main part of the make-up of modern man – without them he is inconceivable – the ideas of free personality and of life regarded as sacrifice."

What words.  Amen to every word, every syllable.

Now I've grown to understand the "Sermon on the Mount" is not a prescription to live a better life, but a description of God's Kingdom subjects, people who follow the Way that is Christ Jesus.  He was ushering in God's Kingdom starting in the here-and-now, God's future breaking into the present, inaugurated by Jesus' death and resurrection, His victory on the cross waiting to be implemented through his followers.

We are called to share in his suffering and losing, weeping and breaking--and of course--dying, so that we can be born again and truly live, going through death and out the other side, from darkness to light, crossing the Red Sea, ending our exile, home again.

  "You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom.

   Not only that—count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble."

How I wish someone did tell me the "Gospel truth" when I was younger.  So many years I've wasted on my useless "faith", staring at my passport to "heaven" that never was, living as if Jesus' living, dying and resurrecting matters not, the Father's will I cared not, the Spirit I knew not.

This Christmas I want to live in and give the most supreme form of living energy--love the LORD my God with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my might, every very fiber of my being, so that I can learn to love my neighbor as myself.

Yours, Alex

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