True holiness looks like Jesus
Rethinking what it means to be holy as Jesus-followers
When many of us first embraced Christianity, we almost immediately began to define our journey by the things we could no longer do. The phrase "shall not" (or something like it) came to characterize not only our approach to our new-found faith, but the ways we lived it out as well.
However, the more I read the Jesus story the more I begin to realize that our journey with Christ and His body has never been about what we can’t and shouldn't do, but more about what we can and should do.
While there will always be things we need to avoid as followers of Jesus, His language and life centered less on things we need to avoid and more on things we need to accept. He didn’t worry about those things the religious establishment of His day said He couldn’t do, who to avoid and what laws He couldn’t break.
Instead, He centered His witness on breaking through those religious barriers and ministered with an "I can" and "I will" attitude---fueled by His relationship with the Father and the understanding of His redemptive mission.
Jesus-Centered Holiness
In one way or another, I’ve spent most of my life within the influence of the holiness branch of Christianity. For those unfamiliar with this faith tradition, one dominate feature of the holiness movement has been its emphasis on separating oneself from the world.
The primary method used to ensure this separation is to enforce what seems to be an endless list of things a person should not do: do not smoke, do not drink, do not watch movies, etc. The list has changed over the years, but the do not focus has remained.
However, I can’t help but think that somewhere along the way we’ve misunderstood what true, Jesus-centered holiness really looks like.
Throughout Jesus’ public ministry, He never seemed to worry about the subject of separation. As a Jewish man, He no doubt would have been keenly aware of the plethora of laws, dietary restrictions and societal regulations that governed the life of every Jewish person. However, while He didn’t ignore these concerns, He chose to take a completely different path by redefining them.
For Jesus, holiness was never about separation, about whom He could not associate with, or about what He couldn’t do and shouldn’t eat. Instead, Jesus redefined holiness by changing its trajectory---from separation to identification. He didn’t walk away from the world, as so many of us do, but He walked into it. Holiness became less concerned about those things He needed to avoid, and more about those things He needed to embrace.
Jesus hung out with people He shouldn’t have. He ate with people He shouldn’t have. He spoke with people He shouldn’t have. He touched people He shouldn’t have. Jesus didn’t bypass the rules as an act of defiance, He changed the rules altogether by redefining their meaning and focus.
He did this from the very beginning. His birth was an incarnation. God assumed the fullness of what it means to be a human being, and by doing so, demonstrated that the way to change the world is not through separation and isolation, but by entering into the world and changing it from the inside out.
Metamorphosis
Jesus demonstrated the way God works in the world---not from the outside, but from the inside. Jesus demonstrated that the way to bring about change was not through removing oneself from the world, but by moving into it. Holiness was not about separating oneself from the world, but separating oneself for God and God’s mission in, to and for the world.
Jesus’ followers are called to do likewise. We are called to go into all the world, and make disciples by living in the world.
The world isn’t bad. God called it good. Yes, sin requires God to redeem and reconcile the world to Himself, but the world is still a place made and fashioned by a good God for the good of all creation. And, God’s choice method of transformation is a metamorphosis---to change it from the inside out.
God lives and works within his world, not outside of it. He moved into His world because he knew that the change he wanted to bring could only come from living within it, not away from it. This would have to be an inside job. The transformation He wanted for his creation needed to happen from within, as a metamorphosis always does, and God knew that He would have to see it through Himself.
So we do not separate ourselves from the world, hoping one day to escape it. No, we move into it, identifying with its pain as fellow travelers, bringing with us the Spirit of metamorphosis who marked the life and ministry of the One who went before us.
God looks like Jesus, entering into the world with all of its brokenness, assuming its brokenness, walking within it, dying for it, and rising for it.
God is not "out there somewhere," detached from and unconcerned for the good world He created. Rather, He entered into it Himself, through Jesus, by the Spirit, and calls us to "go and do likewise."
True holiness looks like Jesus.
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