Failing Up

When I was in law school in the early ‘90s, everyone had a bracelet with the letters WWJD on them.  Of course, WWJD stood for “What Would Jesus Do?”, and the bracelets were supposed to be reminders to those who wore them to follow the example of Jesus.

Now, after a few decades of seeing WWJD on bumper stickers, signs, clothing, books —basically everywhere — the phrase has lost something of its original freshness.  For all our talk of individuality, we live in a culture of assimilation, and the culture has assimilated WWJD to the point where no one really thinks much about it anymore outside its current cultural context.  I don’t really think most people wearing WWJD bracelets or clothing, or driving around with WWJD bumper stickers on their cars, are really thinking much about what Jesus would do. 

First, look at the way people with such bumper stickers actually drive.  Really.  Next time you see one, just watch.  Or watch how people act who wear the bracelets or t-shirts.  Have you ever seen anyone with a WWJD bumper sticker speeding or cutting people off?  Or watched someone in a WWJD shirt or wearing a WWJD bracelet buying something needlessly expensive?  Tyler Perry, the movie and TV personality, once sued someone over who owns the trademark for TV purposes to the term “What Would Jesus Do”.  I’m pretty sure that of all the things that Jesus would do, suing someone is not among them.  I’m not sure that anyone really got the irony of this situation. 

The heart of the matter is that many people really don’t think about what Jesus actually does, because you can’t think about what Jesus does in isolation from thinking about Who Jesus is.  People don’t mind thinking of Jesus as a good example, or a philosopher, or a moral teacher, but unless you understand that Jesus is in fact God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, a lot of what he does is really lost on you.  

For example, Our Lord in the Gospels often talks about some great moral examples, the scribes and pharisees.  These men really were serious about acting right and about avoiding sinful deeds.  If people around us were half as serious about morality as the pharisees, we’d see a revolution in our public life.  

And yet our Lord says, “Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.”  Elsewhere, he calls these same men “whitewashed sepulchers”, meaning that they looked good on the outside, but inside were filled with death and decay.  True righteousness is not achieved by following a moral code, and Christianity is not a system of ethics.  Our Lord proves this in spades by what he says in the following verses and in other places:  anger and contempt are the same as murder; lust is the same as adultery; covetousness is the same as theft.  Our Lord makes it plain, not that our outward actions don’t matter, but that they matter precisely because they flow from our inward dispositions, and that even if our outward actions appear moral and above reproach, our inward dispositions can still send us to hell.  Great news, right?

Christ sets a bar for us that is impossibly high.  It would be hard enough if he told us we had to be as outwardly good as the pharisees.  Most of us would fail at this.  I know I would.  But he also tells us that we have to be free of internal dispositions such as pride, anger, lust, greed, self-centeredness, fear, sloth.  Try it.  You can’t do it.  As a moral system, Christianity is rather depressing.  

But in fact, the goal of Christianity can be summed up in the phrase, “Be holy as God is holy”.  Holiness is miles away from mere morality, and whereas we can fool ourselves that we are moral by the way we behave outwardly, only a fool walks around trying to act holy, and such a fool is apparent to everyone.  Holiness is beyond our powers.  And yet the choice our Lord presents us with is clear:  holiness or hell.  Not a promising start for a system of ethics.

And yet there is a way beyond this dilemma, and it begins with Baptism.  The Church, expounding Scripture, tells us that Baptism is a very extraordinary thing, and that in it the very life of Christ is given to us; that God truly and literally comes to dwell within us in the person of the Holy Ghost.  Now all that is impossible for human nature is possible for the divine nature, and Baptism implants the divine nature within us.  We become, in St. Paul’s phrase, “laborers together with God” (I Cor. 3:9).  

This principle of divine life within us, though, works by putting to death our sinful nature, and most of what we are, what we think of ourselves, what we want and desire, is bound up with our sinful, fallen nature.  We are like sick people who have been sick so long we identify ourselves more by our sickness than by health. We must allow the life of Christ within us to grow, we must cultivate it, we must tend it, we must give ourselves wholly over to it, and in doing that, we will  constantly encounter the need to die to self. 

We will also constantly encounter failure.  We will sin.  We will turn ourselves from God and from his life in ways both great and small. 

King David is one of the key figures in the Scriptures, described as “a man after God’s own heart” (I Sam. 13:14, Acts 13:22).  God says to Solomon that his father David walked in God’s ways and kept his statutes and commandments (I Kings 3:14).  Yet David is also a fairly notorious sinner: he committed adultery and then, to cover his actions, conspired to murder an innocent man; he directly disobeyed God’s command to him not to number his people.  How do we reconcile these things?  

David’s great trait was his swiftness to turn to God in repentance.  The key for us is to turn each and every failure into an opportunity for repentance.  It is repentance that makes us holy and keeps us oriented toward God.  It is repentance which makes us faithful, even when we’ve failed.  

“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”, our Lord says.  We are not simply following his example, though we are doing that, often with real difficulty; we are allowing, day by day, the Life of Christ to have dominion in our lives, we are crucifying our selves, we are becoming through the power of God, sons of God.  That’s what Jesus would have us do.

How do we gauge our progress? We must remember that grace works mostly in secret.  Our wills are diseased with sin, and our hearts are dark and convoluted; we are mostly unknown to ourselves.  Self-knowledge comes from God, by grace, but it comes slowly, over time, as a result of our daily self-abandonment.  God wants our hearts, our wills, to be wholly his, and he does not take them by force, but uses the power of the sacraments and prayer to change us, to make us more aware of what we need to turn over to him, makes us more and more able to bear the realization that this dark place in our heart needs to be given over to God, that that shadow over our will needs to be surrendered to the light of Christ, that this little appetite or tendency needs to be pruned or uprooted.  

Grace acts lovingly, gently, and we often mistake this courteous manner of our Lord in dealing with us for divine absence. But really it is we who are so often absent! I’ve often thought of making my own bumper sticker: “WWJD? Go to Mass.  In fact, he’s already there.” 

Nurture your baptismal life with Scripture, nourish it in prayer and Sacrament, care for it in the remembrance of God, and even in the midst of failure you will walk in newness of life, fully present and alive to God.