SOME HOLES IN "HOLINESS"
What does it mean to be truly holy? It’s to be like Christ: to belong, like Jesus, wholly to the Father, and so to be able, like Jesus, to bring cleansing to the world. Too often our idea of holiness falls short of Jesus’ example. The holiness we hear so much about is shrill and weak and unappealing. Who loved being around Jesus the most? Hopeless and unholy sinners! Jesus’ holiness was absolutely appealing; it was beautiful! It was luminous and deeply desirable. This is because Jesus embodied God’s own holiness—The Father of lights, the Giver of every good gift, the Creator of every radiant moment.
Jesus embodies holiness.
But wait: can holiness be embodied?
Body-ed?
The earliest, most basic, philosophies saw the world divided between good and evil. Okay. But what is good? What is evil? These lay-philosophers observed that evil tended to be more physical—immorality, violence, injustice, etc.—and that good seemed to be more, I don’t know, religious, emotional, and spiritual. So a dualism developed: body is bad and spirit is good. This dualism populates most aboriginal religious systems, including Greco-Roman paganism.
And, of course, that’s what Christianity grew up in. So it wasn’t long before there were apparently godly, gifted, Christian teachers telling people that Jesus was only a spirit and not a man at all (2John 1:7), or that what you did with your body didn’t matter so long as you had the Spirit of Jesus within you (1Cor 6:13). Mature Christianity began to be defined as being good at religious stuff, without necessary regard for how you treated your spouse, kids, or neighbor.
As out of bounds as this might sound, it gained a large following. For several hundred years “Gnostics” led churches and wrote and caused all sorts of confusion that the persecuted church wasn’t able to confront together directly. It wasn’t until the persecution died down, during the fourth century, that these heresies were addressed.
But the force of these ideas isn’t merely philosophical—as we noted earlier, they’re deeply appealing to our sense of the way things are. So these ideas are hard to shake. They still exert influence on us today. For example, in our idea of holiness.
Who is holier: an angel or a man? …But then, Jesus wasn’t an angel; He is a man.
This dualism—this Gnosticism—leads us to feel uncomfortable with being human. Interestingly, the first sin was born out of a desire to be more-than-human! God made us good; God made us humans. We desired something “higher,” “nobler,” less-human, and we fell into sin.
Is our humanity something we should be “evolving” away from? (Or, isn’t the Spirit “transforming” us away from being mere humans?)
Christian or Human?
Here’s the question: What does being Christian have to do with being human?
The answer: Jesus restores our humanity. Mature Christians should be good humans.
The story, in brief.
First, God made us human beings. So, human beings are good. Human beings are uniquely good because they bear the image of God. (Gen 1:26)
Second, humanity rebelled against God by, in part, desiring to be not-merely human beings. They wanted to be more godlike and less the way they were. The image of God in us was marred. We fell.
Third—fast-forwarding quite a bit!—Jesus came and presented us with a true human being. Jesus is a second Adam, a restoration of what we were to have been. What is more, Jesus is the true image in which humanity was made: “Jesus is the image of the invisible God.” (Col 1:15) And so the Spirit of Jesus is renewing His people “after the image of our creator.” (Col 3:10)
In summary: we were made to be humans, sin mars our humanness, but the Spirit of Jesus is at work in believers to restore our humanity.
Touch-Up
If being very holy means being very human, then our idea of what it means to be holy is going to need some touch-up. Remember, “the Son of Man came eating and drinking.” (Mat 11:19) What could be more human than that! But not everyone thought that was great.
What does it mean for the Spirit and the church to help us become more holy? Perhaps nothing greater could be answered than this: we’re learning how to eat and drink again—not to gluttony or drunkenness, but to the glory of God. (1 Cor 10:31) Perhaps what we’re doing is learning how to be human again. And if so, this has implications for our idea of holiness and our expectations for the spiritual journey.
But as we close, let me encourage you to take a moment and thank God for making you the way you are—body, self, spirit, thoughts, feelings, muscles, etc. Thank God for your humanness. Remember, Eve tripped because she wanted more; holiness, for Adam and Eve, would have been increasing delight in the gift of their createdness, their humanity, among other things. How many of our personal troubles emerge from a similar rebellion? So give thanks, and rest in the wisdom of your Creator.
Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash
