When I went back and read last week’s installment of this article, I discovered that that I repeatedly used the phrase I truly believe. This reminded me that being called to holiness also means being called to faith and belief in Jesus Christ Who is God’s revelation to us about human life and how to live it.
I have often asked myself: Why did God become a human being in the Person of Jesus Christ? It is now very obvious to me that God became incarnate because humans didn’t seem to get God’s message about human life through the prophets He sent. I say this because of what Jesus taught. Obviously the Chosen People didn’t get the message about how to live that God sent through the prophets. I guess they were so busy being chosen that they didn’t realize that God’s message was all about how to treat all other human beings, regardless of how they treat you.
In many ways many modern Christians have followed on the path that the chosen took. They have forgotten that God’s revelation to humankind is all about how we treat one another. Wars spawned by religious beliefs have been going on almost since the advent of civilized society, and probably even before that. Humans find it hard to change the way they think!
As I see it, the problem is: How do we maintain this sense of unconditional love for all others when some others want to kill us for our beliefs or make us second class citizens. That is the dilemma we have to try and solve while being called to holiness.
It is obvious, from the narratives we have about the life of Jesus, that His approach was to remain silent! He didn’t fight back or try to rebut the false accusations made against Him. I know that this may be difficult for many to accept and yet this seems to be what God was attempting to teach us through Jesus’ life. We have documents proving that this was Jesus’ response to the false accusations and hatred directed toward Him. Since God could have found a million of other ways to convey to us His idea about how we should live, He did it the way He did.
So being called to holiness means that we must consider the life of Jesus and then decide how we will live. Will we make an attempt to live as Jesus lived? Will we reject His way and just trust in our society’s response to life? The decision, of course, is ours.
The only consolation in this, as I see it, is that God will never stop loving us and that He will continue to let life provide us with the opportunities we need to accomplish this personal transformation. We, of course, can make life much more painful than it needs to be by our personal resistance to personal transformation.