Perspective: Be Not Vacant

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Be Not Vacant

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

John 13:34-35 (NRSV)

And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love
Yes, they'll know we are Christians by our love

From "They'll Know We Are Christians" by Peter Scholtes

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells a parable about a person who is tormented by an evil spirit, in which he compares the person to a haunted house.  After the spirit is cast out of the house, it wanders the wasteland until it decides to return to its former residence.  It finds the house cleaned and straightened up but empty.  Finding the house welcoming, the spirit takes up residence in the house once again and invites seven other spirits to live with it, all of which are even worse than it is.  Jesus concludes that the person represented by the house ends up worse off than the person was before the spirit was cast out in the first place.¹

What went wrong in this parable is obvious: the house was vacant.  If the house had been occupied, the evil spirit could not have returned and invited its friends.  Basically, if we get something negative out of our lives, like an addiction, willpower and gritting our teeth will only get us so far.  We need to be intentional to replace it with something positive, otherwise we are essentially inviting it to come back with a vengeance.  Scholar William Barclay offers the example of an athlete whose athletic ambitions ward off any temptations to engage in any indulgent behavior.²

In reference to the person tormented by evil spirits, Jesus says, "So will it be also with this evil generation."³  Before Jesus tells His parable, He is confronted by a group of His detractors who demand that He give them a sign that He has indeed been sent by God.  Jesus replies, "An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign."⁴  Barclay points out that these detractors, a group of religious leaders and scholars, had "a religion of not doing things."  They focused on the "thou shalt nots" of their religious law, seeking to rid people of evil things without replacing them with good things.⁵

I think that much of what Jesus says about the religious leaders of His day can be said about Christians in our day.  For many people, the Christian religion is all about sin management.  Christians want to make sure that they are not doing anything that is displeasing to God, and they want to make sure that anything they have done to displease God has been forgiven.  Far too often it seems that Christians are known primarily for what they oppose.

On a 1993 episode of The Simpsons, Homer Simpson finds himself in a harrowing escape from his place of employment, the town's nuclear power plant.  He follows a map into a dark hallway, where he is confronted by a giant spider.  The map reads, "To overcome the spider's curse, simply quote a Bible verse."  Homer, who is not the most pious person in the world, begins, "Thou shalt not..."  Unable to think of anything that might come next, he gives up and throws a rock at the spider.⁶  Homer could have said, "Love one another," or he could have said, "God is love," but his mind went straight to "Thou shalt not."

Later on, in the Gospel of Matthew, a religious scholar asks Jesus which of the commandments in their religion is the most important.  Jesus replies, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.'  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"⁷  When Jesus is asked about what matters most, He says nothing about what God doesn't want us to do.  Instead, He speaks only about what God does want us to do - to love God, each other, and ourselves.  For Jesus, religion is not just about getting sin out of our lives; it is, more importantly, about getting love into our lives.

For followers of Jesus, what matters most is not avoiding sin but loving radically, as Jesus loved.  When we love God, other people, and ourselves, as we are meant to love, sin becomes less of an issue for us, for we will not want to do anything that brings harm to anyone.  May we Christians be known not for what we oppose but for whom we love.


Notes:

1. Matthew 12:43-45
2. William Barclay.  The Parables of Jesus.  1990, Westminster John Knox Press.  p. 196
3. Matthew 12:45 (NRSV)
4. Matthew 12:38-39 (NRSV)
5. Barclay, p. 196
6. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0763029/quotes/
7. Matthew 22:34-40 (NRSV)

The photograph of the old house was taken by Darren Lewis and released to the public domain.  The photographer is in no way affiliated with this blog.