THE IMITATION OF CHRIST
January 11, 2013
Westmount Park United Church
Early in the fifteenth century a German monk named Thomas a Kempis wrote a book called “The Imitation of Christ.” That work has stood for centuries as a text book for Christian devotion and Christian living. As the title suggests it counsels how one can seek the sort of life God intends for us by following Christ as a model. We often speak of the Christian life as one of following Jesus. That’s how the gospels all begin, with Jesus encountering fisher folk on the shores of the sea of Galilee and inviting them to follow him. The gospel narratives describe the first disciples of Jesus as literally following him, but when Jesus says in the gospels, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me,” [Luke 9:23] the meaning is symbolic.
For us following Jesus means to do the things he would do, say the things he would say, go where he would go, live as he would live, to imitate Jesus.
We know that. We accept and believe that the goal of a Christian’s life is to be like Christ, but we have a problem really taking that seriously, because following Jesus or imitating Christ seems an impossible task. We regard Jesus’ invitation to follow him as unrealistic, so we don’t have a serious plan for our lives directed at being like Jesus. After all, why bother trying if it can’t be done? Our honest response to Jesus’ invitation to follow him would probably be something like this: – You’ve got to be kidding! How could I ever expect to follow you, to imitate you, to be like you? You’re Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God. I’m just plain old me, an ordinary person. I could never come close to imitating you, Jesus.
That’s sort of how John the Baptist reacted when he saw Jesus coming to him to be baptized in the Jordan river. John was performing a rite of baptism as a ritual way of receiving forgiveness and renewal from God. When Jesus came to him to be baptized John protested that he should not be administering a baptism of forgiveness on Jesus. “You’ve got to be kidding Jesus,” was John’s reaction. “You have no need of ritual cleansing from sin.” But Jesus insisted on being baptized by John in order to demonstrate clearly that he was not above anyone else.
We, like John the Baptist, want to set Jesus in a completely different class from ourselves. When the Spirit descends upon him at his baptism we regard this blessing from God as vaulting Jesus into a different league. Jesus is playing pro ball under the lights with full network coverage while we’re kicking a ball around in a pick up game on a vacant lot. We don’t really seriously accept the notion that Jesus is inviting us to play pro ball with him, because he’s got what it takes to play in the big leagues and we don’t.
Our problem is that we don’t truly comprehend what happened at Bethlehem. The incredible miracle of Bethlehem is that in Jesus, God has entered fully and completely into human life. Jesus was not a super man, Jesus was a one hundred percent fully human person. All his physical, mental and spiritual resources were the same as yours and mine. He did not live a super human life, he lived a real human life. When he says “follow me” he means it, because he is not Superman, able to leap giant chasms of difficulties which no mere mortal can ever hope to get across. When the Spirit of God descends upon him as he comes up out of the river Jordan he is not thereby transported into a realm that we can never know or experience. We also receive the blessings of God’s Holy Spirit. We are fully equipped and enabled by God’s Spirit to be faithful followers of Jesus. The miracle of Bethlehem, that God is with us in a fully human baby who grows up into a fully human adult, means that it is possible to imitate Christ.
The way of Christian discipleship is not impossible because what Jesus invites us to is the way of authentic human living, and what we need in order to respond to his invitation is not super strength, or extra high intelligence, or dynamically strong wills. We need no super powers to imitate Christ, all we need is simple child like trust in the God whose Spirit descended on Jesus at his baptism and whose Spirit, abiding also in us, is all that we need to follow Jesus faithfully and well.
Our chief guide for discovering the way to follow Jesus is the Bible. Jesus also grounded what he did in the scriptures which were for him the law and the prophets and the writings of the people of Israel. Clearly the book of Isaiah had a strong influence on the way that Jesus learned how to live. It was five hundred years before Jesus that the prophet of the exile, who wrote the middle chapters of Isaiah, described a way of life which became perfectly embodied in Jesus, and which still stands as a bench mark for any who would live by imitating Christ. There are several passages in Isaiah, of which today’s Old Testament lesson is one, which describe a faithful servant of God who is willing to suffer for the sake of God’s people. The suffering servant of God is entirely peace loving and non aggressive. He does not raise his voice, he will not break off a bent reed or blow out a faintly flickering lamp, and yet by completely passive means he is able to establish justice. [Isaiah 42:2&3] The way of the suffering servant of God, the way of the Christ, is the way of justice without violence, and it is that way which Jesus invites us to follow, it is that way which we need to imitate in order to be faithful disciples of Jesus.
It may seem difficult or challenging to follow Jesus’ way of loving one’s enemies and turning the other cheek to aggression in others, but it is not super human or impossible, and what really stands in the way of our imitating Christ is not a lack of super internal fortitude but a lack of faith that God’s ways are indeed best. The imitation of Christ does not depend on our being smart or strong, it depends on our having faith in God. When Jesus rebukes his disciples for their failures he does not say, “How stupid of you” or, “How weak willed you are,” he says, “O you of little faith.” [Matthew 6:30, 8:26, 14:31] If we want to imitate Christ ever more faithfully then we need to turn to God in the same way that the father of the dieing child turned to Jesus and say as he did, “I believe; help my unbelief!” [Mark 9:24]
To follow Jesus, to imitate him faithfully in all that we say and do, does not require that we become super human heroes, but it does require that we place our trust in the one whom we are following and imitating. We need to believe that in the miracle of Bethlehem the child born to Mary and Joseph was fully human. We need to believe that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life, and therefore following in his way leads to the sort of human life that God intends for us. We need to believe that God’s Spirit rests upon us no less that on Jesus, that we have Pentecost power just as great as the blessing of God’s Spirit which Jesus received. The imitation of Christ is not an impossible ideal, it is the way that is open and possible for every single child of God.