Faith, Faithfulness, Discipleship....

Faith is....?

Consider a tree. Its roots dig into the earthen ground. Its bole climbs up, up towards the sun; it throws its branches out into the free air.

As a disciple of Christ, I am a tree; at the root of who I am is my faith, which is "grounded" in Christ. The trunk and branches--all that you can visually see--are my life of discipleship, which grow up from the root of my faith. If my faith is strong and deep, the tree will not easily be moved. If my discipleship is strong, the tree will be tall and broad and fertile.



Authority in the Life of Faithful Discipleship

"All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth; therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." (Matthew 28:18-20)

Faith, as I pointed out in the illustration above, is that which roots Christ's disciples in Christ. Discipleship is rooted in faith in Christ's authority to command. Of course, we believe that he has the authority to command because of the resurrection. But we do what he says because we believe that he had the authority to say it. Loving your enemy doesn't make sense; turning your head and offering your enemy your other cheek to slap doesn't make sense; giving more to those who would rob you than they ask for doesn't make sense; such suffering and "carrying your cross" doesn't make sense. Christ's commands don't make sense unless he has the authority to command.

Discipleship grows in the knowledge that Christ does not command us to do anything that he did not do himself. If he did not live what he taught (and thus show us how to do the same), then his commands to love your enemy, to turn the other cheek, or to carry your cross are absurd. But here is the man who loved even the Roman soldiers who put him on the cross, even Pilate (who gives a human face to the inhuman Roman Empire) who oppressed the Jews and massacred them when they attempted to protest peacefully, even the Jews who put the prophets to death with the sword and condemned him to the Romans though he was one of them; here is the man who "did no violence" (Isa. 53:9), who refused to defend himself or those of his own nation who did not know the ways of peace (Luke 13:34, 19:41-44); who did not protest the punishment to which the powers sentenced him, but took up his cross and died upon it. Behold the Man on the cross who "suffered as an example to us, that we might walk in his steps" (1 Peter 2:21-23)! The cross to which he calls us is not any and every kind of suffering, sickness, or tension; it is not inexplicable or unpredictable; it is not an inward wrestling with self and sin. The believer's cross is the end of a path freely chosen after counting the cost; it is the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to come, and his people will experience in ways analogous to his own the hostility of the old order: "The servant is not greater than his master; if they have persecuted me they will persecute you." (John 15:20)

Note: For the last two sentences in particular I owe a tremendous debt to the work of the late J.H. Yoder in The Politics of Jesus.