Mar 25, 2020
By Rev. Nicholas J. Kersten
Director of Education and History
“…And [Jesus] answered them, ‘O faithless generation,
how long am I to be with you?
How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.’”
—Mark 9:19 (ESV)
What does it mean to have selfless love for one another as Christ does for us?
I suspect if you asked the question of most Seventh Day Baptists you would get a variety of answers, but certain themes would repeat. There is a tendency, in our descriptions of God’s love for us, to lean to the accepting and comforting side of God’s love—and there are good Biblical reasons to think that these are important aspects of His love for us. But they are not the totality of God’s love for us. All of us need to be received by God and ministered to by the Holy Spirit. We all can seek comfort and peace in God through Christ and His love.
There are other more difficult, more uncomfortable parts of God’s love which we must not ignore, especially as it relates to showing love to one another inside our local churches and Conference. Stated simply, those elements of love are patience and discipline. When we want to show God’s love to one another, we must desire and attempt to show all of God’s love in our relationships. The comfort we sometimes desire from our brothers and sisters may require patience and discipline from us to deliver, and vice versa.
When God’s love is operational in us, it manifests as comfort and care for our brothers and sisters in both proclamation and demonstration. In other words, we will both speak our love and act out our love. Proclamation without demonstration is empty. Demonstration without proclamation is nondescript. The love shown by Jesus throughout the Gospels includes elements of proclamation and demonstration, not only in the showing of care and comfort in the ways which are most reassuring for us, but also in these areas of patience and discipline.
When Jesus was traveling with His disciples shortly after the Transfiguration, three of the Gospel writers next tell the story of a young man healed from a demonization (Matthew 17:14-20, Mark 9:14-29, and Luke 9:37-43). In all three stories, the parents who bring the young man to Jesus first unhelpfully encounter the disciples who do not aid in bringing the young man freedom—and so Jesus responds to His disciples and those around with the quote above (v. 19 and parallels). Why does this incident, out of all the recorded interactions during Jesus’ ministry, cause Jesus to react this way?
While I don’t have the space to outline all of the possible reasons for this reaction from Jesus, I do want to suggest a couple of possibilities. The first possibility is that Jesus is frustrated that His disciples, even having been with Him for a considerable amount of time, still have not rightly understood Jesus’ heart for the broken and His desire to bring wholeness and healing to them. A second possibility is that He is worn by the constant throng of people who wish for healing from Him. It is not impossible that elements of both options are present. But no matter how you view this, something is testing Jesus’ patience.
For this reason, His response to the situation is instructive for us. He heals the young man (vs. 25-27), aids the young man’s father in his faith (vs. 23-24), and teaches His disciples about the ministry He is doing (vs. 28-29). If Jesus is frustrated with the lack of faith or skill from His disciples or the constant demands from the gathering crowds, it doesn’t come through in His behavior. He remains Himself in perfect love even in dealing with a situation which seems to have tested Him. Ultimately His proclamation and demonstration are in perfect unity with his loving character, frustrated or not.
Sadly, and predictably, most of us do not handle frustration as well as Jesus, and can be prone to both impatience or harshness when we encounter it. It is a growth area for all of us. But if we wish to grow in love and be truly supportive communities of faith—Kingdom family—then we must strive to care for one another, and in these difficult instances above all others. There are two primary ways that I believe we all can grow in this love for one another: loving church discipline and prayerful self-discipline.
Taking the second of these first—all of us know it is wrong to take out our issues on others. We have all been on the receiving end of someone else’s misdirected outburst. Unfortunately, it is far more difficult to identify when we are the ones dishing out to others because of our issues. This is in part because of our impulse to justify ourselves: if someone else has pushed one of our buttons, they must deserve what they get. But the reality is usually that the person on the receiving end of our emotional dumping is simply the easiest or most convenient place to put our outflow—someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. No matter how they got in front of our emotional firehose, they probably do not deserve what we give them, either in terms of what we say to them or how we behave towards them.
The solution that Jesus models for us in this story seems to be one of patient restraint. While He may be frustrated with His disciples’ lack of perception or the demands made of Him, He does not pour out the emotion of this on those around Him. Instead, He lovingly serves. When the disciples ask Jesus how He was able to cast out a demon they were not, He indicates that prayer was the difference. I suspect that it was not only the casting out of demons which was bolstered by Jesus’ prayer life, and that Jesus’ ability to “keep His eye on the ball” with respect to the work of His Father boils down to prayerful self-discipline. It is no accident that when the Apostle Paul speaks of the fruit of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23), he begins with love and ends with self-discipline—or that when he speaks about how we should clothe ourselves as God’s people (Colossians 3:12-14), he includes patience, covered over by love.
This leads us to the other primary way we can grow in this: loving church discipline. Repeatedly, the texts of Scripture make clear that God regularly disciplines us. In fact, it is this discipline which marks His real love for us (Hebrews 12:7-17), and that discipline is meant to be continued in His church. When our proclamation or demonstration of our faith is not in line with the Gospel or is not symmetrical, it is love to us for those in our Kingdom family to aid us in getting back on the right track. It is not hatred. This is not meant to be rare behavior in the context of the church, but a regular part of the functioning of the body of Christ. It is to be motivated by real love among church members, in the same way that parents discipline their children—not abusively, but with firm tenderness. Jesus does the same with his disciples in this story, teaching rather than rebuking them for their failure.
This is not new to Seventh Day Baptists—it is our heritage to see discipline in our churches, and more historically normal than how we now sometimes operate—saving “discipline” only for such instances that are too well-known or too damaging to ignore. Our world increasingly moves towards selfish expressions of love which privilege felt needs over Biblical reality: figuratively letting the kids play in the street during rush hour if they want to. But we cannot settle for this in the context of our churches, as love for people must privilege their freedom in safety over the bondage of self-gratification. This is a hard word for those who have believed, along with our prevailing culture, that love can never say “no.” Nevertheless, it is an important part of our faith to receive for ourselves and give to others the benefit of the loving hand of discipline on the shoulder when someone wanders away from the truth of our faith.
For this part of God’s love to be understood by outsiders, we must take it for ourselves in both our proclamation and demonstration. We must restrain our own impatience and instead submit ourselves to our local churches—which are the body of Christ and are meant to share and show His love with the world, but also inside our own Kingdom families. May we all grasp and live in God’s great love for us!
