Holiness and Mission. Morna D. Hooker
the truth but to do it.13 Long before, the Psalmist had written:
Teach me your way, O Lord,
That I may walk in your truth.
(Psalm 86.11)
Now the way and the truth are revealed in Jesus, and his followers must ‘walk’ – that is, live – in accordance with what they see in him.
When I first arrived in Cambridge, many years ago, I inherited a lecture course entitled ‘The Theology and Ethics of the New Testament’, and found myself lecturing on that theme several times a week. Theology alone, you might have thought, was a big enough topic, needing all the time available, and ethics, too, could easily have filled all the slots allocated to me. But here I was, lecturing on theology and ethics, and I soon realized why. Theology and ethics belong together, and refuse to be separated. True, some people assume that religion is all about what they believe, and has nothing to do with everyday life. But theology and ethics, belief and action, belong together, and those who do not practise their faith in their daily lives have failed to see the implications of their beliefs. It is no surprise, then, to find Jesus challenging his disciples by asking them, ‘Why do you call me “Lord, Lord”, and do not do what I say?’ (Luke 6.46).
The link between theology and ethics is seen clearly in Jesus’ reply to the scribe who asked him which was the greatest commandment. The answer – a quotation from Deuteronomy – appears at first to be straightforward: ‘The Lord our God is the one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’14 But Jesus doesn’t stop there! He goes on, this time quoting Leviticus: ‘The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”’15 (Mark 12.28–34). Surely this is cheating! He was asked for one command, and he has given two. But the reason is clear. The second command is the corollary of the first, and the first cannot be separated from it.16 If you love God, you must love your neighbours, and Jesus maintained that ‘neighbours’ included Gentiles as well as Jews.17 As the author of 1 John later insisted, you cannot claim to love God if you hate others.18 Faith – our trust in God and our love for him – cannot be separated from ethics.
‘Justification by faith’, the watchword of the Reformation, has dominated Protestant interpretation of Pauline theology for centuries. Sadly, Luther’s stress on the antithesis between faith and works as a means of salvation had the unfortunate result that some later interpreters stressed faith to the exclusion of everything else. Personal belief was seen as all-important, and this led to an understanding of religion which concentrated on personal salvation and forgot that – in Paul’s words – salvation needed to be ‘worked out’ (Philippians 2.12) in one’s manner of life. Yet Paul is clear that faith is meant to lead to obedience.19 His mission, he tells the Romans, is ‘to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles’ (Romans 1.5).20 His letters demonstrate how important this obedience – holiness of life – is.
An example of this is seen in what may be Paul’s earliest letter, his first epistle to the Thessalonians. According to Acts, Paul’s attempt to preach the gospel in Thessalonica had been cut short because of opposition from his fellow Jews.21 Anxious about the small community of converts he had left behind, Paul sent Timothy to see how they were faring, and when Timothy brought news that their faith was strong, Paul wrote to them expressing his thankfulness.22 In his opening greeting he reminds the Thessalonians of what their conversion had meant. They had ‘turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God’ (1 Thessalonians 1.9). In the last two chapters of the letter, he spells out something of what ‘serving a living and true God’ meant, and it can be summed up as personal holiness, and concern for one’s neighbour. Paul ends the letter with a prayer for the Thessalonian community:
May the God of peace sanctify you entirely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
(1 Thessalonians 5.23)
God’s demand to his people had been that they should ‘Be holy as I am holy’. This command is addressed now to Christians – to those who, as Paul puts it, are ‘called to be saints’. They, like Israel before them, are called to be God’s representatives on earth – to bring salvation and healing, justice and peace. That is the task to which they have been appointed.
Years ago, when I was a member of a group preparing The Methodist Service Book (1975), and was working on the Intercessions, I remember being puzzled by the fact that in every Christian tradition the first prayer is always for the Church. Surely, I thought, we should be praying for everyone else first, and then for the Church! Was it not very inward-looking to begin with the Church? A colleague and I produced a draft reversing the usual order, but we were soon shouted down – though I seem to remember that the only reason offered us was ‘tradition’! Now, however, I understand the logic. The Church is Christ’s body, carrying on his work. We need to pray for the Church, in order that we may pray and work for others. The Church must be holy – God’s holy people – in order to witness to the world.
Becoming like Christ
For the Christian, the command to ‘be holy as I am holy’ is a command to be like Christ. Not surprisingly, it is in the letters of Paul that we find the fullest description of what that might mean in terms of everyday life, since Paul was concerned to spell out there what the gospel meant – not simply in matters of belief, but in questions of behaviour. As we have seen, the two belong together, and cannot be separated. For Paul, the reason is that those who respond to the gospel, and who are baptized into Christ, share his death and resurrection. They die to their old way of life, and are raised to a new one – a life that is lived ‘in Christ’.23 That is why they are now truly members of God’s people, and that is why Paul addresses them as ‘saints’, or ‘holy ones’, the term once used of Israel. The language he uses reminds us of that fundamental relationship between Christ and believers, and of the call to be holy, in a way that our modern use of the term ‘Christians’ does not.
Another way of expressing this is to say that those who are ‘in Christ’ are part of a new creation. According to Genesis, Adam had been created after the image of God, but those who belong to Christ have been transferred into a new creation,24 and they are being changed into the image of Christ25 – who is himself the true image of God.26 Look at Christ, and you will see what God is like; look at Christians, and what you should see is what Christ is like. For Paul, therefore, the Christian life was a matter of imitating Christ – or rather, of being conformed to Christ.27 And that is in fact a better way of putting it, since what we are talking about is not merely a matter of imitation – like copying the appearance of the latest celebrity – for it is not something that we can ourselves do, but rather is, for Paul, always the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian.
If we want to see what this means, there is no better place to look than Paul’s letter to the Philippians. This brief letter has something of the nature of a manifesto. Paul is in prison, contemplating a possible death-sentence, and he shares with his friends in Philippi something of his understanding