The Stupidity of Holiness

Holiness is sometimes imagined as drifting around in cloud-like robes, holding one’s head carefully so as not to let one’s halo slip. In this condition, one must avoid walking down alleys and into rundown cafés to ensure that no speck of sin may stain one’s lily-white garments. In essence, holiness is being set apart from the world, which is the same thing as not being in the world, you know.

Oh, dear. But Jesus touched lepers. And ate with prostitutes. He drank (deep breath) wine. Good grief. What are we going to do now?

Someone should have told Him to act more like a Christian.

Seriously.

Many men walk priggishly aloof from society, disinfecting their hands when they come into contact with sinners. (Rubbing alcohol of 90% strength is really the only Biblical way. The usual recommendation of soap and hot water is not effective against the infectious fount of sin to be found in People Who Do Not Attend Church.) These church-goers tithe faithfully, support the local charities, and send their children to Christian school.Yet they close their ears to the cry of the gangsters and drug addicts: “Come over here and help us.”

Hey … Psst … What about the verse that says we are supposed to walk as He walked? Dude, really? You expect us all to be celibates and die when we’re thirty-three? And wear sandals? Oh, and the other verse that says we are in the world, but not of the world? It actually means we aren’t of the world, and we shouldn’t be in it, either. You just gotta read it right.

So, now that we all got our exegetical glasses on straight, let’s take a look at a story. All facts have been dutifully reported and none omitted in order to not obscure the identity of the character.

Once upon a time

Once upon a time, a good Christian man was pumping gas for his car when a girl who looked around sixteen or seventeen walked up to him. In exchange for a ride home to her parents’ house, she offered him something that most guys would immediately have jumped at. Not this gentleman, however. He informed her that he was “A Christian”, and as such, had no fellowship with the temple of Baal. Moreover, he was on his way to A Church. He had better things to do than to love his neighbor as himself. And so, magnanimously bidding her farewell, he got himself into his vehicle and set off on his way to serve God, leaving the beaten traveler — I mean, the teenage girl — on the side of the road.

Recounting this tale with evident pride at his own holiness, he failed to notice my “going-to-throttle-you-to-death” glare. His powers of resisting sin were certainly incredible; nimbly jumping the tiny step of sexual temptation, he had landed headfirst in the rank bog of Pharisaism.

I have no doubt that another man did accept her offer later on that evening, in exchange for, or in addition to, God alone knows what.

Our society, full as it is of male predators without the slightest spark of conscience, has no need of “holy” men, cowards and idiots, more thoughtful of their own good name than another’s well being, more worried about the safety of their reputations than the spread of the Kingdom.

Real holiness

We need men with pure hearts and clean eyes, who walk before the Lord in the integrity of their heart (Ps. 101:2–3), and have vowed that their eyes will not look with lust (Job 31:1). We need men who walk into the darkness to bring light, and come forth without a clinging shadow. We need men who look beyond the hopeless offer of sex to see a little girl, desperate to get home, away from the nightmares, desperate enough to pay in the only currency she has learned that men will take.

If your holiness is so delicate and fragile that it will shatter upon the least contact with the world, then it is no holiness at all.

The glorious giants in Lewis’ Great Divorce were not the ones affected by the ghosts’ sins. On the contrary, the ghosts either became like the corporeal saints or were unable to stand before their purity. Christians who stay in their safe spaces, whose only friends are from church or Bible study, are in little position to help the hurting and lost of the world.

Pharisees and Levites that we are, we avoid people with tattoos, dyed hair, or piercings, seeing them as a “bad influence.” Have we forgotten He Who has redeemed us and what God we serve? He has conquered the world and all we have to do is announce that fact (Matt. 28:18–20). Does the God who gave us authority to overcome all power of the enemy (Lk. 10:18–20, cf. Mark 16:17–18) think that we cannot handle talking to the seedy-looking guy next to us in line at Walmart?

There are no ordinary people

We replace each stranger’s face with a stereotype, mentally boxing them up into neat little groups. He obviously drinks a lot … look at how many cases of alcohol he is purchasing. Good grief, those people need to keep their kids in line! Those teenage girls look as if they think it’s 110 degrees outside! There — we have identified and labeled each one — heavy drinker, bad parents, sleazy girls. But what if, as Eugene Peterson says, we look around and see that:

“There are no ordinary people.”

Each family contains enough Shakespearean comedies and Aeschylan tragedies to fill stages for hundreds of years to come. Each person you meet is made in the image of God and He is telling their story. If you see them, your stories are intertwined. What are you going to do about it?

Wisdom is not naive

Some may see this as a naive recommendation to befriend addicted people, underestimate sin’s hold on them, and generally dance through life as if it were a field full of daffodils because everyone is genuinely nice at heart and sin is only skin deep. I could write 31 chapters detailing the nuances of this position, but since Solomon and a few others already did, I won’t. (See Proverbs.) In short, some people are wise, some are foolish, and some people are mockers. The mockers won’t change. Don’t try (Prov. 9: 8). If you see a contradiction between Matthew 28: 18–20 and Solomon’s advice, read the Bible more. Well, do that anyway.

This is not to deny the existence of manipulative, abusive, and narcissistic people. Surely we all know someone who tried to help a homeless person who simply sponged upon his generosity, or we have heard of abortive parents who took the money for their rent and groceries, got an abortion anyway, and pretended it was a miscarriage.

Stories like these might lead many to skepticism, thinking it better to avoid all the lost and hurting in case one’s efforts were futile. This view, however, fails to take into account the sovereignty of God and the importance of wisdom — the ability to look at oneself and others in relation to God and the story He is telling.

If we are expected to share with the poor (Deut. 15:7, Is. 58:6, Matt. 5:42, 1 Jn. 3:17), to protect the weak and defenseless (Prov. 24:12, Ps. 82:3–4, Jer. 22:16), and to bring good news (Rom. 10:15), then we must do it. Wisdom tells us when to walk away from the scorner and God’s sovereignty allows us to trust that He was glorified through our obedience.

Some final thoughts

N.D. Wilson says,

“Be the yeast. Do not fear the shadowy places. You will never be the first one there. Another went ahead and down until He came out the other side.”

“Do not try to hide your children from the world forever, but do not pretend there is no danger. Train them. Give them sharp eyes and bellies full of laughter. Make them dangerous. Make them yeast, and when they’ve grown, they will pollute the shadows.”

Scripture tells us,

“When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” (Matt. 9:36, NIV)

“He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked.” (1 John 2:6, KJV)

P.S. The main point of this blog is to encourage Christians to get up out of their armchairs and out onto the streets … to be light in the darkness. As always with any volatile and touchy subject, this is incredibly complicated and difficult, and my blog only pulled one worm out of the can.