You have likely heard the saying: Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Today, we hear an encounter between our Lord and one of the Sadducees who questions Jesus about the law and the commandments. At the end, Jesus tells him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” In other words, he was close, but this is not horseshoes or hand grenades.
We tend to allegorize this encounter, saying that the Sadducee was standing inches away from the One in whom “the Kingdom of God was at hand” and to walk away thinking that he was in good shape, after all, the Son of God had just praised his faith. However, the early Christians read the encounter a different way.
Knowing the law and commandments, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself, gets one close to the Kingdom, but not into the Kingdom. This is also why our Lord was able to say that even the least in heaven was greater than John the Baptist. The Kingdom of God is not merely a place of eternal life, but of the Perfect.
The earliest church fathers wrote of two ways, or paths that are close to one another. They both follow the way up the mountain of God. We could also say that these are the two wine skins, the old and the new garment. And like the wine at the wedding of Cana, the new is better. There is a lower path and a higher path; a path of the righteous and a path of the perfect.
The righteous, love their neighbor as themselves, but the perfect love as Christ loved us; the righteous love their enemies, but the perfect have no enemies. There are numerous ways in which Christ raised the law of Moses and the prophets to a higher level and that he sought to raise us from the faith of the righteous Sadducee to the perfect faith of the Apostles.
To be righteous is be a good person, but simply being a good person is not enough for the Kingdom of Heaven. As Christ was not simply a good person, but gave his life for the salvation of others. This is the activity of the Perfect, the giving of oneself for others, not only in Salvific terms, but in our everyday actions.
This Advent I will be hosting a series based from this early Christian Spirituality of Perfection, titled From Righteousness to Perfection. The first session will be on Saturday, Nov. 30th, 9am – Noon and we will meet on the Wednesdays of Advent, at 7pm, following the 6:00pm Mass. I invite you to join me, in person or by video, for this year’s Advent Series.
