Jesus And Sex, Ctd

A reader writes:

Your response to Rod Dreher brought up an issue I had with Christianity that I finally resolved several years ago. As you point out, Jesus’s moral standards were higher than the Jewish law and much higher than any professing Christian I know or have known. The only way I could resolve it was: One, Jesus was just joking around. Two, He was mean. Or three, there was some way to do the things He said. I had lots of “instruction” from my evangelical brethren on the moral standards, but my life was not being transformed, so I stopped listening to the preaching, teaching tapes and TV and decided just to focus on the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

This is what I discovered.

Most all of Jesus’s ministry focused on commands, “Take up your bed and walk”, “Go wash in the pool…”, “Woman, you are free from your sickness”. “Do not judge, lest you be judged”, “Bless those that curse you” to name just a few. In all of the cases involving healing or deliverance something supernatural happened, a healing or deliverance took place. What I have come to believe is that the same dynamic occurs when Jesus makes a moral command. “Woman, I do not condemn you, go and sin no more:” could it be that the woman walked away with the power to “sin no more”?

Could it be that when we hear Jesus saying to us, “Judge not” (also impossible) that if we see it as an empowering command rather than a moral standard, that then we can be empowered to do it? And could it be that religious guilt and condemnation actually hinders that empowerment? How do we receive that empowerment? I don’t believe there is a formula, because then it would depend on what we do, not on what He did. Perhaps that is the true meaning of Easter.

It is, I believe. And as a Catholic, I also believe this empowerment can come through the sacraments. Sometimes I have wondered if the miracles are merely ways to illustrate how Jesus transformed the people around him – in a way they simply could not explain. And then when I get to Lazarus, I give up. We are clearly compelled to believe that Jesus had the power to raise someone from the dead. And groaned in agony before he did it.