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Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Limiting The Scope
It was my big thesis paper for my senior year in high school. There were note cards involved. Typing, back before there were computers, was involved, too. It was on Golding's Lord of the Flies. And the teacher described the weeks of research and library time and typing time and the whole bit. We'd all heard the horror stories for years, and now the assignment was put on my desk. We'd all resigned ourselves to 6 weeks of misery leading up to graduation in order to get it done...and, in fact, if you didn't do well on it, you could fail senior English and that would mean summer school to even get to graduation.
This was bad.
This was very bad.
It was especially bad because the assignment came on the Thursday before the high school baseball season rolled around on Monday. It was by far my busiest time of the year.
It was obvious that the only way I could do the assignment was to limit it's "scope." See, the teacher had a time-line drawn out for us, which involved spending a week developing your thesis statement and then three weeks of research and a week of writing followed by a week of editing and that would result in a beautifully defended essay on the nature of human nature about two weeks before the end of the school. Then, those of us who, let's say didn't exactly put senior English highest on our list of priorities, would have to sweat it out to see if we passed senior English to graduate on time.
One good thing was that I knew myself well. Once baseball season started in earnest I checked out mentally from school. Besides, who did Mrs. Swindle think created her to be the English-Is-More-Important-Than-Anything-Else lady? I had a job at the movie theater. I had a girlfriend. I had baseball. I had friends to hang out with.
I knew myself well enough to know that the only way this assignment was going to get done was over the weekend. The only way I could fulfill the requirements of this paper was to...
...limit it's scope.
So, that's what I did. I broke the time-line down into hours. I skipped school that Friday and hit the public library downtown. I switched shifts with the guys at work for Saturday and Sunday, agreeing to work nights and hit the library both of those days, too. I limited the scope of the assignment...it was the only way I could do it.
And that's what the young lawyer did in Luke 10.
Remember that this young lawyer has decided to take a poll. He's asking the carpenter, who's drawn quite a following around town, what it means to be saved. Surprisingly, the carpenter asks the well-heeled, well-schooled lawyer to give him the answer to the question of, "What's one of the most basic verses you learned in seminary?" The lawyer answered correctly, saying that the way to get saved was to love God with all your heart, mind and soul and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus then told him that he got the answer correct, and now, go "do that."
When Jesus quoted Leviticus there, it did one thing to the lawyer: It exposed that he wasn't going and "doing it." Frankly, it would expose all of us...I mean, do we really love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength? Do we really love our neigbhor as ourselves? I think we'd all admit that we really don't.
Leviticus 19:17 squarely points to the reality that God's going to have to have grace and mercy towards us if we're going to get saved. Jesus was hinting at that here...do this and you will live...sheesh. Sometimes I don't even love my wife--who is my closest neighbor--enough to give her the remote control. I certainly am going to need help getting into The Kingdom if I've got to "do it."
So, the lawyer, in verse 29: "But wishing to justify himself, he said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"
See, he understood that the only way to justify himself was to...
...limit the scope of the command.
If he could just re-define who the neighbors were, he might have a shot. Notice he didn't even bother with the God-part of the assignment. Just the neighbor-part.
"And, so...who IS my neighbor? I mean, what if I hauled off and loved somebody and they turned out not to be my neighbor? Wouldn't that be the pits?" My translation there...sorry.
Anyway, that's kinda what we do, isn't it? When it gets tough, we limit the scope of the requirments reguarding God. And we'll see how Jesus responded tomorrow.
But for today, in what ways do we tend to try to "limit the scope" of what God's asking us to do? What do we do about that reality?
P.S. I stayed up pretty much all weekend. I got the paper done, to my teacher's bewilderment (and telling me to take it back and review it for six weeks) turned in that Monday during third period. I told her I didn't need to take it back because I knew it was an "A." She concurred. Then we lost in the state semi-finals that year.
Brent 4:49 AM
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