What No Graduates Will Hear

The time for graduations has mostly passed, and the graduates have been duly flattered and told that they are going to accomplish great things—or rather, since we have been in a narcissistic age for all of my life, that they are going to be great, if they are not great already. Perhaps their school presidents ought to hand out mirrors instead of diplomas.

Two things strike me about this flattery when I think of Jesus and the good news He brings to mankind. The first is how unimpressed Jesus was with the signs of human greatness all about Him, regardless of whether the greatness was built upon ambition, military power, and cruelty, as with Rome, or upon genuine devotion, as with the Temple itself. No doubt He was thinking of the cult of the Roman emperors and the honor afforded their subordinate governors when He advised His disciples not to be like them: “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and they who exercise authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you” (Luke 22:25-26). 

He had to say so because they were bickering about who was to be considered the greatest among them. It is not flattering, it does not fill the imagination with dreams of gold and glory, to hear how Jesus always responds to such ambition: “Whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant; and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave” (Matthew 20:26-27). He even sets before them the kind of creature we now consider to be the greatest obstacle along our paths to glory, the creature whose smallness claims our prime attention and reminds us of how little we are: “And Jesus called a little child to him, and set him in their midst, and said, ‘Amen I say to you, unless you turn and become like little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:2-3).

Jesus did not make much of the Romans. He sought no allegiance with them, nor did He rail against them, no more than you might exercise yourself to support or oppose a drought or an outbreak of disease. He cured the centurion’s servant, seemingly indifferent to what His fellow Jews thought decisive, that “he loves our nation and himself has built us our synagogue” (Luke 7:5). When Pilate, looking for some excuse to set Jesus free, invites Him to acknowledge his authority, Jesus tells him that he would have none at all were it not given him from above (John 19:11).

Yet Jesus leads no rebellion against these magistrates. Consider the trap that the Pharisees and their enemies, the lackeys of Herod Antipas, tried to spring on Him.  Each side wanted His support: the Pharisees for their cool and patient hatred of the Romans, the Herodians for their cooperation with them; though each side would have been content to have Jesus out of the way. They toss their trick question about taxes paid to Caesar; and Jesus, asking them to show Him a coin and to tell Him whose image is on it, parries them by putting politics in its proper but subordinate place: “Render, therefore, to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21).

Roads, aqueducts, dredged harbors, and public buildings are good things, but they cannot bring the human soul one step closer to its perfection. If you are an evil man, good roads give you more opportunity to spread your evil abroad; good harbors, more opportunity to trade upon it. The Romans were excellent road builders, and we may grant them this edge over those of our graduates who will not be doing anything that so obviously subordinates self-opinion to the pragmatic work to be done. A straight and durable highway does not care about your politics, or your self-affirmation, or your Critical Road Theory.

Nor, with Jesus, does the grandeur of the Temple fare any better. Jesus loved the Temple, calling it “my Father’s house” when He drove out the money changers (John 2:16). He stayed behind in Jerusalem once when He was a boy and Mary and Joseph had gone to the city to celebrate the Passover; they found Him in the Temple, as He said, “about my Father’s business” (Luke 2:49). But when His disciples, proud of that same place, wanted to show Him all the buildings, Jesus said that “there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down” (Matthew 24:2).

He transferred attention and honor from the Temple built with human hands to the true and final Temple, built by God. “Destroy this temple,” He said, referring to His own body, “and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). The city of God will be the New Jerusalem, and, says John, “I saw no temple therein, for the Lord God almighty and the Lamb are the temple thereof” (Revelation 21:22).

The second thing I think of is, aside from greatness, how difficult it is to be good—impossible, without the grace of God. Jesus never told His followers that they were good. “If you, evil as you are, know how to give good gifts to your children,” says He, “how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11). We may say we are good because we avoid such obvious and flagrant sins as adultery, but Jesus says that “anyone who so much as looks with lust at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (5:28).

The Pharisee in the Temple was a good man according to the world’s view, and he knew it. “O God,” said he, “I thank thee that I am not like the rest of men, robbers, dishonest, adulterers, or even like this publican,” who had also gone to the Temple to pray. But the Pharisee, says Jesus, did not leave the Temple justified, for all his fasting twice a week and giving of tithes, since “everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled” (Luke 18:10-14).

For our sense of our own goodness works by invidious comparison with others, a comparison that will not stand scrutiny: “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me cast out the speck from your eye,’ and behold, there is a beam in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:4). Such is the way of the world. Therefore, we must enter by the narrow gate, for “broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many there are who enter that way” (7:13).

Who will tell these things to the graduates? I am put in mind here of a moment captured in the greatest of English poems, Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also a graduation of sorts, since Adam and Eve are about to be expelled from earthly Paradise. They have learned about sin the hard way, finding their eyes “how opened, and their minds / How darkened.” But God does not abandon them to their sin; and though their minds now must struggle, their repentance, occasioned by God’s grace, opens them again toward truth. God sends Michael the archangel to cast them out of the garden and, if they submit to it patiently, to reveal to Adam “what shall come in future days.”

This he does, prefacing his revelation with a warning: “Good with bad / Expect to hear, supernal grace contending / With sinfulness of man.” It is not a story of the triumph of the intellect, of technological development, of political liberation. What good, in the end, are any of those things if man is wicked? “Inventors rare,” says Michael of the generation before Noah, “unmindful of their Maker, though his Spirit / Taught them, but they his gifts acknowledged none.”

The saving death and Resurrection of the Son of God is the central act of man’s story, and His return at the creation of the new heaven and earth is its climax. To the genuine Christian, these are hard historical facts. The salvation of any man, and the goodness of any society, must be viewed in their light. What God will do with societies that never were Christian to begin with, we will leave to Him. But with societies that once were Christian? Their rejection of Christ is spiritual suicide.

Who will tell the graduates of such a society that their moral goodness, apart from Christ, is a little wildflower withering in the heat?

Only those who will understand this wisdom from Adam, his final words in the poem. Here is a valedictory that tells the truth:

How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest,
Measured this transient world, the race of time
Till time stand fixed; beyond is all abyss,
Eternity, whose end no eye can reach.
Greatly instructed I shall hence depart,
Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill
Of knowledge, what this vessel can contain,
Beyond which was my folly to aspire.
Henceforth I learn that to obey is best
And love with fear the only God, to walk
As in His presence, ever to observe
His providence, and on Him sole depend,
Merciful over all His works, by good
Still overcoming evil, and by small
Accomplishing great things; by things deemed weak
Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise
By simply meek; that suffering for truth’s sake
Is fortitude to highest victory,
And, to the faithful, death the gate of life,
Taught this by His example whom I now
Acknowledge my Redeemer ever blest.