“God blesses those whose hearts are pure, for they will see God.”
My heart is not pure. I’m not exactly sure what Jesus meant by “pure,” but I know I’m not it. The history of Christianity is littered with failed attempts to achieve purity. The church in Corinth certainly was not pure, and the apostle Paul rebuked it for its greed, party spirit, and accommodation with sexual immorality. In fact, Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome, lamented his own inability to control the sin in his life. “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.”
Yes. I’ve been there, done that. We all have.
Asceticism afflicted the church in the second century and lasted for centuries. At first it emphasized self-discipline as the road to purity. Any of us who have attempted a long term diet know how reliable self-discipline is. In the late second century asceticism emphasized sexual abstinence as the road to purity. The church in Syria went so far as to require celibacy for baptism. By the third century the church saw the rise of holy hermits who withdrew from the world in order to escape its temptations. It wasn’t a far reach to the later development of a priesthood that embraced celibacy in order to maintain purity for Christ and his church. That didn’t work either, as the recent sexual abuses of the priesthood demonstrate.
Asceticism is still being practiced by Christians who are convinced that purity is the avoidance or rejection of certain things. It can take an extreme path. I will never forget a young man in the church we served in Thousand Oaks, CA who found great joy in his conversion and desired to be completely pure for Jesus. He embraced self-discipline, passed to denial of relationships with women, then to a humiliation of his body’s needs. Eventually he began to hurt and mutilate himself in order to “bring his body into subjection.” His faith was not a matter of joy. In fact, it wasn’t a faith in Jesus at all, but a faith in his own attempt to be pure in God’s eyes. It was a destructive form of Pharisaism.
To pursue purity of heart as the product of our own effort, or as the denial of the body’s need or pleasures, is a false pursuit. The instrument through which you see God is your whole self…a self created in God’s incredible image. And if a person’s self is not kept clean and bright, their glimpse of God will be blurred…like the moon seen through a dirty telescope.
God can show himself as he really is only to real people. And that means not simply to people who are individually good, but to people who are united together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing him to one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like; like players in one great band, or organs in one great body. WE do not create purity; God creates it within us as we love him with all our heart, mind, soul, and body, and as we love each other as ourselves.
Prayer: “Father, we know that you are perfect good, that there is no stain of any wrong within you. But we are not like that, and we wrestle daily with our weakness and poor choices. We know that we will never attain to purity unless you create it within us, and our whole soul craves that kind of clean and restored spirit. Open for us the gates of righteousness. We will enter and give thanks to you. Cleanse us and make our way blameless. We will rejoice in your pleasure and laugh with freedom. In Jesus’ name, Amen”