Growing up in a Christian School environment there are a few themes you pick up very quickly and little answers to question that you learn. Knowing the answers to certain questions would make you a notch better than the first year Christian-schoolers. One of those questions is “What does it mean to be holy?” This was always a trick question. Whoever asked the question is trying to get someone to say something about how being Holy means doing the right things and being perfect, but we all knew better. We knew that being holy didn’t mean being perfect, it meant being set apart.
I have always liked thinking of holy as being “set apart,” but I had never really thought about what being set apart looks like or really means. I think we all agree that as Christians we act differently than other people, but what actually makes us different. Does it mean that I just don’t swear? Honestly I think that is what most people think being holy boils down to. I was talking to a coworker at an old job who wanted to start going to church because he was miserable and just feels that he needs to put God back in his life. It was interesting talking to him about it because he says he didn’t used to live the way he does now. He also told me that he didn’t use to talk like he does now; he didn’t use to swear so much. It is funny how swearing seems to be the line that gets drawn in the sand that separates the holy from the unholy, but I really think the true meaning of holiness is something much deeper than simply the words that come out of our mouths.
When I think of trying to be holy, it always seems to boil down to what I am doing. If I want to be more holy, I need to do more good things. On the other hand, if I am doing a lot bad things I will feel less holy. I guess I realized that my view of holiness has always been about how I view myself and how I think other people view me. However, when I look at the reality of trying to do more good things so that I can look better in my own eyes and the eyes of the people around me, I don’t think that is holiness at all. What I find myself describing is not holiness, but pride.
Let’s get back to that Sunday school answer of what it means to be holy. To be holy means to be set apart. So if we start looking at the life of Jesus who was perfectly holy in every way I start to notice something. Jesus never seemed to care what people thought about Him. He was content to be that weirdo walking around saying things that a lot of people didn’t like. He would heal someone and then tell them not to let anyone know about it. I can’t understand why Jesus would do that. If I healed someone I think I might tell that person to go around saying what I did. One of the most frustrating things in the gospels for me to read is people criticizing Jesus. People were constantly calling him a drunkard and glutton and saying that He was just like all the tax collectors, prostitutes and other “sinners” that He hung around. Whenever those “righteous” people said those things I would wait with great anticipation for Jesus to put them in their place. I desperately wanted Jesus to stand up and tell them all they were wrong and that He was perfect. I wanted Jesus to get into a big fight about who was actually a better person and turn the tables on those stupid Pharisees who were the real sinners, but He never does. So Jesus was holy but He never seemed to focus on his image, or about what He or anyone else thought about Him. So what made Jesus holy? What set Him apart from everyone else?
I started thinking about those questions and realized that holiness has nothing to do with how I view myself, but it has everything to do with how I view the people around me. What set Jesus apart from everyone else was that He cared for and loved everyone around Him. Jesus lived in a society full of people trying to make themselves look better than the person next to them. There were people wearing blindfolds out in public so that they wouldn’t look lustfully at women, people would shout prayers from the street corners so people could hear them pray and do all other kinds of righteous acts to elevate their status in their own minds and in the minds of others, but Jesus never played that game. Jesus could have started listing off all the things that made Him so much better than all those other people, but that wasn’t what being Holy was about, that was pride. What set Jesus apart from those people was not His perfect pride, but His perfect love. It wasn’t how He viewed himself in comparison to the people around Him, it was how He viewed the people around Him with love.
So when I start thinking about what set Jesus apart and God’s call for us to “be holy,” I start thinking about what that means; what that looks like. I think it looks a lot like how Jesus lived. It means we stop looking at ourselves and start looking at the people around us. It involves letting go of those things we do to make ourselves look better and starting to love the people God puts around us. We stop caring about our image and start caring about the people Christ died to save.
John 13:35
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