Christ's Calling Card.

Image © by Brian E. Faulkner

​Writer Tim Challies is a blogger I read several times a week, and this morning he did not fail in providing stimulating spiritual content: a timely thought about how “we are mirrors that reflect something of Christ. We gaze upon him,” Challies writes, “and as we do so some of his character, some of his attributes, some of his loveliness is reflected in us.”

To enlarge his point, Challies quotes J.R. Miller, a late 19th, early 20th century American pastor and writer (whose insights have been described as “spiritual diamonds”) by offering Miller’s image of light gleaming off a puddle of muddy water. You can see the stars reflected in it at night and the blue sky, passing clouds and bright sun during the day -- perhaps even a spray of wildflowers. Miller suggests, in a devotional excerpt presented in the blog post, that others “see our character, watch our conduct, observe our disposition and temper and all the play of our lives, and as they behold us they perceive the image of Christ in us.” 

Or not.  Miller’s words sound more like a caution to me, just as Pastor Scott spoke to me about my sin this past Sunday morning, the murky reality hidden beneath the bright surface of my life (how did he know about the unkind words I had just spoken to someone that very morning?!).
    
All this reminds me of the rich young ruler described in both Mark and Luke, whom Taylor Caldwell introduces to us from an extra-Biblical perspective in her historical novel, Dear and Glorious Physician. Lucanus, a Greek slave who, by adoption into the family of a Roman nobleman, finds himself -- after decades of devoted medical practice among the Empire’s poor -- in the stateroom of a man of “learning and power and influence and wealth” whose ship was “inlaid with ebony and pearl and gilt.” The dying man, perhaps only in his 20s or 30s, has “lain like one stricken by a mortal illness for two months,” the ship’s captain tells Lucanus. “He has not moved from his bed. is dying moment by moment.”

Lucanus concludes that the man suffers from an illness of the spirit, and upon examining him, observes tears seeping from beneath shut eyelids. When the man finally is able to talk, he describes a “Jewish rabbi who was teaching the people in the dust of the city and the byways” and performing great miracles, perhaps the same individual Lucanus has been seeking and had disparaged for most of his adult life. His patient, whose name was Hilell (meaning “He has praised”), tells of encountering the supposed Messiah along a roadside near Jerusalem. As the rich young man steps from his chariot and approaches a small cluster of people surrounding Jesus, he is aghast at how “poor and humble” the man appears, “as of a beggar.” 

“Could this be he of whom (the people) speak?” he asks himself, “the man who had so ignited Herod?” He looks askance at the ragged and barefoot children standing in the background. Their mothers, “poor women in rough striped garments with jars on their shoulders,” thrust their offspring toward the rabbi, who welcomes them.

“Hillel opened his eyes,” Caldwell writes, and Lucanus saw that they were full of torment as the man continues his story.

“I stepped down from my chariot and approached Him, and my servants called to the people to open a passage for me. He watched me approach and smiled at me like one recognizing a brother … and waited. My servants shouted to ‘make way for Hilell ben Hamram, who is great in Israel, for he has the rule of a town and his family is renowned and has much gold.’”

Hearing this, the women and children stepped back in fear. The rabbi gazed at the man in silence, who was close enough to Jesus that he could have reached out and touched him.

And then came the familiar question we recognize from the Gospels:

“Good master,” Hilell said, “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

After an exchange in which each presents his views about keeping the Commandments, Christ lowers the boom on his wealthy questioner after a period of silence, during which Ms. Caldwell’s character observes to himself how unlearned the rabbi appears and how vulgar the sound of his accent is. 

At last, Jesus responds: 

“You lack one thing,” the Lord tells him. “Sell all that you have, for you are rich, and give it to the poor, for then you shall have treasures in heaven.”

Yikes! You’d think the man had been asked to give up everything he owned, disclaim his privileged position and then follow behind this raggedy beggar, accompanying the very people and walking in the very dust he disdained!

“I told myself this was madness,” Hilell reflects in the novel. So, he returns to his chariot and drives off, for as Scripture says, “he became very sorrowful because he was rich.” Yet, he had just looked incalculable richness in the eye and turned away empty.  

The rich young man depicted in the Bible and described with some creative license by Taylor Caldwell asked Jesus a critical life’s question but did not comprehend the revolutionary nature of the Lord’s response: to abandon whatever he valued most and follow Christ. He was blinded by his own wealth and an image of personal perfection (having kept all the Commandments “from my youth”) and so turned his back on a life that could have sparkled with meaning and purpose well beyond any further wealth he may have accumulated.

From time to time, I see an attractive reflection in a pond or puddle and wonder if this is God’s way of speaking to me. If preoccupied with some Earthly task or concern, I can totally miss Christ’s calling card and walk on by with little thought, but sometimes I am blessed to stop. And wonder. What if I had stopped and listened to what the Lord had to say to me way back when?  How would my life have played out had I not been so insistent, so entrenched, with doing things my own way? How differently would my flower have unfolded? How immeasurably more rewarding (not necessarily in the checkbook sense) would my life, and even the lives of those I love, have been had I heard -- and heeded -- Christ’s message back when I wanted nothing more than nothing at all to do with God?
   
Hilell was driven close to madness by missing out on what Oswald Chambers calls “the compelling purpose of God,” which we share with Jesus: the fulfillment of His purpose on this Earth and not our own. We, too, are to do the will of the Father, and from time to time, God reminds us of this truth by presenting us with a momentary reflection of his Son here on Earth and of the realization that it’s far better to mirror the life Christ offers to us than dying moment by moment as we drift along on winds of our own making.

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