If you come to a good thing through a benign thing, is the final result any less good
?[1]
- Adults used to add sugar to medicine for children (before pharmaceutical companies began making it taste like bubble gum).
- Lo-cal, lo-salt, and lo-fat foods are made to look and taste like their unhealthy cousins.
- Teachers reward students for doing their homework and getting good grades.
- Bosses give flex time, vacations, bonuses, etc to improve performance.
If I enjoy selling widgets because someone offered me a good paycheck and lots of vacation time, do I sell any fewer widgets?
If I got an A in calculus because the teacher promised the class a pizza party, do I understand calculus any less?
If I eat only lo-salt pretzels and am equally satisfied, is there any qualitative difference when I reach the bottom of the bag?
If I love Jesus because I was first attracted to statues or steeples or beads or bells or hymns or fonts or baptisteries, am I any less saved?
The point: Does something "not Jesus" obviate "Jesus"?
No, I don't think so.
They can instead be enriching complements.
Sure, any incentive can interfere with a goal, but that's true of everything.
[2013-02-26]
I have a question....
Why did Jesus say "pick up your cross and follow me" before he was crucified?[2]
Was the cross an Aramaic metaphor? Or is it an anachronism? (and so probably added after the crucifixion).
If it wasn't a phrase familiar to his listeners, it makes no sense.
I understand the Romans often forced condemned criminals to carry the cross-beam to the place of execution, so this would have been a familiar scene and it's entirely possible Jesus' words were a metaphor meaning something like "the burden is unpleasant and lonely and may not end well in this life."
There are thousands upon thousands of colloquial expressions common today that 2,000 years from now will mean nothing. Indeed, even hundred or a dozen years from now.
(IMHO the fact that it was included indicates the original writers and editors - who certainly were aware of the anachronism - held accuracy to be more important than the immediate sense, which is not a trivial observation. Any change made - even for gender or racial or theological sensitivity - can remove a detail that might later add insight. If the text can't survive scrutiny or we don't have the courage and perspicacity to account for changing sensibilities, maybe we ought to forget about it altogether.
That is a very real challenge, and it applies to any creative work. If you're not willing to approach it in its own context and on its own merits, don't bother.I'm most definitely not saying there's no place for modernized translations, adaptations, etc, only that those ought to be steps back toward the source, not the end of the discovery.)
[2013-03-04]
[1]
Even tougher: If you come to a good thing through a bad thing, is the final result any less good?
No, I don't think so, though the likelihood of that happening IMHO is much less.
[2]
The full context is:
Luke 14:25-33
25 Now large crowds were accompanying Jesus, and turning to them he said, 26 "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. 27 Whoever does not carry his own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 28 For which of you, wanting to build a tower, doesn't sit down first and compute the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? 29 Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish the tower, all who see it will begin to make fun of him. 30 They will say, 'This man began to build and was not able to finish!' 31 Or what king, going out to confront another king in battle, will not sit down first and determine whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? 32 If he cannot succeed, he will send a representative while the other is still a long way off and ask for terms of peace. 33 In the same way therefore not one of you can be my disciple if he does not renounce all his own possessions. (NETFree)
RE: 'Take up your cross' - Good point- even if the people of Jesus' day were familiar with a person carrying a cross, it doesn't seem obvious (to me) that they would have considered the act one of self-sacrifice.
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