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All in
For I tell
you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you
will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:20)
There’s a
kind of slavish righteousness that involves keeping the rules, dotting the ‘i’s
and crossing the ‘t’s. Too often, this produces an odious self-righteousness
for which legalistic religion is rightly denounced.
On the other
hand, there is the ‘all in’ righteousness of Jesus, in which one’s head,
heart and whole being are given to a just and loving purpose. Purity of heart
is what he calls it in the Sermon on the Mount.
I don’t think
this is something we can summon from the resources of our ever-wavering wills.
It comes as a gift, a grace when love fills the heart and we desire only what
love wants, which is to say what God wants and wills for us.
Such moments
are fleeting because our wills, especially in this consumeristic culture, are
always craving more of something we imagine will fulfill our hearts and still
the nagging fear that we are missing out. We seek our fulfillment in a million
places that do not and cannot satisfy the soul.
But moments
of awareness come, like when I look at my beloved, my heart at rest and peace,
knowing that no matter what the years will bring, sickness or health, comfort
or hardship, I am ‘all in,’ we are ‘all in,’ totally given, not from a sense of
obligation but because our hearts know that it is enough that we are together.
The loving
awareness of being ‘all in,’ totally given for love’s own sake, is the
fulfillment for which human hearts are shaped.
St. Bernard
of Clairvaux, great apostle of love that he is, wrote of four stages or
movements of love. We begin our lives loving ourselves for our own selfish
sake. With time and prayer and maturation, we might come to love God for God’s
gifts to us. But this is still a utilitarian love.
With years
and the reception of many divine graces, we may begin to love God simply
because God is God and God is love, no matter what good or evil comes to us.
Finally, for a blessed few, I suppose, we come to love ourselves not for what
we have accomplished or managed to avoid, but for the sake of the precious
expression of divine love that we are, for the love living in our souls.
The righteousness
of being ‘all in,’ loving for no other reason than for love’s own sake, is the
exceeding righteousness Jesus awakens in our hearts as we contemplate the love
he is for us and all creation.
We taste the
sweetness of God’s kingdom and the blessed righteousness for which we are made,
when love rises from our depths, filling us with the awareness that becoming this
divine love is the one thing that truly matters.
David L. Miller
