Living Jesus or believing Paul?

I was thinking last night, pondering how to live instead of just believe. It's not really an easy task, and it's not like there is much of a roadmap for how to do that, since the "Christian" culture that I live in doesn't really take too kindly to changing it's status quo of belief Christianity. Which is quite a problem for me, the religion student, taking a 1 Corinthians class and learning all about how Paul's goal for the church is to become a redical subculture with an entirely different way of life than the culture at large.

And then this question came to me: What if instead of being so busy trying to live as Paul (or Moses, by whom I really mean the OT law) command/call us to we lived the way that Jesus lived and let Paul (and Moses) stand as reminders to help us live Jesus better?
What I mean is that in Christianity today the focus is all about personal holiness, living a pure and righteous life free from sin and vice and full of virtue and goodness. Not sinning, in otherwords. First of all, that kind of life only considers sins of comission, and not sins of omission. It's all about being a better person; which is why you get so many people accused of having a "holier-than-thou" attitude. People think that if they only have a speck in their eye while it is obvious that all their brothers have planks, they are certainly on the narrow path that leads to life.

And I wonder what Jesus would have thought of that. Jesus who healed the sick (I don't), Jesus who touched the lepers (I don't), Jesus who made blind men see (I don't), Jesus who hung out with prostitutes and tax-collectors and sinners (I don't), Jesus who cared for the poor in spirit and those who mourn and the meek (I'm not sure that I do). And I can't help but think that Shane Claiborne's Jesus would be much more focused on those things that Jesus actually did than trying to live a pure and holy sinless life full of righteousness (which, by the way, he also did - andI don't).

And in all this I though that I had something, where we really needed to put the focus of CHRISTianity back on Jesus and take it off of Paul (or Moses).
Then this morning as I was reading Matthew, I came across a really troublesome passage that I don't think I've ever heard preached before (impressive for someone who has spent 20 years in the church and maybe missed 20 Sundays. Look at me, aren't I holy?), and can say with some certainty that I've heard flat out contradicted before.
It's also interesting that it's a highlighter moment, where we have highlighted the part we liked so we didn't have to really think about the rest.

Mt. 5, v 17-20 (NIV).
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to ablish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven."

How often do we look to v. 17 and say this is what Jesus came for! And completely ignore the rest of the passage? Is it because we don't know what to do with it? Or is it because we don't like what it says?
While of course I want to point out that I'm only 20 and know next to nothing about the Bible, it sure looks like Jesus is pointing to OT law, and even the prophets, and saying: "If you don't live up to these, at least as well as the Pharisees (ironically, whose hearts are in the wrong place with their "holier-than-thou" attitudes, that brood of vipers), you are screwed and will not go to heaven (the chief fear of belief Christianity, which is more or less fire insurance)!
And if you'll permit a little eisegesis here, there were some Pharisees (or those less than Pharisees) who weren't afraid to say to Jesus "All these I have kept" (Mt. 19, v. 20). While some students in my NT World class find it unfathomable that someone could say that they have kept the whole law, people (the Pharisees) did it, and on a regular basis.
And, if you'll permit a little blatant plagiarism from Rich Mullins / Shane Claiborne on p. 99 in The Irresistible Revolution (who also provided the "highlighter moment"), that's the whole point of the rich young ruler story - is that you can keep the whole law; but you still lack selling all you have, giving to the poor, and following (now to think back to Rob Bell, who in Velvet Elvis points out that to follow a rabbi meant to imitate him in every way, going so far as to quite literally walk in his footsteps) Jesus.

You can talk about Paul and faith and purity and holiness and righteousness and whatever is good, pure, lovely, noble, trustworthy, etc., all day long; and you can go on and on about how you have followed and kept the whole law your entire life, even honoring your father and mother since birth (I certainly haven't!); but at the end of it, what is the point?

Faith, without works, is dead. To stretch a little: Faith in Jesus, without the works and imitation of Jesus, is dead.

And yes, before you all say it, I know that I have made it seem that I think that Paul doesn't advocate imitating Jesus at all; I know this is not the case. My point is more that we only look at / preach / use / talk about / live the parts of Paul that I mentioned above, instead of focusing first on imitating Jesus and THEN on holiness (which you'd think that imitating Jesus would be holiness...). Thus the point of the whole argument, that we should imitate Jesus FIRST, and then Paul (and or Moses) can come after to remind us how to imitate Jesus better.

Chesterton and Claiborne

The quote that has been running through my head for quite a while is from something by G.K. Chesterton that I read in Great Ideas: "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried."

As I look around me, and even at my own life, I realize just how true that really is. I see people unwilling to do things because they are too weak emotionally, or to unimaginative, or too steeped in the rhetoric of the "Christianity" that they grew up in to make their faith their own - or beyond that, to make it something lived out, not just believed.

I've been reading Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution (who influences much of the rest of this post) and it is a marvelous vision of what Jesus life lived out in today's world looks like, instead of what we are all too content to do and just believe in Jesus life. He talks about how easy it is to have your whole life together before truly encountering Jesus. He shows you how Jesus will take your life and screw it all up.

It's way to easy to be cool, to have your group of friends that you hang out with, to be a "good little Christian" without really doing anything different than anyone in the world does it; except that you abstain from pre-marital sex and alcohol or drug abuse, and maybe if you are really good you'll stay away from questionable media influences and keep from swearing. Really, how hard is that?

But is that really what it looks like to "take up your cross daily"? It's just like what Shane says, taking from Jesus - that's just what the world does. They all form their little "in-groups" and have their social mores and rules and norms that they follow, and ostracize you for not living up to that, and consider themselves morally and socially superior.

What if we took the life of Jesus out of the academic and out of the once- or twice-a-week church setting or out of the realm of belief and took him primarily into our social world?

What would this look like when it comes to the uncool, the losers, the people that no one likes to hang out with? Could trying to live Jesus life as our own mean that we continually love the poeple that we look at and see as weak, the ones that we have started to leave behind because all they ever do is complain? Or the ones that do nothing but criticize those around them? Or the ones that have habits and struggles and downfalls that are below such mature Christians as we are?

What if we took this out of the setting of what we have made our everyday lives and did something far more "radical"? What if we took what to us now is "radical" and made it ordinary? What if we started to really do what Jesus said to do, and that being caring for orphans, for widows, for the poor, for the sick, for the imprisoned, for the broken, for the weak, for the immature (?), for the people that no one else cares about? What if we slowly tried to work them into our social lives?

I really don't know exactly what this looks like, beyond the picture of it I see in The Irresistible Revolution. Or beyond Hobo Jueves. Beyond that, I really don't even know if I have the strength to try to live that life. I may be too steeped in a different Christianity, and I may be tied too tightly to my own "emotional stability" to try to break into living a new life, a different life.

To go from believing Jesus to living Jesus.
That's what people find so hard, and that's why they give up.