Follow Jesus Christ

Imagine that before you stands a being that knows everything about you. It sees not only your deeds but also what kind of person you could become under different circumstances. It knows your whole life — past, present, and even what has not yet happened. It looks at you and notices things you do not see yourself: a hidden tendency toward greed, fear, betrayal that will surface if life turns out a certain way. Until that happens you consider yourself a good person. But it knows that under the right conditions a dark side will emerge that you don’t even suspect. And it’s not that you have already sinned. The point is that within you there is the possibility of sin — an imperfection that one day will certainly be tested by life.

Imagine a small sin, a tiny bit of code in your program that quietly lies somewhere at the bottom of your subconscious. It will inevitably run at some point in life, because in the end every fragment of the inner program of personality will be executed and tested. And this is not simply malicious code: it is part of who you are. Even if the cause of that code was not you but DNA, circumstances, or unconscious errors of the mind — how does Christianity deal with this problem of human imperfection and sinfulness? The usual view is that God’s forgiveness extends only to sins a person has actually committed. What about potential sins, the unknown side of personality? Are hidden character flaws miraculously cut away like a surgical excision even before they manifest in reality and are repented of? Or does God simply not notice them?

Christianity has known from an early stage that anyone can fall and sin, even a saint. Contrary to many simplifications within Christianity — “believe once and you’re saved forever” — the truth has always been more complex. God does not look at Christians through rose-colored glasses and does not ignore the sins of his children who have faith. Even the sacrifice on Golgotha is not a blanket guarantee of salvation: redemption by blood opens the way to salvation, but salvation is accomplished through the transformation of the person. The cross removes the obstacle, but the path still must be walked. In other words: Christ’s sacrifice makes a new life possible, but it does not replace that life. This is what sensible, responsible Christianity says about the essence of the problem.

So what happens to the large and small “specks” of sin and imperfection that lie at the bottom of human consciousness? Ideally, in the perspective of time and eternity they should no longer be there. But how does one repent for what one has not yet done? The resolution of this contradiction is that sin is not the primary problem. It is the second problem. The primary problem is the unwillingness to grow and change. Spiritual growth wrought by God is the very mechanism for locating and working through a person’s sins and imperfections. Going further, growth and imperfection are inseparable phenomena, like a dialectical unity of opposites. Imperfection, metaphorically speaking, is a dark space that is filled with light in the process of spiritual growth guided by God. The imperfect material world and the imperfect person are, in fact, part of God’s original design: they are given the opportunity to move toward perfection under God’s guidance, being freed from sin.

We humans are so vulnerable, so imperfect; we so need grace and mercy. We do not know ourselves well enough, and we are periodically shaken by inner sins and contradictions. That is precisely why Jesus so often pointed to the necessity of mercy: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” A person needs God’s mercy every day of his life, and God bestows that mercy despite the contradictions and internal wars that tear a person apart from within. This is what Jesus meant when he said the sun shines on everyone alike. For God, a person’s many sins and imperfections are not the central problem; they do not separate a person from God in the way conservative theologians imagine. The main problem is the refusal to change and to undergo spiritual transformation, which God so patiently offers and brings about.

In Jesus’ teaching the Kingdom of God — that is, the salvation of the soul — is likened to the growth of a plant: first the stem, then the ear, then the full grain. The process is clearly visible there. For Jesus, growth means a deepening of love, an expansion of mercy, release from fear, and from the many “specks” of imperfection lodged in consciousness. Spiritual growth is nonlinear, impulsive, and resists neat definitions. Modern psychology confirms that habit change is nonlinear. There is regression. There are leaps. There are periods of stagnation. Growth is more a spiral than a straight line. Qualitative inner transformation is usually accompanied by the disappearance or sharp weakening of gross forms of sin. Yet there are subtle passions: pride, vanity, judgmentalism, spiritual self-assurance. In the process of growth a person begins to see subtler inner disorders. There is an interesting regularity in spiritual transformation: objectively a person becomes better, but subjectively he can feel worse. Why? Because he begins to see things he didn’t notice before — those “specks,” those hard places of imperfection in his mind and heart.

Refusal to change is ruinous for anyone. The prodigal son returns, the tax collector repents, the thief on the cross turns. But if a person persists and reverses moral reality, he stops seeing what needs to be changed. Such a stance leads to stasis and to calling evil good. Jesus constantly insists on the new — being born again, new wine, a new covenant, new life, a new commandment, a new creation. Taken together, these passages form a coherent line: eternal life is connected with inward renewal, not only with the forgiveness of sins. Many Christians will object: “We have already been born again, we are already saved, we are already in Christ, everything is accomplished.” In the Gospels and among the apostles, the new birth is the beginning of the way, not its end. The fruit appears only over time. Consciousness expands only over time. Jesus pointed to perfection as the goal, which can be reached only over time and through the action of spiritual grace from above. Time will tell.