One of the first things the Army taught me was how to use a map and compass to find my way around. On foot, a couple of the basic skills include knowing how to use a compass to "shoot an azimuth" and knowing how to use your pace-count to measure distance. All of this seemed fairly straight forward in the classroom. In practice, it was much more difficult than advertised. I first put my training into practice during a field training exercise at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The task appeared simple. The instructor handed us a sheet of paper with a list of points to be visited in order, with only a direction and distance from the previous point to guide the way. The real terrain was much more challenging than the classroom or the parking lot where we had practiced our skills. Dense underbrush, fallen trees, thick stands of pine forest, gullies, shear cliffs and other obstacles not only made it impossible to go directly from point A to point B, they often made it impossible to keep an accurate pace count or even to see the way ahead. Moving forward sometimes meant going left to go right and using landmarks just a few feet away to guide your movements. The path from point A to point B sometimes zig-zagged more than Jeffy's wanderings in the Family Circus. How wonderful it was when I first held a GPS that showed me distance and direction to the next way point no matter how much I had to maneuver around obstacles!

I thought about this experience recently when I read a discussion of the role of the Sermon on the Mount and the other absolutes in Jesus' teaching. Some argue that Jesus' teachings simply highlight the impossibility of truly virtuous behavior in this life. They are meant, according to the argument, to drive us to despair of our own goodness and thereby repent and believe in God's grace. At the other end of the spectrum, some hold them to be taken at face value as absolute moral imperatives and a design for the restructuring of society. Both points of view contain a kernel of truth along with some serious mistakes.

The world that we live in, gripped by sin and with real limits on what is possible, is a lot like that land navigation course. It's often impossible to go straight from point A to point B. Even with the best of intentions, we are constrained by what is possible, by conflicting requirements of the moment and by our imperfect judgments about how to proceed. The pessimists are right that we cannot find a perfect, sin-free way through the forest and we depend upon the grace of God. The optimists are right, however, in pointing to the absolute will of God as the azimuth that we should be following. We are not just wandering through the forest, taking whatever path seems pleasant or easy. Like the "Blues Brothers," we are on a mission from God. Whatever the moral terrain before us might require at the moment, our ultimate objective is to align ourselves and our world more fully with the azimuth that God has shown us. Jesus' absolute ethical demands shine as a light in the forest, helping us keep our bearings and readjust our course as we navigate the ethical terrain of the real world.

Filed under: Articles

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.