Orienting Principles: Four Priorities for the Imitation of Christ
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from The Imitation of Christ in the Gospel of Luke: Growing in Christlike Love for God and Neighbor
At some point, each of us has experienced “supermarket amnesia.” We leave home with a short list of groceries we need to pick up: milk, bread, cereal, and a few apples. But we walk into the local SuperMegaFood Center, and we’re overwhelmed with thousands of varieties of food. Among the dozens of fruits in the produce section, there are ten or more varieties of apples. On the cereal aisle, there are more colors, sizes, and textures than we can count. And so the amnesia sets in; overwhelmed by too many options, we forget why we even came to the store.
Growth toward spiritual maturity can seem this way at times. If we are constantly adding new spiritual priorities to our lives—be more joyful, more generous, more kind, more compassionate, more holy, more pure, more devoted, more disciplined—we can become so frustrated that we don’t make any progress at all. Jesus seems to recognize the need for a realistic set of spiritual priorities when he summarizes all of God’s commandments under two headings: love God with your whole self, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matt. 22:35–40; Mark 12:28–31; Luke 10:25–28). Jesus does not mean that these are the only commandments that matter, so that others can be ignored. Rather, he intends us to view every other command through this twofold lens, so that every one of God’s laws, applied in each of life’s circumstances, comes into its proper focus.
Drawing on Jesus’ wisdom, we need a practical approach to imitating his example. On the one hand, this approach needs to be clear and simple, so that it is able to reorient us when we are overwhelmed and drifting from true priorities. On the other, our approach must be profound and comprehensive, so that it can account for the complexities of reflecting Jesus’ character in all the details of daily life. The image that helps me to envision such an approach is a compass. On the one hand, it is simple, based on only four cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west. On the other, it allows for an infinite variety of applications. Correctly combining those four directions, we can move from any point on the face of our planet to any other point. Sometimes we go north; sometimes we go north-northwest at a bearing of 332 degrees; and sometimes we go due east for twelve miles, then southwest at a bearing of 218 degrees for forty miles. It all depends on where we are starting from, and where we need to go. But how we get there never changes—always through a combination of north, south, east, and west.
My study of Luke’s Gospel suggests that when it comes to the imitation of Christ, there are four cardinal directions, four major principles that oriented Jesus’ life and that should orient ours as well:
● Passion for the glory of God
● Passion for the good of other people
● Willing denial of self
● Patient endurance of hardship
As we consider these four principles, several observations are in order. First, while Luke never lists these principles for us, they do provide a helpful way of organizing themes that are prominent in his depiction of Jesus. Second, as later chapters will demonstrate in more detail, each of these topics is a major feature of Jesus’ teaching. We will not be surprised, then, to see that Jesus embodies the same principles he requires of others. Third, these four principles provide us with a Christlike orientation to all of life, describing how we are to relate to God, to other people, to ourselves, and to our circumstances. These distinctions provide guidelines for the chapters that follow, in which we will take up each principle in turn, asking how Luke portrays Jesus’ relationship to God and how we might imitate his example, how Luke portrays Jesus’ interactions with and attitudes toward other people and how we might imitate his example, and so forth. Finally, while these four orienting principles may be distinguished, they cannot ultimately be separated. Thus, in various chapters we will often return to the same texts to view them from different perspectives. In particular, we will examine Luke’s passion narrative multiple times, as Jesus’ last hours represent the culmination of each of these principles in his own life, and the most powerful call for us to imitate the example of our Savior.
It is, of course, possible to sit in the comfort of our own homes studying maps and reading websites about how to operate a compass. But the whole point of having a compass is to go somewhere, to pick a destination and travel toward it with the confidence that you will not lose your way. As we more deeply explore Luke’s portrayal of Jesus’ example, and what it would look like for us to reflect that example in our own lives, it is my prayer that two things would happen: first, that we will go somewhere, making progress toward the goal of likeness to Christ; and second, that we would come to appreciate more than ever the truth that when we walk in the footsteps of our Savior, we are never in danger of losing our way.
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