Not

Many people think of all religion (but perhaps Christianity most of all) as a long list of things not to do. To these people, Christianity is all about the thou-shalt-nots. Not too surprisingly, this group includes a fair number of Christians--people who ought to know better. Just as Christianity is not really about what we do, it is also not about what we do not do. Christianity is about what we are. But, as we have explored elsewhere, being will almost always lead to doing--or, in this case, not doing.


One of the first words we learn is no. It allows us to assert our autonomy: our parents tell us to do something, we say "no"--and we have distanced ourselves from their rule. In the Lord's prayer, we are asking to be distanced from temptation. In our lives, we want to be distanced from anything that we see as a threat. Yet, as much as we might be eager to use the word, we are usually pretty loathe to hear it. We do not like to be told no. Perhaps it all goes back to feeling that we have lost our autonomy, that we have been told to give up our "power." Maybe we just really want to do the thing we have been told not to do.


Call it human nature, call it original sin, call it the id; whatever it is, it pushes us toward doing the kinds of things that we have been chastened not to do. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ explains that the action is not necessary for the sin to occur: we can commit adultery without touching another person if we have experienced lust in our hearts. We can commit murder without killing someone if we harbor anger in our hearts. I bring this up because most people have not killed another human being. I like to think that most people have not committed adultery or stolen or set up idols. Yet, I am fairly certain that there are very few who have not done any of these things in their hearts.

Our culture does not readily embrace the negative. Because we are so immersed in the culture, it might be hard to wrap our minds around this idea--we probably cannot easily understand that negative does not have to be perceived as a negative. We assume that a negative must be seen as negative. We have to understand that we are juxtaposing two different connotations of the word: on the one hand, we are talking about negative as it applies to the function in a sentence, to the idea that we are changing the direction of a command; on the other hand we are talking about negative as a way that we perceive something, to our feelings about the thing.


Concisely, negative does not have to be negative. In fact, we should actually embrace negative, in some situations. In math, a negative represents a distance, just as we noted that the word no can represent the distancing of ourselves from an authority. If we grasp this idea, that the negative can be seen as a distancing, then we should easily see that the negative can be a positive thing. We should embrace the negative when it is a part of our armor against sin. We need the negative in our lives, just as negative space is necessary in art. In art, negative space is the area that is not the thing we are drawing--it is the part that is not the thing itself.


Growing up, I was teased by my uncles and my father about being careful not to eat the hole of the donut. It was a bit of nonsense, a way to have fun with a four-year-old, but it addresses that same idea of negative space, and the idea of negative space is important to consider. In simple terms, everything in a drawing is the thing or not the thing. We tend to do that with the tenets of Christianity: we either do the thing or we do not do the thing. We murder or we do not murder. We lie or we do not lie. Christ, however, admonishes us that reality is more complicated than simple black and white.


Many people feel that the world would be a better place if the Ten Commandments were posted in every school and every public building. Maybe it would. However, I do believe that there are more important ideas with which we should be concerned. And I think that it would be more important to have these things posted in our hearts than on a wall. Instead of limiting ourselves to the basics of Mosaic law, I think we should address ourselves more to the words of Christ. I believe that we should spend more of our time and energy focused on being a Christian than on not doing things from a list of prohibitions.

I guess what I am trying to say is that we have to decide whether we are going to define ourselves by what we are or by what we are not, by what we do or by what we do not do. If we live a life defined by not, then we live a life of fear and loathing; if we live a life defined instead by what we are, then we are free to follow Christ--following Christ is about doing and being. If we choose to follow Christ, we will adhere to the Ten Commandments, even attempting to live as Christ admonished us to live in His Sermon on the Mount. If we choose to focus on the Ten Commandments first, we will miss the truth that is Christ.

I would never advocate that we should not live according to the Law; however, we have to realize that Christ must come first and that everything else will fall into place after Him. Many people see Christianity as a list of prohibitions, but if we are truly following Christ, we are living a positive life--not a life of negatives.