Could You Live Like Jesus for a Year?

Answer: No.

“WWJD?” while it looks nice on a bracelet and is well-intended, is the wrong question. The right question is, “What would Jesus have me do?” Attempts to “live like Jesus” immediately involve us in all sorts of absurdities if, by that, we mean “attempt to re-enact the life of Christ in the 21st Century.” For instance, we neither can, nor should, attempt to live as Jesus did, under the constraints of the Mosaic law as he chose to place himself. We should not, as Gentile Christians, be keeping kosher, circumcising our children, or be observing the liturgical feasts of Israel, if we are binding ourselves to do it out of a wrong-headed notion that we are “doing as Jesus would do” and pinning our hopes of salvation on it. That is precisely what the Judaizers of the ancient Church thought and it is precisely what the Holy Spirit (aka “the Spirit of Jesus”) immediately taught the Church not to do. The paradox of Jesus’ life (a life full of paradox) is that he stands at the cusp between the old covenant which could not save and the new covenant in which alone is salvation. He was “born of a woman, born under the law” in order to deliver us from the letter of the law (which cannot save and which cannot be kept) and to give us the Spirit by whom alone we can fulfill the demands of the law.

Nobody since 70 AD has been able to “live like Jesus for a year” because every year of Jesus’ life he would have gone to the Temple. That’s rather problematic for us. But the whole point of the New Testament–spelled out in Romans, Galatians and Hebrews–is that these ritual requirements are no longer necessary and are, in fact, a danger to the soul if you observe them as a sort of alternate route of salvation around Jesus. It is, I suppose, possible for a Jewish Christian to observe them as “family custom” so long as they are not treated as salvific. And they can have a catechetical value (which is, after all, why they were instituted). But it’s particularly silly for Gentile Christians (who were never bound by them in the first place) to place themselves under such requirements and start talking as though, by this “imitation of Christ” they are somehow closer to the brass ring of salvation than if they had not. Galatians could not possibly be clearer about this.

The funny thing is: I’m the law-bound Papist who is, as I am constantly reminded by various separated brethren, tragically ignorant of the grace of Christ and enslaved to salvation by works. So how come I find myself, not for the first time, having to tell a Bible-believing Christian one of the most elementary truths of the Christian faith–that we are saved by grace and not by works of the law?