....and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to day in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and went. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, sir: and went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto him, The first. (Matthew 21:28-31, KJV)
Which, of course, is the right answer for Jesus, and for us. Impetuousness or resistance or hesitation are but moments, and they can constitute--or immediately abut--instances of involuntary reaction. It would be madness to believe that such moments reveal the substance of a person's soul, yet in the Bible (and in far too much of our lives today) such flashing moments are seized upon as occasions for sanctimonious judgment.
The second way that Jesus' stories differ from the Bible at large is in the matter of grand (that is to say, life-defining) plans. Our estimations of historical figures are replete with recountings of the lives of people who achieve great and decades-consuming goals, or who constitute tragic figures in that their ambitions or visions are not realized. One might be reminded of David's intention of building a house for his God:
And it was in the heart of David my father to build an house for the name of the Lord God of Israel. And the Lord said unto David my father, Whereas it was in thine heart to build an house unto my name, thou didst well that it was in thine heart. Nevertheless thou shalt not build the house.... (1 Kings 8:17-19)
And of course the stories of the kings of Israel and Judah are filled with their ambitions for the establishment of national prominence--and filled as well with the prophet's pronouncements that this or that royal scheme to those ends was an affront to God. Hovering over all this drama is the persistent idea that practicality in such matters ought to be irrelevant--an Israel or Judah that was right with God could not come to a bad end on the battlefield.
Such were not Jesus' stories of people's ambitions--ambitions, however noble, that can lead in the pinch to those same people compromising their virtue. Moreover, it is not the nobility of the ambition (or the piety of the striver) that matters most, but rather the humility of persons in recognizing the vanity of much to which we aspire:
For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish. Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace. So likewise, whosever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14: 28-33)
"Forsaking all that he hath" can often mean forsaking what are ostensibly laudable goals. There is special difficulty in laying aside those things that--paradoxically--can seem the most self-sacrificing. Great plans; great ambitions; great worldviews; great ambitions for obtaining views of the world, of the universe, or of existence--all can be nothing more than vain graspings on our part, draining the substance out of our strivings. The "cannot be my disciple" conclusion from Jesus above is followed in the text immediately by "Salt is good, but if the salt have lost his savour...."
Any notion we have of our lives or of our ambitions is necessarily a notion that rests on our conceptions about the flow of time. We do not really know time. The "now" of the present is gone before we know it, and if we are honest with ourselves we do not know our pasts or those of anyone else. And as for the future: "Thou fool, this night thy soul will be required of thee...." (Luke 12:20).
These, then, are the two novel ideas that Jesus gives us. First, we are not the creatures of our moments, but we are rather vital, convoluting, coalescing assemblages of all that we experience and understand about ourselves. That is both the only realistic way--and the only humble way--for us to view ourselves. Second, we do not understand our existence. Much less do we have warrant to effectively stand over our existence and pronounce upon it, which is really what we are doing when we speak of religion, regardless of endless utterances about total depravity and unmerited grace. If there is anything "unmerited" that God gives us, it is something beyond our understanding. To God we owe glory, not sweat-stained treatises about his glory.
Or to put it more succinctly: We are suspended between an earthly existence that we do not understand, and a heavenly existence that we do not understand. Whenever we contend otherwise, we are making godlings of ourselves--whichever realm we are describing. Jesus speaks to Nicodemus in John 3 of "earthly things" and of "heavenly things," but it is foolishness to neglect the fact that "earthly things" in the conversation does not mean "understandable things":
Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth. . . . If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?
To be born again (that is--crucially--as the scholars tell us, "born from above") is to be born to a cognizance of an existence that launches away from earth and is crushed down by heaven. The "again-ness" is "again-and-again-ness," as assuredly as "take up the cross" means not to dare execution in the end, but to be executed all the way--as assuredly as Jesus through his life--through all eternity as we might understand it--bore the horror of his execution.
To be "born from above" is not a one-time thing, or a sacramental thing, or a grace-alone thing. It is the only thing of any proper human existence, proper human existence being continually--or as continually as may be--characterized by a new-born-ish exposure to every unfolding development. We know nothing of earth or heaven (if we are honest enough to recognize that we know not of their boundaries and therefore of their totalities), and when we recognize that we know nothing of earth and heaven, we are as likely as ever to grasp in innocent wonder at the proper things, and to leave the foul things alone.
Only when we feel at home anywhere are we likely to construct ourselves the shelters in which we crouch from the light of God. We will do almost anything, it is true, to avoid being launched out of our cowering-places into the crushing light of heaven. The burst of light of new wonder--analogous to the burst of light to the newborn--is the narrow path to the light from above.
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