You Do You...but like Christ!

The Lenten Quest for Authenticity

Lent is a season of renewal, a time to refocus on our Christian identity and recommit ourselves to following Christ more faithfully. At the beginning of Lent, our guest author, Br. John Church OP, challenges us to consider what it truly means to be an authentic disciple. As we begin this journey, may his words inspire us to seek deeper transformation in the weeks ahead!

What Kind of Person Is the Good Disciple?

Luke’s Gospel (Lk 6:39-45) provides us with some of Jesus’ most memorable images: warnings about the blind leading the blind, logs and specks in the eye, trees and their fruit. They come at the end of Jesus’ famous ‘Sermon on the Plain’ in St Luke’s Gospel, which we have been reading these past few Sundays. And all these striking images touch on what is, I think, a peculiarly modern concern: authenticity. With words about leadership, hypocrisy, and the good heart, Jesus poses the question: what makes for an authentic disciple?

The Modern Concern for Authenticity

Our society widely celebrates whatever it means to be ‘authentic’. Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, has observed our culture’s very distinctive notion of authenticity. The basic idea is that each person has his or her own way of living out their humanity, and authenticity comes from discovering one’s own unique path.

As Taylor puts it: “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s.” As one popular psychologist put it “The greatest act of courage is to be and to own all of who you are…”

Is Personal Choice Enough?

I remember well a conversation with a good friend the summer before I started my noviciate as a Dominican. This friend is a convinced atheist, and as I shared with him my intentions to join the Order, I was expecting (and quietly hoping) to be told ‘you want to consecrate your life to God? You must be mad!’, and then a lively conversation would follow. But instead, I received lots of very well meant affirmation and encouragement – “if that’s what you want to do, that’s great”. And there was clearly a kindness in this, a good will that belongs to friendship. But something was missing too.

Our culture, and perhaps my generation is particular, is deeply reticent about ever challenging someone’s life choices or way of living. And it is because Taylor’s notion of authenticity is so deeply embedded. The only thing that really matters is that you live your life in conformity with how you feel. The ‘authentic person’ lives what they discover to be the ‘true self’ within.

Brené Brown, the hugely popular podcaster and author, captures just this when she says: authenticity is about “the choice to show up and be real. The choice to let our true selves be seen.” But is that all there is to authenticity? How should our inner convictions relate to how we live and behave?

A Tree and Its Fruit: What Comes from Within

This question is at the heart of this passage of Luke’s Gospel, especially with the image of a tree and its fruit: “For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit.” Jesus is speaking about how our interior dispositions relate to our words and actions. He is saying that what comes out of a person reveals what is inside. Sirach speaks about this too in our first reading, using that same image: “The fruit discloses the cultivation of a tree; so the expression of a thought discloses the cultivation of a person’s mind” (Sir 27:6).

The basic point is that the good disciple shows an integrity of life. There is a harmony between what is within and without: “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good”. But is this integrity the same thing as Taylor’s notion of ‘authenticity’?

Christian Authenticity: More Than Just Self-Discovery

We need to look at Jesus’ image of the tree and its fruit a little closer. He uses it, in fact, to make two quite distinct observations. In the first place, Jesus talks about the quality of the fruit: good trees produce good fruit, bad trees produce bad fruit. But, importantly, Jesus adds to this a second observation: the fruit and the tree correspond also in kind. Figs grow on fig trees, not thornbushes, and grapes grow from vines, not bramble bushes. For the good disciple, authenticity has everything to do with what kind of thing you are.

Behind this sits a fundamental biblical conviction: we are created in the image and likeness of God. The kind of thing we are is to be a person created in God’s image. Becoming a good disciple, therefore, is not about searching for a ‘true self’ within, but searching for God. Yes, some introspection is important, but we look in to look up, to search for the God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves, as St Augustine so marvelously put it. For the Christian, the question of authenticity can never be separated from creation and from gift.

Becoming Like Christ: The Path to True Authenticity

What kind of person then is the good disciple? The whole movement of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain couldn’t be clearer. Over the past two Sundays we heard first the proclamation of the Beatitudes and then, last week, the command of utterly gratuitous love. Then, today, in this final part of the Sermon, Jesus says to his disciples: “everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.” This vision of the moral life takes a concrete form in Christ. The good disciple, shaped by the beatitudes, given totally in love, looks like Christ.

If Charles Taylor is right that our culture’s mark of authenticity is a life lived in one’s own way and “not in imitation of anyone else’s”, then Christian authenticity couldn’t be more counter-cultural. Becoming a good disciple is about receiving and inhabiting the life offered in Christ. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”, St Paul proclaimed to the Galatians.

We do all have a unique path. When Pope Benedict XVI was asked ‘how many roads are there to God?’, he responded ‘as many as there are people’. But that road, for every one of us, is shaped by Christ. ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me’.

Christian authenticity begins with Christ. He dwells in us, and we dwell in Him. In this Lent, Jesus invites us to live his life.

A version of this text was originally preached at Blackfriars, Oxford and published on Torch.

Image: Blackfriars, Oxford by Giovanni Castellano