The Very Rev Dr John Chalmers explains why holiness is about who we are.

MEDITATION

OVER the past few months we’ve been working through the holiness toolbox – looking at the variety of instruments which can be put to work in pursuit of our spiritual growth and development.

The exciting thing has been to realise that if we are adventurous enough and if we are willing to explore the rich traditions of the Christian faith, then our inner lives can be rewarded in ways that our Presbyterian forebears never imagined possible! It’s time to wind up this series, but not before looking at the nature of holiness itself and putting the results of our exploration to the test of real life.

To what end do we tinker with our inner life? Why wait before God in silence or in prayer? Why do we lend an ear to the mystery behind the universe or strain for the Word of God in Scripture? What is there for us in the sacred places that we visit or in the holy days that we commemorate? What does true holiness look like and why is it in any way important?

One of the most razor-sharp passages of Scripture is to be found in the 23rd chapter of St Matthew’s gospel; it has Jesus incisively describing those whose whole life was about demonstrating what they thought was rigorous orthodoxy and conspicuous holiness. It, however, exposes the hypocrisy of Pharisees and teachers of the law, whose outward show of scrupulous attention to the law was betrayed by a poverty of spirit and whose attention to their appearance in public was betrayed by their callous disregard for justice, mercy and humility.

Jesus goes as far as to describe them as “whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and …………who on the outside appear as righteous but on the inside are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”

These are the kind of people that Robert Burns wrote about in the Unco Guid:

O ye wha are sae guid yoursel’,

Sae pious and sae holy,

Ye’ve nought to do but mark and tell

Your neibours’ fauts and folly!

Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,

Supplied wi’ store o’ water;

The heaped happer’s ebbing still,

An’ still the clap plays clatter.

With these words echoing the words of Jesus we discover what holiness is not – it is not about how we look on the outside. It is not about what we do or about how we do it. Instead, it is about who we are, how we act justly, how we love mercy and how we walk humbly. We are all familiar with that strand of church life which does judgementalism, is a tad self-righteous, moralistic in tone and lacking in humility.

These are not the fruit of holiness.

Holiness is about who we are when there is no more room for kidding on. Before we became ‘human doings’– obsessed with achievement and success, we were ‘human beings’– content with fewer possessions, but satisfied by strong relationships. This means, quite simply, that attention to the inner life is of far greater importance than any kind of success in our outer lives and if we are looking for the seeds of holiness they will be in a planting of humility and grace, kindness and love, in the centre of our being.

I used to think that this belonged in long hard attempts to discover some secret that God might be hiding from us, but now I believe that true holiness is more about letting go of the stuffthat clutters our lives, letting go of the ambitions that are aimed at feeding the ego and letting go of what many of the spiritual teachers call the false self. In other words true holiness, as Richard Rohr puts it, is about subtraction rather than addition – you can’t create what you already have, but you can work to uncover it.

It is not about what we do or about how we do it. Instead, it is about who we are, how we act justly, how we love mercy and how we walk humbly.