The wisdom of the world is often expressed as the golden mean. The Oracle said, “nothing in excess.” Aristotle talked about virtue as the path between extremes. Courage was the virtue between recklessness and cowardice. And it is not just a western thing. The Buddhist might chart the middle path between existence and non-existence which was the expansion of the Buddha’s original rejection of both extreme asceticism (non-existence) and self-indulgence (too much existence). And you can even find it in Christian thought. For Aquinas and Dante the middle path is that between insufficient love and excessive love. In our love infatuated age it might be hard to imagine that second pole of excessive love. But think again of courage and recklessness. Isn’t recklessness an excessive love of risk? It is hard to outgrow old training so I return to a finance example. If one part of our society is engaged in the attempt to eliminate all risk, like shutting down all society for a virus, is not the other, invested in prop bets on Draft Kings and Crypto coins, running to an excess love of it?
And you would be a fool to completely reject the golden mean. But there is something in the spiritual life that speaks against it. Let’s describe it as submission and aggression. God says to Abram, “Go, from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you (Genesis 12:1).” It is the demand of absolute submission. Not much later God would ask Abram to sacrifice Isaac, his only son, the only child of that promise. And Jesus uses demands like this. “”If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26 ).” Or speaking in a way that people responded – “this is a hard teaching, who can listen to it” – “”Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. (Jn. 6:53).” You shall have no other gods before me is a call for complete submission.
Yet that submission is aggressive, it is not passive. “Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran. And Abram took Sarai…and Lot…and all their possessions…and set out (Genesis 12:4-5).” Sarah when Isaac was born told Abraham to get rid of Hagar and Ishmael, and God told him to listen to his wife. Joshua was told to conquer the land and Israel was only rebuked when they didn’t go far enough. And like Abram who “journeyed on (Genesis 12:9),” Jesus “sets his face to go to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51).” Within Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane “Lord, not my will, but thine be done” are both the absolute submission and the aggression.
I think there is something here of what we need. Occasionally it is the law which says do this. And the “this” is usually some virtue or some golden mean. The golden rule – “treat your neighbor as you would like to be treated” – is akin to that golden mean. If we all lived that way, we would have no problems. But we don’t live that way. And as much as the philosophers might agree in theory, in practice each one has their own list of virtues and their ordering. And when we find ourselves off the middle way, and the true path is lost, it takes something radical to restore us. It takes the One who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist (Romans 4:17).”
It is that One, who is not at all the middle way, but a jealous God, that we need. And who has shown up not walking a middle path dispensing wisdom like the Buddha, but setting his face for the cross. And it is that One who has given us a promise like Abram. The Kingdom is yours.
