“A Human Point of View”

June 22, 2003

What are you worth?

There are a many ways to answer this question.  You might think, for example, of calculating the market value of your assets, as in finding your net worth.  But what are you worth – as a person?

You might say that there is no way to put a dollar value on human life, and of course that’s right – although it is done every day.  Several years ago the faculty at the Kennedy School of Government promulgated the methods of cost-benefit analysis, a tool that aids in decisions on public policy by putting a dollar value on human life.  For example, in setting environmental regulations, the benefit to society in giving industry free reign to create jobs and generate goods and services on the one hand must be weighed against the costs to society in the environmental impact, especially the effects on human health.  Marginally greater industrial growth may entail a marginally greater number of human illnesses and even human deaths.  The one is weighed against the other by placing a dollar value on both. 

The Bush administration recently made news by proposing a decrease in the valuation of human life – or for certain human lives.  The lives of older persons – say, those over 65 – were to be valued at a lower worth than the lives of younger persons.  Some objected to this proposal on environmental grounds: any devaluation of human life, by the arithmetic of cost-benefit analysis, would result in greater leeway for environmental damage.  Others objected to the proposal for more personal reasons.  Some might have pointed out that government policies of valuing some human lives as greater than others led to the great evils of the last century.

We have other, non-monetary ways of assigning relative values to people.  We assign values to people according to their abilities or powers.  It happens every day.  On the playground you discover your relative value to a baseball team according to whether you are chosen among the first or among the last.  In the work place we make judgments as to who will be promoted and who will be let go; who will be recruited for a project and who will be avoided; whose telephone calls we always take and whose messages we never return.

Another means of assigning value has to do with social worth – popularity, status, honor, and prestige.  Who did you invite to your seventh birthday party?  Who will you invite to your daughter’s wedding?  Who will gain entrance to the club, and who will not?  Whom do you call out to on the street, and whom do you pass by as if they didn’t exist, though they may call out to you?

By all these measures – wealth, power, and prestige – we evaluate one another and ourselves because these are the things that we value.  These are the things to which we ascribe worth when we look at things, in Paul’s words, from “a human point of view”; these are the things that we hold as worthy; these are the things that we worship – worth and worship are the same root word.  These are our idols.  We worship God in church on Sunday morning, but these are the things that we worship by the choices we make the on other six days of the week.

Because these are the things that we value, these are the things that we would look for in a savior.  We reflexively make for ourselves a Messiah in our own image – or, in Paul’s terms, we “see Christ from a human point of view.”  This is portrayed in the gospel story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.  I think that we can usefully hear this story, not as a biographical account of Jesus’ own inner psychological struggles against the attraction of wealth, power and prestige, but rather as a picture of our attempt to make a messiah in our own image.

Think of it:  if we were to design a savior for ourselves, what would that savior be like?  Why, a savior would come and solve for us all the problems we don’t seem to be able to solve for ourselves.  We produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet, but we can’t seem to get the distribution right; couldn’t a savior just turn stones into bread so that everyone would have more than enough without our having to learn to be generous?  We ought to be capable of living together in justice and peace, but we don’t seem to be able to work it out; couldn’t a savior come in and rule the world, compel everyone to do right without our having to struggle with the messy business of freedom?  And we’re having a difficult time maintaining our lives of faith; couldn’t a savior simply compel our adoration by some obvious miracle – say, jumping off the pinnacle of a tall building?  Then we wouldn’t have to wrestle continually with the inconvenience of our doubts.

This would be Christ from the human point of view, a messiah in our own image, but this Jesus refused to be.  He rejected the idolatrous values of the world, and so the world – and so we – rejected him.  He was clearly – from the human point of view – no proper messiah.  He said radical things about money; he completely rejected traditional family values; he violated the laws of Sabbath; he violated sacred hospitality by welcoming prostitutes to a good man’s table.  Not only did he not act like a messiah – refusing to be make king, having not a single battalion to command against enemy – but he positively behaved like an anti-Christ: he condemned the Temple in Jerusalem and prophesied its destruction.  The enlightened and responsible Pharisees, Sadducees and scribes had no choice but to silence him – and we would do the same.  We might not crucify him, but we have our own ways of rendering people as non-entities.  The world is full of people whose voices we do not hear, whose suffering we don’t regard, whose deaths we do not mourn, whether they are in the Congo or in our own city.

That Jesus went with dignity to the cross shows the integrity with which he rejected the values of our human point of view.  But the fact that he rose from the dead compels us to reconsider those values.  If Jesus could withstand the very worst that the world could throw at him and still come back triumphant, then we must consider whether there is not here a power greater than the powers that we know.  Because Jesus rose from the dead, we can no longer regard him from a human point of view; we must instead regard our world from his point of view.  We must re-imagine reality.

We do this by entering the world of his parables – the world he called “the kingdom of God.”  We see a world in which a patriarch casts off his dignity in order to embrace the return of his delinquent, self-indulgent, irresponsible son.  We see a world in which a landowner pays the same for two hours’ labor as for ten hours’ labor.  We see a merchant sell all that he has in order to obtain a single pearl of great price – the one thing that really matters to him.

When we begin to see the world through “kingdom” eyes, it is like a new world, a new creation.  And as we begin to make choices in our own lives according to “kingdom” values, it is as if we, too, become a new creation.  Rather than making a messiah in our own image, we are transformed into the likeness of Christ.  We begin to have a very different sense of our own worth.  We see that if we live lives of self-seeking, we will lose our lives – they will be worth nothing to us – whereas, if we live life for others, we find a life that is good and genuine and true.  We begin to look at our own lives through the eyes of Christ and see that our worth depends completely upon who and how we love, because in the end – in The End – nothing else matters.

What are you worth?

-- Steven Bonsey

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