Christianity and Buddhism

“Buddhism tells you how to grow up, get a job, and make a life for yourself. Christianity tells you to go on a road trip from which you will never return.”

When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment, he responded by giving two great commandments: love God, love your neighbor. It’s interesting to me how often Jesus replies to questions with non-sequiturs. When asked about who we should treat as our neighbors, Jesus instead offered a story on how to be a good neighbor to others.

There’s something there. In contrasting Buddhism and Christianity, I’m not suggesting that they offer two different answers to the same question, so much as I am suggesting that Christianity skips the question altogether, and moves on to a different topic. Christianity fundamentally does not answer any questions about how to live your life, or how to build a better society. So many of the things essential to building society are simply ignored by the Christian scriptures: politics, raising children, to baptize infants or not (and thus our whole understanding of what it means to be baptized into Christianity), career-planning, marriage. Despite cursory discussions of those topics, the New Testament essentially ignores such deeply important things, and instead tells people to pave the way for the new order of things that was coming into being.

I’m starting to think this was no accident. Jesus didn’t spend a lot of time pre-resurrection telling people what to expect after his resurrection. And the New Testament doesn’t spend a lot of time telling people how to live in the new world that was going to be dominated by Christendom. All it does is provoke an event. All it does is tell people to let go of how things are, and be prepared to embrace how things will be.

All it does is tell us to pack our bags, hit the road, and see what we find.

Maybe that’s the really provocative idea in Christianity: that we can trust ourselves enough to figure it out as we go. Maybe that’s the significance of being led by the Spirit; not that we get some emotional warm-fuzzies, not that God audibly speaks to us, not that God has a purpose and plan for our life that gets revealed to us as we go — but that God trusts us enough to figure it out. That God is present with us as we do. That God’s image in us is so pronounced, we don’t need a roadmap for the journey.

We just need to start.

And that’s exactly what the New Testament helps us do, over and over again. It tells us to drop our things, pick up our staff, and go. It tells us to head straight towards suffering and turmoil. It tells us to embrace life and chaos. It tells us to let go of what defines us.

And it assures us that when we’ve done so, we will soon find something new.