Arguably, I think this would be a good discussion point. If asked, I’d probably get to thinking and then try to narrow his various goals for us down to just one. Might take some doing.

I bring this up because of a sentence I just read in a book my friend Ryan loaned me this morning.

Without going into a lot of detail, the book is about many of the massive challenges facing the church today, many of which are of its own doing as well as the doing of the people who work and volunteer with them. The sentence is near the end of a chapter on the way narcissism is so insidious and destructive, in our society at large, in our churches and our personal lives.

Actually, the sentence is rather simple. The author says,

“Jesus’ ultimate goal in our lives is not to make us comfortable but agents of transformation.”

Doesn’t sound particularly impressive on the surface, does it? But, let’s just take a moment to consider what’s really going on here.

There is the terribly false narrative out there that has pretty much fully hijacked the guiding principles of our lives. It is the belief that we have the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Goodness gracious! It’s in the founding document of our infant country: The Declaration of Independence. And, said the authors (Jefferson did not draft this alone), this right, among others such as life and liberty, were “endowed” by the “Creator.”

And, here I come along and say that this is a fiction which steers us away from the truth. And, it’s both a bold fiction and a dangerous deviation.

In fact, as I’ve argued before, we have no “right” to happiness. Nor, would we want one. Happiness is always fleeting and in the pursuit of it, we only end up becoming unhappy. Don’t get me started.

To bring us back, comfort is closely akin to happiness. We have no “right” to comfort. Someone, please define comfort as an ultimate thing and then extrapolate that to a right for everyone. How does that work? I know of a number of people who live in what most of us would say are very comfortable circumstances but who are quite unhappy in those circumstances … in other words, uncomfortable.

No, there’s no way around the conclusion that Jesus really is not all that concerned about our comfort, nor our happiness. (Please, do not confuse happiness or comfort with joy, about which Jesus is quite concerned.)

Instead, he is primarily concerned about transformation. Ours and everyone’s.

And, here, the simple is also the profound. Transformation always comes at a cost. True transformation is always discomfiting. It involves sacrificing something in order to obtain something else.

All of this leads, obviously, to the question of what kind of transformation the author claims is the ultimate goal of Jesus. It would be natural to leap to the conclusion that by the word “agent” he means the transformation of others. Well, yes. But, of course, the first place we need to look as agents is in the mirror. Where the narcissist will delight and be consumed by the surface beauty of such an image, the follower of Jesus will only see someone who is broken but still completely loved by God. To be in the place of fully realizing both of those things is transformative and nothing short of miraculous. Amen.