It as a stirring picture and we love to look at it,
contemplate it, read about it. It is a dull mind and heart that does not
quicken in response to His amazing compassion and strength; and as we
study his instructions to us, it becomes clear that He expects us to be
to our generation what He was to His.

When we realize what His teaching and commandment require of us, our
sense of the beauty and simplicity of His life is overshadowed by the
terror aroused in us by His expectation of us. We know that the ugliness
of our lives can never reproduce the beauty of His. From a human point
of view, the imitation of Christ is a complete impossibility, and one
wonders how so many Christians can go on, generation after generation,
thinking that this is their task and that they can accomplish it. Yet it
is clear that He expects us to be members of His body and to do His work
in our time. Is it possible that He asked us to do something that is
beyond our powers of accomplishment? If this is so, then far from being
Savior, He is one of the most cruel of men. There must be some other
answer.

The answer, of course, is that Christ did not leave us alone to carry
out His commandments, summed up in the great commandment: "You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and
with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as
yourself."[8] He understood only too well the ambiguity of our lives.
How understanding He was of vacillating Peter, and yet He called him the
Rock. Had Peter possessed any self-understanding, he must have wondered
why his Lord gave him that name. But after the resurrection and the
coming of the Holy Spirit, Peter became the Rock, because then he
incarnated the Spirit of his Lord. As with Peter, so with us. The
presence of the Spirit makes possible an imitation of Christ. Now we
can read the Gospels without dread, and not as patterns for us to
imitate literally and slavishly. The New Testament provides the
understandings that help us to test whether or not we are responding to
His Spirit and letting Him accomplish His work in and through us. Thus,
like Peter, we may become rocks, incarnating the Spirit of our Lord.

Nor do we need to be embarrassed by our humanity. We begin to sense that
we cannot be Christian without first being human, which means that we
shall be both loving and hostile, both righteous and sinful, both
courageous and cowardly, both dependable and vaci