“You Lead Me in Paths of Righteousness”: The Limits and Freedom of The Moral Life
fourth in a guest series by Myles Werntz on Psalm 23 and the moral life
The Freedom of Righteousness
The pursuit of the moral life is one which follows the contours of the path from sin to salvation, from life to death, and as such, from enslavement to freedom. This recurring theme of Israel, in which Exodus becomes the lodestone for the Law, is sung in the slave spirituals and whispered in the dreams of political prisoners, shouted in Congressional debates and weaponized at border crossings.
But freedom is more than a dream; it is the haunting spectre of the 20th century. Now that it is a political possibility, it becomes an imperative: to be free at all is to be maximally free. Fannie Lou Hamer’s axiom that “no one is free until everyone is free” stands before us not so much as a gift, but as a burden to be undertaken. This is the truth in this: that freedom for the Christian is not an individual property, nor is it a matter of isolated conscience. The “here I stand” is better understood as a “here I stand, and will suffer with you”.
But the side of the coin that faces us most frequently is not the call to solidarity, but the call to be a free moral agent, to rise up to a life worthy of the agency we have been given. If freedom is at the core of what it means to be human, then it must be as maximal as possible, without limit: this, again, is more than what we wish for, for to be unlimited entails to be unburdened, and to be unburdened is to lose the relation with others that makes freedom worth having. As a husband and father, whatever freedom means, it cannot and must not mean the ability to be other than a husband and father; whatever freedom means for God, it does not mean to be other than Jesus Incarnate, the Crucified Lord and Resurrected Shepherd.
The freedom of righteousness is one whose limits are already in the house, for we follow not as an idea, but from within the world as it comes to us, out of our hands. To be a free moral agent is not to take on any possible life, and even less, to ask for all roads to be open to us. It is, rather, to be summoned to follow the One who has raised us from death: what could be more free than to spend one’s life in opposition to the forces of Death, to (as William Stringfellow put it), live as humanly as possible, alive to God and dead to the principalities? If by freedom, we mean the ability to pursue any road we wish, we wish only for the freedom of the shopping mall: to browse, to look, and never commit. To be limited, we shall see, is not an occasion for lament, but an acknowledgment that not all roads are open to us in righteousness. But these roads, the ones which the LORD claims, it turns out, fill the cosmos with glory.
The Spaciousness of Our Finitude
That there are limits to the paths of the sheep has less to do, I think, with our frailty than with our finitude. There is a way of speaking of limits which is offered as an excuse—that we are “only human”—which speaks with two faces. On the one hand, it hides behind frailty and finitude, but on the other, speaks of its finitude with a presumed knowledge of what that finitude is. By presuming to know the limit of our agency, of our acting, this way of speaking of limits speaks disingenuously: we are too frail to live up to the LORD’s calling, and yet strong enough to plumb the depths of what our capacities and limits truly are.
The limits of the sheep, by contrast, are those which they do not know: they know neither the exactitude of their capacity, nor the depths of their failures, but only the LORD’s provision. For the LORD does not command the sheep to exceed limits too high for them, but asks that they, as creatures, rise up from sloth to be what they have been made to be. In following the LORD, their imaginations of what they are are transfigured, their weakness made perfect in the strength of God, and their limits given in appropriate measure for what they are.
It is the nature of God, after all, to share what God is with creatures, to make friends out of the dust. As such, the limits of the sheep morally bear not the shape ascribed to it by the realists, but the shape given to them by the One whose flesh now fills the cosmos, giving life to all things. In sharing in that flesh—the flesh of the resurrected LORD—the sheep know their limits to be only that apportioned to them by the LORD within the accidents of time and space. All are called to be saints, not moral heroes, after all, and not all sheep will be remembered for their great deeds. But then, the moral life is temporal: done well, it remains behind as a marker for others of the life of the holiness which changes the world; done poorly, it becomes the crown of the influencer, acclaimed by many but inspiring few.
Paths (in the Wood) of Righteousness
The paths of righteousness which we are led in, then, take on two features of freedom: paths, which we are led into. The difficulty, as we have noted, is that these paths do not appear as two different levels, one celestial and one of the earth: because the LORD is the shepherd, these paths appear within the contours of creation. They are two trees, the way of life and the way of death, the soldier who lifts his eyes to drink and the one who drinks facedown. Because the LORD—even in the face of the angel—takes the shape of creation, of the recognizable, these paths are not as clear as we wish.
And as such, this intimacy of the LORD to creation can be taken for granted. Uzzah’s grasping of the altar followed years of the ark living not in the tabernacle or the temple, but in a house, dwelling as an object among objects in the house of Abinidab. His spiritual heir, Simon Magus, considered the Spirit as a talisman among talismans to be wielded. This confusion is, in part, intrinsic to the way of the LORD being embedded within the world, that we confuse the LORD with Moses or Elijah and not their fullness. The outside of the world lies within it already, more deeply the truth of the world than the world’s knowledge of itself.
That there are multiple paths of righteousness named here offers us no relief either. For as we approach the valley of Death’s shadow, it remains unclear as to why the paths are multiplied here. Is it from as a kind of moral relativism, assuming that the voice of the shepherd is the same as the voice of the conscience? Is it from a kind of divinely differentiated calling, for John not to concern himself with the call of the LORD to another? Is this shifting form of righteousness from the passage of time, that the young might dream dreams, but the old will have visions? The LORD, speaking with the sheep, calls to them into righteousness’ paths, which retain both singularity and plurality: prophets, priests, and kings in a singular economy of God’s grace, but with their own marked out paths to walk. If it is the righteousness of the LORD which the sheep follow, then the paths are but one path, in conformity to the LORD who leads them in scarcity and through death, but if the paths are those of their own undertaking, then none will follow except those sheep who they already recognize.
It is that these paths of righteousness are all leading toward Death’s Valley which chastens the sheep, that the moral life is not that which lasts forever, but that which will end, that which is in service to the formation of the sheep into the way of the LORD. To know that the moral life is not everything is to know that if it is anything, it is because it trails behind the LORD. It is in this that the sheep know that it is better to bear with one another, to suffer their disagreements, and to pray for one another, for the time for the moral life is short, and there is still a very long way to go.