Mencius' Bent Men

Bill Brown ... Xiamen University
"Seek and you will find; knock and the door will open for you." Jesus, in Luke 11:9 我又告诉你们，你们祈求就给你们。寻梢就寻见。叩门就给你们开门。路加福音11:9

"It was written of old, "Seek and you will find; neglect and you will lose it." Mencius, Gaozi 1 告子上:孟子曰：故曰：‘求则得之，舍则失之。’

When Jesus said, "Seek and you will find," he opened a door that Chinese had been struggling with for centuries. Three hundred years before Christ, Mencius wrote about the tragedy of man's loss of heart, purpose and direction. And both the Chinese and the Jews sought answers by creating ritualistic religions and ceremonies that served, if anything, to deaden the heart, rather than awaken it.

Jesus deliberately healed a man on the Sabbath, and when the Jewish leaders complained about his breaking their religious rules, he replied, "If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a man than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath." Matthew 12:11,12

Mencius was attacking the same blind hypocrisy in China when he wrote that men will seek lost fowl and dogs, but not seek their own lost heart and soul:

'Benevolence is the heart of man, and righteousness man's path. How tragic to lose the path and not pursue it, to lose the heart and not seek it again. When men lose fowl and dogs they seek them, but when they lose their heart, they do not know to seek it. The great end of learning is nothing else but to seek for the lost heart." Mencius, Gaozi 1 告子上: 孟子曰：“仁，人心也；义，人路也。舍其路而弗由，放其心而不知求，哀哉！人有鸡犬放，则知求之；有放心，而不知求。学问之道无他，求其放心而已矣。”

Seek & Find; Neglect & Lose Jesus said, "Seek and you shall find", and Mencius wrote, "Seek and you shall find; neglect and you shall lose." We must seek because we have lost, and because we are lost. As Mencius said, we have not only lost the path but do not even seek to regain it. This may have been in part because they had no guide to lead them back to the path.

Bent Men on Straight Paths Both Confucius and Mencius wrote of their inability to change themselves, much less change others. As Mencius wrote in Teng Wen Gong, "Never has a bent man made others straight." "枉己者，未有能直人者也。”

Fortunately for us, Jesus was the unbent man, and he said that he can make us, and our paths, straight. And like Mencius, Jesus said "Seek and ye shall find," but better yet, he also said "Ask and it shall be given to you." The answering to straightening our bent lives lies not within other people, or philosophies or religion, but in "asking" for help from the one unbent man.

Ask and it shall be given.

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