Reaping What You Sow: Jesus and the Law of Karma

I remember learning about Newton’s Laws of Physics in junior high, and how I appreciated the balance of the Law that states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. To put it even more simply: actions have consequences. Often we can see this in real time: we hit a ball with a bat and the ball goes flying (action) and feel a jarring reverberation in our hands (reaction). Other times, it takes a lot longer for the consequences to become manifest: centuries of carbon-based economy has provided us with a lot of cheap energy (action) but has also changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere putting life as we know it at severe risk (reaction). Both Christianity and Buddhism understand a similar principle to work in our lives as a whole, though as we’ll see, they take it in different directions.

Karma in Buddhism

On the night of his enlightenment, it is said that the Buddha witnessed a series of his own past lives and how the actions he took in one life set the course for the next. From this he came to understand that our lives are conditioned according to karma. Karma is a well-known, but also widely misunderstood concept these days. Here in the West it tends to be thrown around casually in the sense that whatever energies we put into the world will rebound to us. But this isn’t quite how the Buddha used it. For him, it referred to a two-pronged truth built into the universe: 1. our “intentional actions in thought, word, and deed”; and 2. the results of those actions, “shaped by the quality of the intention behind” them (Thanissaro Bhikkhu). These can be compared to sowing a field with all kinds of seeds; some sprout up right away, but others may take years or even lifetimes to bear their fruit.

This way of looking at things in a sense splits the difference between Western ‘virtue ethics’ and ‘consequentialism’, an ongoing divide about whether it is the intention behind our actions that matters, or their results. It’s an ongoing debate because there’s no satisfying answer. On the one hand, as they say, the way to hell is paved with good intentions: so many of the world’s horrors have been framed within worldviews that intended those actions as positive. But on the other hand, even the best of us are just doing the best we can do with the limited knowledge, skills, and experience available to us, and to a large degree the results of our actions are out of our control, so it seems too harsh to be judged solely on the consequences of our actions. The Buddha’s teaching understands that both our intentions and the results of our actions are important. For intentions to be good, or rather skillful, they must be free of greed, aversion (i.e, acting so as to avoid something we don’t want), and delusion, and be marked by wisdom (or far-sightedness), compassion, and purity (defined in terms of validity: the Buddha taught that we should evaluate the results of our actions and change course if they aren’t what we intended).

While the Buddhist understanding of karma is the work of many lifetimes, it also means that every moment counts. Every moment is our chance to think, speak, and act skillfully, in order to both sow better karmic seeds for the future, but also help to mitigate the negative impacts of our inherited karma. An analogy the Buddha used was of salt in water: if our minds and lives are small and stagnant like a cup of water, then the ‘salt’ of karma will render it undrinkable; but if they are expansive and flowing like a river, then that same amount of salt will be negligible. And if we come to true enlightenment and deal successfully with all our inherited karma, we might even escape that cycle of rebirth once and for all.

Jesus and the Law of Reaping and Sowing

Buddhism’s understanding of karma is grounded in the belief in reincarnation, which was a given in the South Asian cultural context in which it arose. And in so doing in a way it seeks to answer the question of justice: Why are some born into wealth and some into poverty? Why do the good so often suffer while those who do evil prosper? While Buddhism doesn’t talk about ultimate justice, something like a cosmically just condition is established since one’s actions in this life condition the nature of one’s next life.

This is of course not how the Judaism Christianity inherited answered these questions. There is no unending cycle of lives from which we need to escape: just one life given as a unique gift of God. Its answer to the question of justice in the universe was the day of the Day of the LORD, the Last Judgment, and the resurrection of the dead. In this framework, God will come in a profound way to judge the earth and its peoples, and vindicate those who have lived well.

Here too actions have consequences. And, just as in Buddhism, the scales will be balanced even if we can’t see that in the confines of our lifetime. And, just as in Buddhism, this belief makes every moment an opportunity to do right.

This comes out in the teaching of Jesus around forgiveness and judgment:

• “if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6.14-15)
• “For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.” (Matthew 7.2)

But it’s Paul who has given us the most lasting Christian expression of this principle: “you will reap what you sow” (Galatians 6.7).

There’s an sense in the New Testament that, while the scales are tipped against us by being born in and into a sinful world, God is already working behind the scenes to lavish us with forgiveness, love, and grace. And once we receive that grace, we are called to pass it on to others. This is what I’ve come to call ‘God’s Economy’ of grace. Here, we’re seen as a link in a great chain of grace; the only way we ‘lose’ God’s grace is by not extending it to others.

While Christianity’s correlate to the Buddhist idea of karma is decidedly focused on eternal life in God’s kingdom, there is also within the biblical tradition a recognition that our actions condition future lives in this world. Only instead of being our own future lives it’s the lives of our descendants being impacted:

• “The LORD is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children to the third and the fourth generation.” (Numbers 14:18)
• “Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations” Deuteronomy 7:9).

So then, our actions do have consequences, both for ourselves (even if we may not see those consequences within our earthly life) and others.

Conclusion

Because Christianity and Buddhism operate within very different metaphysical systems, there is no Christian correlate to the Buddhist concept of karma. But thinking through the implications of karma highlights the strong teaching within Christianity that our actions do have very real consequences, for us and others, even if we may not see them within the course of this lifetime. What we do, for good or ill, skillfully or unskillfully, reverberates out into the world and down through time. Do we participate in God’s economy of grace and love, or do we not?