That Jesus sure was Sexy
To think the notion that Jesus lives inside the poor is an easy or romantic teaching would be absurd. Certainly there are many, including, myself who once thought this true. It was an ideal that could only come from the privileged. From those who can see the poor and return home to write about. It comes from a desire to sensationalize what is difficult, and a hope that our deepest emotions and intentions will be good enough to enact change. It is a good intention, all this thinking about how it's sweet to be with the poor cause Jesus is there, and we should accept that. But intentions will not bring the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. When we truly encounter all those who are human, we find that the powers creating brokeness do not discriminate. Justice, relationships, love, and life itself is far from sexy. It is the poor who make me feel uncomfortable and angry. When I sit in community meals on Monday nights I'm constantly frustrated with my conversations with the so called "poor and homeless" who I sit with. I want to scream at them and say "look chump, you're supposed to be Jesus, so why don't you pull it together, maybe shave or take a shower, and we can get to chili's for happy hour if we run." But the poor are no sexier than we are. For we are all fallen, awkward, and smelly. And life turns out to simply be the long laborious waiting and working for shalom, mixed with the hope that we don't completely screw things up before that happens.
But if there is any hope for true redemption, we must acknowledge our place in this world. Those who are privileged must acknowledge that the God who encounters the narrative of the Bible, is a God who exists primarily in the margins. God does exist in the poor, and no its not sexy. But the reign of God will not come from the empire; it will come from those who have been marginalized by the empire. The prophetic voices of those who are being oppressed will one day be realized, and the powerful, those both well and ill intentioned; will fall on our knees before the God who has been living and with the poor and oppressed.
We, as Americans, who are bold and confident in our "rightness" about the world, will one day find that we have been so drastically wrong. This is true of our government, of our NGO's, of our churches, and our institutions. It is not that we are evil, but that the principalities and powers have taken a hold of our land and have blinded us to the true alternative reality possessed in the reign of God. But those who have been hurt by our weapons, by our development projects, and by our understanding of God will one day be heard.
I find hope in this. For it reminds me that the restoration of the world will happen through but more often in spite of ourselves.
posted by Daniel Leonard @ 9:01 AM
1 Comments:
Daniel,
Your writing revives me sometimes. Thank you.
I think that pieces of the cloak of Jesus are often unable to be touched because of the crowded web of intellectualisms, moralisms, and even, prophetic acts of correction that we have used to debase the mysterious and so incredibly foreign nature and person of Jesus, replacing him with abstractions and concepts. Jesus Christ is. Jesus speaks of loving your enemies, and of a kingdom where a child will play in peace with wild snakes. And we claim that Jesus was non-violent because we must provide justification for Him, we must defend Him. We resort to the lowest forms of contest. We must speak of such things as presenting a platform for non-violence or non-resistance because we cannot accept Jesus as he is, we cannot accept Him until we learn how the earth can become a more just equitable through the things, which he proclaimed and lived. We like to use Jesus, to steal a quiet, intimate, mysteriously untouchable and unchallengeable beauty, and become complicit in barraging Him with tireless questions, with woes, with our doubts about whether He is just, with our shaken persons, and though he listens to us with infinite patience and mercy, Jesus bids us to sit and listen, to trust in His Father, in the forgiveness of sins, in a Kingdom in which we cannot even begin to picture without proving the unworthiness of even our imaginations.
The forgiveness of sins is an offense to us. I’m not sure there are many who can accept it. Jesus speaks of the blessing of the man who is not offended in Him, but it seems the Kingdom can only be a non-violent Kingdom if it is to be with Jesus, it must be a Kingdom full of equality for all men, it must be a bosom of ideality and the basin for the highest points our weak imaginations can reach. Until our lives find significance in accepting Jesus fully, accepting his refusal to provide us answers to all of our questions, His refusal to let Himself be contained within our abstractions, within our intellectualisms and rational, culturally derived studies of His person, we will continually be using Jesus. Perhaps the most ennobling thing we can ever proclaim of Jesus is that we will accept Him. That we will accept the errs of his followers (as He does), that we will accept the violence of the Old Testament (not as a paradigm for action, but as showing a God we cannot begin to fathom or rationalize), that we will accept the God who Abraham accepted: the God who commanded him to kill his son. This is offensive to us because we are evil. It seems to be the case for me that it’s always high time for me to be moving on to other concepts. I am complaining and in need of an end to it and perhaps I will not receive it if I am waiting for God, impatiently, to show up and fix things right up for me so I can feel good about being so presumptuous as to proclaim that my life is better because I am consistently interested in Jesus. Or I think, “Where does Soloviev’s philosophy of love intersect with the Gospels?” How does the Mimetic Theory dictate the social patterns of the church…how are we slaves to jealousy and imitation, within a body of people who are not restricted by this, who are supposed to be free of this?” These things all lose their significance in receiving and accepting the love of Jesus, in being barraged by a love so foreign to us, that our sin does not allow us to accept it. Our sin does not even allow us to see that we cannot accept it. But the love of Jesus can quell the most insurmountable intellectual fury or existential crisis. It is the love of Jesus, received and known, that will begin to sprinkle water onto the dirt that bears the hidden seeds of an undying garden that we will soon call our home.
And we won’t complain.
Post a Comment
<< Home