Friends,
I just stumbled across these "Top Ten Surprises" about Jesus by Philip Yancey. I highlighted the high points.
Happy New Year!
Don
As a writer, I have the wonderful
privilege of researching and meditating on one topic for months at a time. My latest project allowed me to focus on the
grandest subject of all: Jesus. Growing
up in the church, I learned his name as soon as I learned the names of my
family members. But now, as an adult,
what did I truly think about him? Which
childhood impressions had been confirmed and which ones overturned?
As I reflect on what I learned in the
process of writing "The Jesus I Never Knew," I have come up with a
"top ten" list. Please forgive
me if the form seems irreverent. David
Letterman style, it begins with number 10 and works upward.
10. JESUS WAS A JEW
I knew that, of course. But the more I studied Jesus, the more I
realized that his humanity had receded far away. Every week in church I would repeat the
creed, which, significantly, hustles through Jesus' life. "...
Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate," it
says. Did anything happen in the
interval between birth and death?
Somehow, everything Jesus said and did
in 33 years on earth gets swept aside in the rush to interpret his life
correctly. For me, as for many others
raised in the Christian tradition, the man who walked the dusty roads of
Palestine had been all but lost. I knew
Christ -- "Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made"
-- but not Jesus, or Rabbi Jeshua bar-Joseph, the Jew from Nazareth.
A remarkable change has taken place in
recent years, I learned during my library research: interest in Jesus is
resurging among the Jews. In 1925, the
Hebrew scholar Joseph Klausner could find only three full-length treatments of
Jesus' life by contemporary Jewish scholars.
Now there are hundreds, including some of the most illuminating studies
available. Modern Israeli schoolchildren
learn that Jesus was a great teacher, perhaps the greatest Jewish teacher, who
was subsequently "co-opted" by the Gentiles.
Jesus' true-blue Jewishness leaps out
from Matthew's very first sentence, which introduces him as "the son of
David, the son of Abraham."
Roughly, that might parallel an American politician being introduced as
"the son of Abraham Lincoln, the son of George Washington." Jesus grew up in an era of Jewish pride, when
families were adopting names that harked back to the times of the patriarchs
and the Exodus from Egypt (not unlike ethnic Americans who choose African names
for their children). Circumcised as a
baby, Jesus attended religious festivals in Jerusalem as a young man, and as an
adult he worshiped in the synagogue and temple.
Even his controversies with other Jews, such as the Pharisees,
underscored the fact that they expected him to share their values and act more
like them.
Growing up, I did not know a single
Jew. I do now. I know something of their culture: the close
ties that keep sacred holidays alive even for families who no longer believe in
their meaning; the passionate arguments that at first unsettled me but soon
attracted me as a style of personal engagement; the respect, even reverence,
for legalism amid a society that mainly values autonomy; the ability to link
arms and dance and sing and laugh even when the world offers scant reason for
celebration.
This was the culture Jesus grew up in,
a Jewish culture. Yes, he changed it,
but always from his starting point as a Jew.
Now when I find myself wondering what Jesus was like as a teenager, I
think of Jewish boys I know in Chicago.
When the thought jars me, I remember that in his own day Jesus got the
opposite reaction. A Jewish teenager,
surely -- but the Son of God?
9. YET JESUS DID NOT ACT LIKE A JEW
The very architecture of the temple
expressed Jewish belief in a ladder of hierarchy reaching higher and higher
toward God. Gentiles and
"half-breeds" like the Samaritans could enter the outer Court of the
Gentiles; a wall separated them from the next partition, which admitted Jewish
women. Jewish men could proceed one
stage farther, and then only priests could enter the sacred areas.
The society was, in effect, a
religious caste system based on steps toward holiness, and the Pharisees'
scrupulosity reinforced the system daily.
All their rules on washing hands and avoiding defilement were an attempt
to make themselves acceptable to God.
Had not God set forth lists of desirable (spotless) and undesirable
(flawed, unclean) animals for use in sacrifice?
Had not God banned sinners, menstruating women, the physically deformed,
and other "undesirables" from the temple?
In the
midst of this tight religious caste system, Jesus appeared, with no qualms
about socializing with children or sinners or even Samaritans. He touched, or was touched by, the
"unclean": those with leprosy, the deformed, a hemorrhaging woman,
the lunatic and possessed. Although
Levitical laws prescribed a day of purification after touching a sick person,
Jesus conducted mass healings in which he touched scores; he never concerned
himself with the rules of defilement after contact with the sick or even the
dead.
Indeed,
Jesus turned upside down the accepted wisdom of the day. Pharisees believed that touching an unclean
person polluted the one who touched. Yet
when Jesus touched a person with leprosy, Jesus did not become soiled -- the
leprous became clean. When an immoral woman washed Jesus' feet, she
went away forgiven and transformed. When
Jesus defied custom to enter a pagan's house, the pagan's servant was healed. As Walter Wink puts it, "The contagion
of holiness overcomes the contagion of uncleanness."
In
short, Jesus moved the emphasis from God's holiness (exclusive) to God's mercy
(inclusive). Instead of the message
"No undesirables allowed," he proclaimed, "In God's kingdom, no
one is any longer an undesirable."
Jesus' attitude convicts me today,
because I sense a movement in the reverse direction. The church is becoming more and more
politicized. As society unravels and
immorality increases, I hear many calls that we show less mercy and more
morality. Stigmatize homosexuals, shame
unwed mothers, harass the homeless, punish law-breakers. I share a deep concern for our society, and
obviously Christians need to be a moral voice.
In doing so, though, we must follow Jesus' example, "loving the
sinner while hating the sin." I am
struck by the power of mercy as demonstrated by Jesus, who came for the sick
and not the well, for sinners and not for the righteous. I spent half my life rebelling against the
legalism of my childhood; when I tasted the first draught of the Living Water
offered by Jesus, I knew I was changed forever.
8. JESUS LOST THE "CULTURE
WARS"
Not long ago I addressed the topic
"Culture Wars" before a large gathering that was tilted toward the
liberal Democratic persuasion and included a strong minority of Jews. I had been selected as the token evangelical
Christian on a panel that included the presidents of the Disney Channel and
Warner Brothers, as well as the president of Wellesley College and Anita Hill's
personal attorney.
To prepare for my talk, I went through
the Gospels for guidance, only to be reminded how unpolitical Jesus was. Today, each time an election rolls around,
Christians debate whether this or that candidate is "God's man" for
the White House. Projecting myself back
into Jesus' time, I had difficulty imagining him pondering whether Tiberius,
Octavius, or Julius Caesar was "God's man" for the empire.
I was also struck by what happens when
Christians lose the culture wars. In
Communist countries -- Albania, the Soviet Union, China -- the Christians'
worst nightmares came true. These
governments forced the church to go underground. (A missionary in Afghanistan told me that
after bulldozing the only Christian church in the country, the Afghans dug a
huge hole underneath its foundation; they had heard rumors about an underground
church!) In waves of persecution during
the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, Chinese believers were fined, imprisoned,
and tortured. Yet, despite this
government oppression, a spiritual revival broke out that could well be the
largest in the history of the church. As
many as 50 million believers gave their allegiance to an invisible kingdom even
as the visible kingdom made them suffer for it.
When my
turn came to speak, I said that the man I follow, a Palestinian Jew from the
first century, had also been involved in a culture war. He went up against a rigid religious
establishment and a pagan empire. The
two powers, often at odds, conspired together to eliminate him. His response?
Not to fight, but to give his life for these his enemies, and to point
to that gift as proof of his love. Among
the last words he said before death were, "Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do."
After the panel, a television
celebrity came up to me whose name every reader would recognize. "I've got to tell you, what you said
stabbed me right in the heart," he said.
"I was prepared to dislike you because I dislike all right-wing
Christians, and I assumed you were one.
I don't follow Jesus -- I'm a Jew. But when you told about Jesus forgiving his
enemies, I realized how far from that spirit I am. I fight my enemies, especially the
right-wingers. I don't forgive
them. I have much to learn from the
spirit of Jesus."
7.
JESUS WAS A POOR SALESMAN
Sometimes I wonder how Jesus would
have fared in this day of mass media and high-tech ministry. I can't picture him worrying about the
details of running a large organization.
I can't see him letting some make-up artist improve his looks before a
TV appearance. And I have a hard time
imagining the fundraising letters Jesus might write.
Investigative reporters on television
like to do exposes of evangelists who claim powers of supernatural healing with
little evidence to back them up. In
direct contrast, Jesus, who had manifest supernatural powers, tended to
downplay them. Seven times in Mark's
gospel he told a healed person, "Tell no one!" When crowds pressed around him, he fled to
solitude, or rowed across a lake.
We sometimes use the term "savior
complex" to describe an unhealthy syndrome of obsession over solving
others' problems. Ironically, the true
Savior seemed remarkably free of such a complex. He had no compulsion to convert the entire
world in his lifetime or to cure people who were not ready to be cured.
I never
sensed Jesus twisting a person's arm.
Rather, he stated the consequences of a choice, then threw the decision
back to the other party. For example, he
once answered a wealthy man's question with uncompromising words, then let him
walk away. Mark pointedly adds this
comment about the man who rejected Jesus' advice, "Jesus looked at him and
loved him."
In short, Jesus showed an incredible
respect for human freedom. Those of us
in ministry need the kind of "Savior complex" that Jesus
demonstrated. As Elton Trueblood has
observed, the major symbols of invitation that Jesus used had a severe, even
offensive quality: the yoke of burden, the cup of suffering, the towel of
servanthood. "Take up your cross
and follow me," he said, in the least manipulative invitation that has
ever been given.
6. NO
ONE KNOWS WHAT JESUS LOOKED LIKE
John's gospel records this hyperbolic
comment: "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I
suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would
be written." After spending time in
seminary libraries browsing through the thousands of books on Jesus, I had the
eerie sense that John's prophecy was coming true.
And yet, here is a strange thing: with
this preponderance of scholarship, we still lack certain basic information
about Jesus. The four Gospels skip over
nine-tenths of his life, omitting much that would interest modern readers. We have only one scene from his adolescence
and know nothing about his schooling.
Details of his family life are so scant that scholars still debate how
many brothers and sisters he had. The
facts of biography considered essential to modern readers simply did not
concern the gospel writers.
We also know nothing about Jesus'
shape or stature or eye color, and thus, as a writer, I could not begin where I
normally begin in reporting on a person -- by describing what he looked
like. The first semirealistic portraits
of Jesus did not come until the fifth century, and these were pure speculation;
until then, the Greeks had portrayed him as a young, beardless figure
resembling the god Apollo.
I once showed to a class several dozen
art slides portraying Jesus in a variety of forms -- African, Korean, Chinese
-- and then asked the class to describe what they thought Jesus looked
like. Virtually everyone suggested he
was tall (unlikely for a first-century Jew), most said handsome, and no one
said overweight. I showed a BBC film on
the life of Christ that featured a fat actor in the title role, and some in the
class found it offensive. We prefer a
tall, handsome, and above all, slender Jesus.
One tradition dating back to the
second century suggested Jesus was a hunchback, and in the Middle Ages,
Christians widely believed that Jesus had suffered from leprosy. Most Christians today would find such notions
repulsive and perhaps heretical. Was he
not a perfect specimen of humanity? Yet
in all the Bible I can find only one physical description of sorts, a prophecy
written hundreds of years before Christ's birth. Here is Isaiah's portrayal, in the midst of a
passage that the New Testament applies to the life of Jesus:
Just as there were many who were
appalled at him -- his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and
his form marred beyond human likeness.....
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his
appearance that we should desire him. He
was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with
suffering. Like one from whom men hide
their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Evidently our glamorized
representations of Jesus say more about us than about him.
5. YOU
MIGHT NOT HAVE WANTED JESUS AT YOUR BACKYARD BARBECUE
In
writing a book about Jesus, one impression struck me more forcefully than any
other: we have tamed him. The Jesus I
learned about as a child was sweet and inoffensive, the kind of person whose
lap you want to climb on, Mister Rogers with a beard. Indeed, Jesus did have qualities of
gentleness and compassion that attracted little children. Mister Rogers, however, he assuredly was not.
I realized this fact when I studied
the Sermon on the Mount. "Blessed
are the poor. Blessed are the
persecuted. Blessed are those who
mourn." These sayings have a soft,
proverbial ring to them -- unless you happen to know someone poor, persecuted,
or mourning. The homeless huddling over
heating grates in our major cities, the tortured prisoners whose pictures are
distributed by Amnesty International, the families of the Oklahoma City bombing
victims we see interviewed on television -- who would think of calling them
blessed, or "lucky"?
In all the movies about Jesus' life,
surely the most provocative -- and perhaps the most accurate -- portrayal of
the Sermon on the Mount appears in a low-budget BBC production entitled
"Son of Man." The director,
Dennis Potter, sets the Sermon on the Mount against a background of violence
and chaos. Roman soldiers have just
invaded a Galilean village to exact vengeance for some trespass against the
empire. They have strung up Jewish men
of fighting age, shoved their hysterical wives to the ground, even speared
babies in order to "teach these Jews a lesson." Into that tumultuous scene of blood and tears
and keening for the dead strides Jesus with eyes ablaze. "I tell you: Love your enemies and pray
for those that persecute you," he shouts above the groans.
I say it's easy to love your own
brother, to love those who love you.
Even tax collectors do that! You
want me to congratulate you for loving your own kinsmen? No, Love your enemy. Love the man who would kick you and spit at
you. Love the soldier who would drive
his sword in your belly. Love the
brigand who robs and tortures you.
Listen to me! Love your enemy! If a Roman soldier hits you on the left
cheek, offer him the right one. If a man
in authority orders you to walk one mile, walk two miles. If a man sues you for your coat, give him the
shirt off your back. Listen! I tell you, it is hard to follow me. What I'm saying to you hasn't been said since
the world began!
You can
imagine the villagers' response to such unwelcome advice. The Sermon on the Mount did not soothe them;
it infuriated them.
I came
away from my study of Jesus both comforted and terrified. Jesus came to earth "full of grace and
truth," said John: his truth comforts my intellectual doubts even as his
grace comforts my emotional doubts. And
yet, I also encountered a terrifying aspect of Jesus, one that I had never
learned about in Sunday school. Did
anyone go away from Jesus' presence feeling satisfied about his or her life?
Few people felt comfortable around
Jesus; those who did were the type no one else felt comfortable around. The Jesus I met in the Gospels was anything
but tame.
4.
JESUS IS NOT THE CHURCH
George
Buttrick, former chaplain at Harvard, recalls that students would come into his
office, plop down on a chair and declare, "I don't believe in
God." Buttrick would give this
disarming reply: "Sit down and tell me what kind of God you don't believe
in. I probably don't believe in that God
either."
Many people who reject Jesus are
rejecting not Jesus, but a distortion of him as presented by the church. To our everlasting shame, the watching world
judges Jesus by a church whose history includes the Crusades, the Inquisition,
the Conquistadores in Latin America, and a slave ship called the Good Ship
Jesus.
In order to get to know Jesus, I had
to strip away layers of dust and grime applied by the church itself. In my case, the image of Jesus was obscured
by the racism, intolerance, and petty legalism of fundamentalist churches in
the South. A Russian or a European
Catholic confronts a very different restoration process. "For not only dust, but also too much
gold can cover up the true figure," wrote Hans Kung about his own
search. Many abandon the quest entirely;
rebuffed by the church, they never make it to Jesus.
I often wish that we could somehow set
aside church history, remove the church's many layers of interpretation, and
encounter the words of the Gospels for the first time. Not everyone would accept Jesus -- they did not
in his own day -- but at least people would not reject him for the wrong
reasons.
Once I was able to cut through the fog
still clinging from my own upbringing, my opinion of Jesus changed
remarkably. Brilliant, untamed, tender,
creative, merciful, slippery, loving, irreducible, paradoxically humble --
Jesus stands up to scrutiny. He is who I
want my God to be.
3. YET
THE CHURCH IS JESUS
What I
have just longed for, nonetheless, is not only impossible; it is
unscriptural. Jesus planned from the
beginning to die so that we his church could take his place. ("Once again," as Robert Farrar
Capon reminds us, "God was -- and still is -- throwing
sinkers.") He stayed just long
enough to gather around him followers who could carry the message to
others. Killing Jesus, says Walter Wink,
was like trying to destroy a dandelion seed-head by blowing on it.
The
church is where God lives. What Jesus
brought to a few -- healing, grace, the good-news message of God's love -- the
church can now bring to all.
"Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies," he
explained, "it remains only a single seed.
But if it dies, it produces many seeds."
As I worked through the Gospels I
concluded that the Ascension represents my greatest struggle of faith -- not
whether it happened, but why. It
challenges me more than belief in the Resurrection and other miracles.
It seems odd to admit such a notion --
I have never read a book or article designed to answer doubts about the
Ascension -- yet for me what has happened since Jesus' departure strikes at the
core of my faith. Would it not have been
better if Jesus had stayed on earth to direct us?
"It is for your good that I am
going away," Jesus told his disciples, who had the same question. "Unless I go away, the Counselor will
not come to you." I find it much
easier to accept the fact of God incarnating in Jesus of Nazareth than in the
people who attend my local church -- and in me.
Yet that is what we are asked to believe; that is how we are asked to
live. Jesus played his part and then
left. Now it is up to us, the body of
Christ.
2.
CATHOLICS ARE BETTER AT CALENDARS THAN PROTESTANTS
The church I grew up in skipped past
the events of Holy Week in a rush to hear the cymbal sounds of Easter. We never held a service on Good Friday. We celebrated the Lord's Supper only once a
quarter. Roman Catholics did not believe
in the Resurrection, I was told, which explained why Catholic girls wore
crosses "with the little man on them." They celebrated Mass daily, a symptom of
their fixation with death. We Protestants
were different. We saved our best
clothes, our rousing hymns, and our few sanctuary decorations for Easter.
When I began to study theology and
church history, I found that my church was wrong about the Catholics, who
believed in Easter as strongly as we did.
From the Gospels I also learned that, unlike my church, the biblical
record slows down rather than speeds up when it gets to Holy Week. The Gospels, said one early Christian
commentator, are chronicles of Jesus' final week with extended introductions.
The
author and preacher Tony Campolo delivers a stirring sermon adapted from an
elderly black pastor at his church in Philadelphia. "It's Friday, but Sunday's Comin'"
is the title of the sermon, and once you know the title you know the whole sermon. In a cadence that increases in tempo and in
volume, Campolo contrasts how the world looked on Friday -- when the forces of
evil won over the forces of good, when every friend and disciple fled in fear,
when the Son of God died on a cross -- with how it looked on Easter
Sunday. The disciples who lived through both days, Friday and Sunday, learned
that when God seems most absent he may be closest of all; when God looks most
powerless he may be most powerful; when God looks most dead he may be coming
back to life. They learned never to
count God out.
Campolo's
sermon skips one day, though. The other
two days, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, are perhaps the most significant days
on the entire church calendar, and yet, in a real sense, we live our lives on
Saturday, the day in between. Can we
trust that God can make something holy and beautiful and good out of a world
that includes Bosnia and Rwanda and inner-city ghettoes in the richest nation
on earth? Human history grinds on,
between the time of promise and fulfillment.
It's Saturday on planet Earth; will Sunday ever come?
Perhaps
that is why the authors of the Gospels devoted so much more space to Jesus'
last week than to the several weeks when he was making resurrection
appearances. They knew that the history
to follow would often resemble Saturday, the in-between day, more than Sunday,
the day of rejoicing. It is a good thing
to remember that in the cosmic drama, we live out our days on Saturday, the day
with no name.
1.
JESUS SAVES MY FAITH
"Why am I a Christian?" I sometimes ask myself, and to be perfectly
honest, the reasons reduce to two: (1) the lack of good alternatives and (2)
Jesus.
Martin Luther encouraged his students
to flee the hidden God and run to Christ, and I now know why. If I use a magnifying glass to examine a fine
painting, the object in the center of the glass stays crisp and clear, while
around the edges the view grows increasingly distorted. For me, Jesus has become the focal
point. I learned, in the process of writing
this book, to keep the magnifying glass of my faith focused on Jesus.
I tend to spend a lot of time
pondering unanswerable questions such as the problem of pain or providence
versus free will. When I do so,
everything becomes fuzzy. But if I look
at Jesus, clarity is restored.
Jesus gave no philosophical answer to
the problem of pain, but he did give an existential answer. I cannot learn from him why bad things occur,
but I can learn how God feels about it.
I look at how Jesus responds to the sisters of his good friend Lazarus,
or to a leprosy patient banned from the town gates. Jesus gives God a face, and that face is
streaked with tears.
Why doesn't God answer my
prayers? I do not know, but it helps me
to realize that Jesus himself knew something of that feeling. He prayed all night over his choice of
disciples, and still that list included one named Judas. In Gethsemane he threw himself on the ground,
crying out for some other way, but there was no other way. At its core, Gethsemane depicts, after all,
the story of an unanswered prayer. The
cup of suffering was not removed.
I can worry myself into a state of
spiritual paralysis over questions like "What good does it do to pray if
God already knows everything?"
Jesus silences such questions: If Jesus saw the need to pray, so should
I.
Mostly,
Jesus corrects my fuzzy conceptions of God.
Left on my own, I would come up with a very different notion of
God. My God would be static, unchanging. Because of Jesus, however, I must adjust
those instinctive notions. (Perhaps that
lay at the heart of his mission?) Jesus reveals a God who comes in search of
us, a God who makes room for our freedom even when it costs the Son's life, a
God who is vulnerable. Above all, Jesus
reveals a God who is love.
On our
own, would any of us come up with the notion of a God who loves and yearns to
be loved? Those raised in a Christian
tradition may miss the shock of Jesus' message, but in truth, love has never
been a normal way of describing what happens between human beings and their
God. Not once does the Qur'an apply the word love
to God. Aristotle stated bluntly,
"It would be eccentric for anyone to claim that he loved Zeus" -- or
that Zeus loved a human being, for that matter.
In dazzling contrast, the Christian Bible affirms, "God is
love" and cites love as the main reason Jesus came to earth: "This is
how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world
that we might live through him."
I remember a long night sitting in
uncomfortable Naugahyde chairs in O'Hare Airport, waiting impatiently for a
flight that was delayed for five hours.
Author Karen Mains happened to be traveling to the same conference. The long delay and the late hour combined to
create a melancholy mood. I was writing
the book "Disappointment with God" at the time, and I felt burdened
by other people's pains and sorrows, doubts and unanswered prayers.
Karen
listened to me in silence for a very long time, and then out of nowhere she
asked a question that has always stayed with me. "Philip, do you ever just let God love
you?" she said. "It's pretty
important, I think."
I realized with a start that she had
brought to light a gaping hole in my spiritual life. For all my absorption in the Christian faith,
I had missed the most important message of all.
The story of Jesus is the story of a celebration, a story of love. It involves pain and disappointment, yes, for
God as well as for us. But Jesus
embodies the promise of a God who will go to any length to get his family back.
____________
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./CHRISTIANITY
TODAY Magazine June 17, 1996, Vol. 40, No. 7, Page 29