The Man Jesus (Part 7): Jesus Overcame all Forms of Authority-Thinking

Chapter 17 "The Man Who Emerges" (Jesus Before Christianity)

Continuing with the section on "Confrontation", we come to chapter 17, a powerful chapter on the uniqueness of Jesus. The opening paragraph reads,

"Jesus is a much underrated man - underrated not only by those who think of him as nothing more than a teacher of religious truth but also by those who go to the opposite extreme of emphasizing his divinity in such a way that he ceases to be fully human. When one allows Jesus to speak for himself and when one tries to understand him without any preconceived ideas and within the context of his own times, what begins to emerge is a man of extraordinary independence, immense courage and unparalleled authenticity - a man whose insight defies explanation. To deprive this man of his humanity is to deprive him of his greatness.

The author explores the meaning of the term "Son of man" that Jesus used for himself. Nolan argues that because of his teachings in general, Jesus would not have intended that term to be a title of any sort but to have more to do with his great esteem for humans as humans and his solidarity with all humans. He so identified with humans that he eventually acquired a 'bad reputation'..."even John the Baptist (was) scandalized by the way he mixed socially with sinners, by the way he seemed to enjoy their company, by his permissiveness with regard to the laws, by his apparent disregard for the seriousness of sin and by his free and easy way of treating God..."

Much of the chapter focuses on how, unlike all others, Jesus insisted on not using any titles for Himself...Jesus wanted nothing to do with the whole idea of acting and speaking 'with authority' (the right to be obeyed by others): "...did Jesus claim authority, any kind of authority at all, even implicitly? Would it not be closer to the truth to say that what makes Jesus immeasurably greater than any other human being is precisely the fact that he spoke and acted without authority and that he regarded the 'exercise of authority' as a pagan characteristic. 

"Jesus was unique among the people of his time in his ability to overcome all forms of authority-thinking. The only authority which Jesus might be said to have appealed to was the authority of the truth itself. He did not make authority his truth, he made truth his authority...(He) did not expect others to obey him; he expected them to 'obey' the truth, to live truthfully.  ...by avoiding all authority-thinking, he released the power of truth itself - which is the power of God and indeed the power of faith.

"Somewhere at the heart of Jesus' mysterious personality there was a unique experience of intimate closeness to God - the Abba-experience...We know that the Abba-experience was an experience of God as a compassionate Father..."

The chapter ends saying, "The secret of Jesus' infallible insight and unshakeable convictions was his unfailing experience of solidarity with God, which revealed itself as an experience of solidarity with humanity and nature. This made him a uniquely liberated man, uniquely courageous, fearless, independent, hopeful and truthful. What would make anyone want to destroy such a man?..."

The Man Jesus (Part 6): Jesus Did Not Die for a Cause...

Chapters 15, 16 "Confrontation" (Jesus Before Christianity)

Continuing with the section on "Confrontation", we look now at chapters 15 and 16:

In chapter 15, the author proposes that there were two main temptations to violence for Jesus in the form of two particular incidents that Nolan views as attempts to get Jesus to take on the role of Messiah and lead an overthrow of Rome. (These would have been during the time of His hiding from and avoiding the authorities.) The first incident was the gathering of 4-5,000 men on the deserted hills near Bethsaida, which Nolan suggests may have likely been a gathering of men to persuade Him to lead them in a rebellion against Rome. (This gathering is typically known for the miracle of the loaves and fishes...)

The second incident was with Peter; a strong quarrel ensued over Jesus' talking about rejection and suffering while Peter saw the perfect opportunity for him to seize power and become Messiah.

Both incidents were real temptations and while there were likely practical reasons why Jesus knew such a revolution would never work, there was a greater reason for not yielding: "To have accepted the kingship over a people who had not transferred their allegiance to the 'kingdom' of God and to lead such people in battle was to play into the hands of Satan. It would have meant accepting power from Satan over a 'kingdom' which was itself without any loyalty to the 'kingdom' of God and encouraging them to use violence against another, albeit more godless kingdom. Nothing could be achieved for God's 'kingdom' in this way...Jesus would presumably have been willing to be Messiah-king if Israel had changed its ways and the 'kingdom' of God had come. Messiahship would then not have been a title of honor, prestige and power but a form of service, and the Gentiles would then have been brought into the 'kingdom' not by the power of the sword but by the power of faith and compassion."

In chapter 16 Nolan says that Jesus viewed suffering and death differently than the Jews: "The Jews had a long tradition of persecution and suffering. Theoretically the righteous person always suffered on account of his or her righteousness, and every faithful Jew was willing to die rather than disobey the law...The early Christians did not invent the idea of martyrdom nor the idea of an atoning and redemptive death; it was part of their Jewish heritage..."

Nolan speaks about the "paradox of compassion": "The one thing Jesus was determined to destroy was suffering...but the only way to destroy suffering is to give up all worldly values and suffer the consequences. Only the willingness to suffer can conquer suffering in the world...(Mk 8:35; Mt. 10:39; Jn 12:25; Lk 14:26)

The author goes on to say, "The Maccabean martyrs died for the law; the Zealots died to defend the sovereignty of Israel's God; other people have been willing to die for other causes. Jesus did not die for a cause. As he understood it, one should be willing to give up one's life for exactly the same reason as one gives up possessions, prestige, family and power, namely for others...Jesus was fully alive because he was willing to suffer and die not for a cause but for people...It is a willingness to die for all people. The willingness to die for some people would be an expression of group solidarity. The willingness to die for humankind is an expression of universal solidarity...(it) is a service rendered to all people."

And Jesus knew that in order to be in solidarity with suffering people, He would have to suffer, meaning He would have to come out of hiding and face those who were seeking to get rid of Him.

The Man Jesus (Part 5): Jesus Was Not Busy with a Religious Revival but with a Revolution

Chapters 13, 14  "Confrontation" (Jesus Before Christianity)

The next section of the book is comprised of seven chapters about the climax of Jesus' life and why he became such a target for both the Jewish leaders and for Rome. Nolan is attempting to peer into how the people in Jesus' day would have understood him and how he himself understood things before his followers later interpreted his life and words through an "end-of-the-world" lens. In this post we will look at chapters 13 and 14.

Chapter 13 looks at "politics and religion". The fact that Jesus of Nazareth was killed for high treason by Rome did not make him unique, because many thousands of Jewish revolutionaries were crucified by the Roman rulers of that day. Although the revolution that Jesus wanted certainly involved liberation of the Jews from oppressive rulers, his greater concern was that Israel have a change of heart. "...This is not a matter of resigning oneself to Roman oppression; nor is it a matter of trying to kill them with kindness. It is a matter of reaching down to the root cause of all oppression and domination: humanity's lack of compassion. If the people of Israel were to continue to lack compassion, would the overthrowing of the Romans make Israel any more liberated than before? If the Jews continued to live off the worldly values of money, prestige, group solidarity and power, would the Roman oppression not be replaced by an equally loveless Jewish oppression?..."

Unlike what many of us have been led to believe about the man Jesus, the men of his day would not have "thought of him as an eminently religious man who steered clear of politics and revolution. They would have seen him as a blasphemously irreligious man who under the cloak of religion was undermining all the values upon which religion, politics, economics and society were based...

He disapproved of (Rome's) way of 'making their authority felt' and their way of 'lording it over their subjects'. But he envisaged changing this by changing Israel so that Israel could present the Romans with a living example of the values and ideals of the 'kingdom.'"

"Jesus' social mixing with sinners in the name of God and his confidence that they (sinners) had God's approval while the virtuous did not were a violation of all that God and religion and virtue and justice had ever meant. But then Jesus was not busy with a religious revival; he was busy with a revolution - a revolution in religion and politics and everything else."

Chapter 14 deals with the dramatic confrontation between Jesus and the Jewish leaders which was the turning point in Jesus' life: the Temple incident. Up till this point he was confronting the men of religion but now confronts the men of affairs, the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem who were exploiting the poor.

This chapter tries to answer questions such as how did Jesus and his intentions become sufficiently well known to be of national concern so that the authorities wanted to arrest him while the people wanted to make him king? Why did he have to withdraw and become a fugitive? The timing of the temple confrontation has much to do with the answers to these questions.

The gospels are confusing concerning when this temple incident took place, but Nolan cites sources and proposes that it took place early in Jesus' public ministry as told in the gospel of John (rather than just before his death as Mark, Luke and Matthew tell it). This confrontation propelled Jesus into the national limelight. Because of this angry demonstration by Jesus towards the economic exploitation of the people's devotion and piety by the Temple system (for example, the widow giving her last penny), Jesus and his disciples were forced to change their whole way of life because of the danger they were in.

Jesus had been preaching about the need for Israel's change of heart in order to escape the coming catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem, but it was this confrontation in the Temple that made him a figure of national importance and forced the leaders to make a decision about taking action concerning him. They were further worried about the fact that he seemed to have great influence over the people. All of this caused Jesus to avoid going to Jerusalem and also to Galilee (where Herod was after him too) and when he did go to Jerusalem, it was under cover.

The Man Jesus (Part 4): Good News about a Reversal of Fortunes in the New Kingdom-Society

A personal comment to start this section - as I considered afresh the implications of the "reversal of fortunes" that Jesus' kingdom society brings, I saw in a new way that this "good news" isn't necessarily heard as "good" news by those in power in earthly kingdoms (which is why Jesus was put to death). Ultimately all people are blessed by living according to the values of God's kingdom but fear of scarcity hinders the powerful from seeing this.

Chapters 6-12 "Good News" (Jesus Before Christianity)

The third section is comprised of seven chapters (chapters 6 through 12) about "Good News" in which the author focuses on the "kingdom of God" and how utterly different it is from all of the kingdoms of this world.

In chapter 6 Nolan writes of how Jesus understood the kingdom of God; the most common ways Jesus talked about the kingdom of God was through the pictures of a household or a walled city: "The fact that his way of speaking about the 'kingdom' is based upon a pictorial image of a house, a city or a community leaves no doubt about what he had in mind: a politically structured society of people here on earth. A 'kingdom' is a thoroughly political notion...The difference is between a community of humankind in which evil reigns supreme and a community of humankind in which goodness reigns supreme...Jesus was convinced that the 'kingdom' of God would eventually triumph over the 'kingdom' of Satan and replace that 'kingdom' here on earth."

The next four chapters are chapters dealing with the value system of God's kingdom and how radically different God views these matters; the author presents all of this in light of the world Jesus lived in and gives insights to what Jesus' words and actions meant in His day: 

Chapter 7: The "Kingdom" and Money: "(Acts 2; 4:32, 34,35) This then is what selling all one's possessions means: giving up the surplus and treating nothing as your own...Jesus did not idealize poverty. On the contrary his concern was to ensure that no one should be in want, and it was to this end that he fought possessiveness and encouraged people to be unconcerned about wealth and to share their material possessions...Jesus dared to hope for a 'kingdom' or world-wide community which would be so structured that there would be no poor and no rich."

Chapter 8: The "Kingdom" and Prestige: In Jesus' world prestige was even more important than money. "Status and prestige were based on ancestry, wealth, authority, education and virtue..."
In Mark 10:14 Jesus says his kingdom will be one of "children" or "of those who are like children because in society they are insignificant; they lack status and prestige."

Chapter 9: The "Kingdom" and Solidarity: Group solidarity - loyalty to those in our group - is something that all societies understand, even our western individualistic society. "Jesus extended one's neighbor to include one's enemies. He could not have found a more effective way of shocking his audience into the realization that he wished to include all people in this solidarity of love. The saying is almost unbearably paradoxical: the natural contradiction between neighbor and enemy, between outsiders and insiders must be overlooked and overcome so that enemies become kin and all outsiders become insiders!"

Chapter 10: The "Kingdom" and Power: "Society and power are inseparable. A society must have a structure and that structure will have something to do with power. The issue of power and the structures of power...is what we today call politics." Jesus' words in Lk. 6:20; 14:11; 12:32; 22:29,30 all indicate that "there is going to be a reversal in fortunes...The power of this new society is not a power which has to be served...It is a power which has an enormous influence in the lives of people by being of service to them."

Chapter 11 deals with the idea of "time". This is a fascinating chapter in which Nolan contrasts the way Westerners view time (more quantitative) with the way a Hebrew views time (qualitative). "For the Hebrew, to know the time was not a matter of knowing the date, it was a matter of what kind of time it might be...Time was the quality or mood of events...When individuals reach a fixed point, for example, the Passover festival or a time of famine, they become in a sense contemporaneous with their ancestors and their successors who have passed or will pass through the same qualitative time. The individual's ancestors and successors share the same kind of time, no matter how many intervening years there happen to be between them."

Jesus was announcing that there was coming a time qualitatively different from anything that went before. "It will be a qualitatively new time, not a new measurement of time" (as we westerners would assume)...The newness of Jesus' time can hardly be exaggerated." We are not to confuse John the Baptist's message (of doom) with Jesus message (of good news). "Goodness is triumphing over evil." This can be seen in all that Jesus did and said: "God has come down from the heavenly throne, the highest position of prestige in the world, to be intimately close to men, women and children, who may now address God as abba...The success of the cures and of all Jesus' liberating activity showed him that God felt with those who suffer, that God wanted to live in solidarity with humanity and to use the godly power to serve them and protect them."

In chapter 12 Nolan concludes this long section on "good news" by talking about the coming of the 'kingdom' as miraculous: "In view of the extraordinarily high values that are supposed to reign supreme in this 'kingdom', it should not be difficult to appreciate that its coming would be a miracle...This kind of 'kingdom' can only come, it cannot be built...The 'kingdom' itself cannot be achieved, it must be received - as a gift."

Although Jesus didn't know the time of the coming kingdom, the urgency in His preaching was because He understood that if there was no repentance, for sure a catastrophe would come; and the catastrophe did come with the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 CE, to be followed with a merciless massacre in 135 CE when the Romans completely destroyed the nation of Israel and expelled the Jews from Palestine.

Nolan ends the chapter by saying that in order for us to recover what Jesus meant to the people of His day (before Christianity), we need to read the gospels without the "apocalyptized" process being applied to them. He attempts to do this in the following chapters.

The Man Jesus (Part 3): The Company of Jesus was Sheer Joy for Anyone Not Too Hung up on Respectability

Chapters 3,4,5 "Praxis" (Jesus Before Christianity)

Following up from the previous post (Jesus Identifies with John Baptist), we'll look at the second section of Albert Nolan's book which deals with the activity of Jesus in light of the conditions of humanity in His world. There are three chapters in this section.

In chapter three Nolan tells about the sort of people that Jesus gave most of His attention to. Scripture uses the following descriptors for them: "the poor, the blind, the lame, the crippled, the lepers, the hungry, the miserable (those who weep), sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors, demoniacs, the persecuted, the downtrodden, the captives, all who labor and are overburdened, the rabble who know nothing of the law, the crowds, the little ones, the least, the last and the babes or the lost sheep of the house of Israel."

The author gives a description of the different classes in society in that day and says that Jesus was from the middle class (not to be mistaken for what we call "middle class" in our day). "The remarkable thing about Jesus was that, although he came from the middle class and had no appreciable disadvantages himself, he mixed socially with the lowest of the low and identified himself with them. He became an outcast by choice."

Nolan's main point in chapter 3 is that "what made Jesus different was the unrestrained compassion he felt for the poor and the oppressed."

In chapters 4 and 5 Nolan continues to explore Jesus' actions towards the disenfranchised by looking at healing and forgiveness. Chapter 4 contains some very interesting insights on His healing work, pointing out how different Jesus' approach to healing was from other healers of His time.

Chapter 5 is about forgiveness and how Oriental people of the first century looked at sin and its link with sickness and trouble. This is a beautiful chapter about Jesus' friendship with "sinners" and how He enjoyed being with them and they with Him. 

"It would be impossible to overestimate the impact these (festive) meals must have had upon the poor and the sinners. By accepting them as friends and equals Jesus had taken away their shame, humiliation and guilt. By showing them that they mattered to him as people, he gave them a sense of dignity and released them from their captivity...Moreover, because Jesus was looked upon as a man of God and a prophet, they would have interpreted his gesture of friendship as God's approval of them. They were now acceptable to God. Their sinfulness, ignorance and uncleanness had been overlooked and were no longer held against them....There can be no doubt that Jesus was a remarkably cheerful person and that his joy, like his faith and hope, was infectious...The poor and the oppressed and anyone else who was not too hung up on 'respectability' found the company of Jesus a liberating experience of sheer joy...He made them feel safe and secure...His very presence had liberated them."
 
In healing and forgiving and befriending the disenfranchised, Jesus had no motivation to prove anything but was simply moved by deep compassion.

The Man Jesus (Part 2): Jesus Identifies with John Baptist, Not the Religious Groups

Chapters 1,2 "Catastrophe" (Jesus Before Christianity)

In the first chapter Nolan paints a word picture of the world we live in today and of the world that Jesus was born into; he proposes that the times we live in now bear similarities to the days of Jesus, although what we face is on a much larger scale. Both then and now there is an awareness and sense that the world is on the brink of disaster, headed toward a hell on earth.

The following is a summary statement by Nolan about the world we live in:"...What we are up against is not people but the impersonal forces of a system which has its own momentum and its own dynamics...We have built up an all-inclusive political and economic system based upon certain assumptions and values and now we are beginning to realize that this system is not only counter-productive - it has brought us to the brink of disaster - but it has also become our master. Nobody seems to be able to change it or control it. The most frightening discovery of all is that there is nobody at the helm and that the impersonal machine that we have so carefully designed will drag us along inexorably to our destruction."
The author's concern is that we look at how Jesus lived in His difficult world in order to understand how we must be with Him in our world.

In chapter two the author shows why it was significant that Jesus identified with John the Baptist rather than with any of the Jewish religious groups that existed in His day. The religious groups of his day were the Zealots (open rebels against Rome), Pharisees (moralistic group whose interest was in reforming Israel), Sadducees (chief priests/ruling upper class who collaborated with the Romans endeavoring to maintain the status quo), the Essenes (who believed they were the only faithful remnant of Israel and separated themselves from society in response to the belief that the end of the world was near), scribes and scholars (most of whom were Pharisees but not priests), and apocalyptic writers (anonymous seers/visionaries who believed that the secrets of God's plans for humanity and the end of the world had been revealed to them).

Nolan says the following about John the Baptist and Jesus:
"In the midst of all these religio-political movements and speculations there was one man who stood out as a sign of contradiction. John the Baptist was different precisely because he was a prophet...a prophet of doom and destruction...There had been no prophet in Israel for a very long  time. The spirit of prophecy had been quenched. God was silent...This silence was broken by the voice of John the Baptist in the wilderness...God's fiery judgment upon Israel would be executed, according to John, by a human being. John spoke of him as 'the one who is to come'...

"John the Baptist was the only person in that society who impressed Jesus...the very fact of his baptism by John is conclusive proof of his acceptance of John's basic prophecy: Israel was heading for an unprecedented catastrophe. And in choosing to believe this prophecy, Jesus immediately shows himself to be in basic disagreement with all those who reject John and his baptism: the Zealots, Pharisees, Essenes, Sadducees, scribes and apocalyptic writers. None of these groups would have been willing to believe a prophet who...prophesied against all Israel...Jesus (himself) repeated this prophecy again and again throughout his life...

"There can be no doubt that Jesus did prophesy the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans...The very thought of it made Jesus weep (Lk. 19:41)...But what was he to do about it?"

The following chapters deal with what Jesus did about it in practice.

The Man Jesus (Part 1): Jesus Belongs to all Humanity

As stated in my previous post, I will be doing a series of posts with quotes from the book, Jesus Before Christianity, by Albert Nolan. I will only give "teasers"; some of the quotes will be controversial to some readers and won't be fully understandable without reading the full text, but perhaps it may whet the appetite for more.

Nolan says the following in speaking about this book in particular:

"...Nothing about Jesus will be presupposed or assumed. The reader is invited to take a serious and honest look at a man who lived in first-century Palestine and to try to see him through the eyes of his contemporaries. My interest is in the man as he was before he became the object of Christian faith...

"...the book was (not) written for the apologetic purpose of defending the Christian faith. No attempt has been made to save Jesus or the Christian faith. Jesus does not need me or anyone else to save him...If our search for the truth leads us to faith in Jesus, then it will not be because we have tried to save this faith at all costs, but because we have discovered it as the only way in which we can be 'saved' or liberated..."

The following is a quote from the opening chapter:

"Jesus cannot be fully identified with that great religious phenomenon of the Western world known as Christianity. He was much more than the founder of one of the world's great religions. He stands above Christianity as the judge of all it has done in his name. Nor can historical Christianity claim him as its exclusive possession. Jesus belongs to all humanity."

The Man Jesus

My greatest joy since retiring has been further pursuit of God in Jesus. While this has been at the forefront of most of my life, in the years since I retired, I've had the opportunity to step away from the confines of "Christendom" and discover a wide and boundless ocean of love and goodness in God as manifested in Christ Jesus beyond that which I had ever known before.

I continue to be awestruck by this Person, Jesus of Nazareth, in ever-increasing measure! It's like opening a door into the wonder of such a person only to find another door to walk through into more of His beauty, and that door opening into another door into another and another...

A few years ago I did a series of blog posts with quotes from Albert Nolan's book, Jesus Before Christianity. This book remains one of my favorite books about Jesus. For the next few posts I will be re-looking at this book with the prayer that others will be freshly struck by how utterly human and good Jesus was in His walk on earth and why humans could not tolerate the goodness and grace of such a Man.

I remember as a young adult having a dream in which I was part of a Christian church congregation that was deliberating over Jesus, and in the end we voted against Him. That was perhaps my first peek into the antagonism between Jesus and religious systems. Nolan shows that Jesus reveals what God is really like and explains why religious and political systems of Jesus' day could not allow Him to live. It's important that we understand this in order to understand how each generation of Jesus followers faces the same realities. I hope you will be blessed by the summary of the book and encourage you to read the book for yourself.

Loving Truth Allows for Not Knowing

We humans love to know, and the internet has opened the world of knowledge to a whole new level. I believe one reason we want to gain knowledge is that it gives us a sense of control in our lives. Bit by bit as I have lost certainty about some of the information I've believed about God and about the Bible (subjects I thought I had a lot of certainty about in the past), I'm discovering freedom and peace in not being so sure about a lot. I'm discovering that "knowing" in God doesn't primarily mean being certain about everything related to Him. "Knowing" in God includes honest doubting and questioning and not knowing. Truth is meant to be loved, not always known. George MacDonald understood this and said the following:

"To know God is to be in the secret place of all knowledge; and to trust him changes the whole outlook surrounding mystery and seeming contradictions and unanswered questions from one of doubt or fear or bewilderment to one of hope...Not to be intellectually certain of a truth does not prevent the heart that loves and obeys that truth from getting the goodness out of it, from drawing life from it because it is loved, not because it is understood."  (from MacDonald's book, "The Lady's Confession")

"Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest heart. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have yet to be understood...Doubts must precede every deeper assurance. For uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed."   (from "Discovering the Character of God")

This is not to advocate for laziness in seeking truth, but it is allowing space for not knowing. It is to be at peace with mystery...

Morality or Mortality?

Picture framing is an art. The color and design emphasize certain aspects of a painting and lead the viewer to see the artwork in a particular way.

In recent years as I've reconsidered the picture of God's story and His relationship with His creation, I'm learning to re-frame that picture through the writings of authors such as Richard Beck. In his wonderful book, The Slavery of Death, he presents why he believes that humanity's predicament has more to do with mortality than with morality. In other words, our fear of death is the better framework for the picture of humanity's basic problem than sin is.

Beck says: "Death, not sin, is the primary predicament of the human condition. Death is the cause of sin. More properly, the fear of death produces most of the sin in our lives."

As I have read Beck's work and looked into some of the theology of the early church fathers, I've come to appreciate this framing of humanity's problem over the framing that many of us in modern western Christianity have inherited. Many throughout church history have understood that humanity's need is more for a Deliverer than for a Judge. In other words, rather than born sinful, we are born mortal and therefore fearful of death.

This is not a denial of the reality of sin, but an understanding that sin is the symptom of something deeper at work holding us captive (Heb. 2:14,15)

In an affluent society, the fear of death often takes on the form of neurotic anxieties, such as fears related to self esteem or not having significance and acceptance from others. And in our desire to be immortal, we attach ourselves to causes or organizations or religious groups that will last beyond our lifetime; or we place our hopes in our children's success as a way to ensure our success; we compete for positions and for recognition...etc.

Three reasons I like this framework:  first, it highlights God's gracious compassion towards humans.  God is loving Creator and Father who in great compassion for His creation comes in His Son to rescue humanity from the bondage of the fear of death by defeating it through His own death, forgiving, healing and reconciling us back to Himself to live in fellowship with Him; in that living fellowship we are empowered to walk free of anxieties that drive us to sinful practices.

Second, it doesn't pit Jesus against God. In other words, it doesn't present Jesus as taking our side against God's anger towards humans; but rather it shows that God and Jesus have always been of one mind in unconditional, unchanging love for weak humans and that they are in agreement about our need for deliverance from that which holds us captive to the fear of death.

Third, it sees humans through a more compassionate lens and moves us away from our tendency to see people primarily as sinners who should be judged and condemned. Rather, we see humans as born fearful and driven to sin because of the desperate need to escape death by whatever means.

(Much of the way we frame God and His story is rooted in our beliefs about the atonement. If you're interested in viewing an interesting presentation of contrasting views of the atonement, you can go to this link:  The Gospel in Chairs.) 

How to Wash Feet...

The quote below from Dietrich Bonhoeffer helps paint a picture of what it looks like for Jesus' followers to wash the feet of others in His name:

"In the midst of discipline, the entire fullness of the Holy Spirit wants to unfold and to ripen, and we should give it full space within us for the sake of God, for the sake of others, and for our own sake. The entire world of God, the dear Father, wants to be born in us, to grow and ripen. Love—where only suspicion and hostility reign; joy—instead of bitterness and pain; peace—amid internal and external strife; patience—where impatience threatens to overwhelm us; kindness—where only raw and hard words seem to make any difference; goodness—where understanding and empathy seem like weakness; faithfulness—where long separations and enormous changes in all relationships seek to rock the foundations of even what is most stable; gentleness—where recklessness and selfishness seem to be the only ways to reach one’s goals; self-control—where short term pleasures seem to be the only reasonable option and all bonds are about to dissolve."

In a world where hostility, sadness, strife, impatience, harshness, meanness, infidelity, brashness and self-indulgence wear and tear people down, the fruit of the Spirit of Jesus at work through us brings refreshing as did the washing of tired and dirty feet in Jesus' day.

Galatians 5:22,23 "The Spirit however, produces in human life fruits such as these: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, fidelity, tolerance and self-control—and no law exists against any of them."

Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Badly

Scripture is full of stories that show us that God doesn't expect great and perfect works from those who follow Him. However, it's common for us to have illusions of grandeur and perfection; i.e., we believe that the measure of approval we will get from God is dependent on how much we do and how close to perfection we can do it.

Over and over we read of those whose small sincere and often faulty obedience was all it took for God to do great things. The point of these stories is that it's God who does the great things with our small and inadequate actions because of His great care for humans.

One such story is that of the young boy's offering of his loaves and fish to Jesus (John 6). This was a poor inadequate offer on the boy's part in the sense that it didn't come close to meeting the need represented by the crowd's hunger. But Jesus, unperturbed by the tiny bit of food and caring that the people were hungry, unhesitatingly accepted the "foolish" offering and used it to satisfy the hunger of the large crowd.

Often in our lives we labor under feelings of inadequacy or guilt that we aren't fasting or praying enough or doing great enough things for God, but this kind of heavy burden indicates that our focus is more on how much and how well we're serving than on His desire and His ability to take our small and feeble offering and multiply it into blessing for many.

In our fallenness we are prone to look inward at how well we are performing for God rather than to look up and away from ourselves to Him and to His desire to do much with the little that we give Him in faith.

Religion requires perfectionism; God asks simply that we trust. Perfectionism focuses on my offering to God and on getting it right (self-rightness); trust focuses on God and His perfect love and work in Jesus. Perfectionism attempts to compete with God's work; trust responds with utter dependence on God's self-giving work.

We've all heard the saying, "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well." G.K. Chesterton reworded this to say: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." This isn't advocating sloppiness or carelessness but simply acknowledging that God desires our inadequate offerings of love and that we must not allow perfectionism to paralyze us because we can't "do it well".

The young boy didn't allow self-conscious fear of inadequacy keep him from giving what he had, trusting that Jesus would do well with it. He had his eyes set on Jesus rather than on the insufficient lunch in his hands.

Good News: God is Not Angry with You

In one of his novels, George MacDonald has young Robert saying the following to his grandmother (who had been raised with a view of God as an angry God requiring punishment to turn away His wrath toward humans):

Robert: "It's more for our sakes than His own that God cares about his glory. I don't believe that he thinks about his glory except for the sake of truth and men's hearts dying for lack of it...

"God's not like a proud man to take offense, Grannie. There's nothing that please him like the truth, and there's nothing that displeases him like lying, particularly when it's pretended praise...you say some things about him sometimes that sound fearsome to me...
Like when you speak of him as if he was a poor proud man, full of his own importance and ready to be down on anybody that didn't call him by the name of his office - always thinking about his own glory, instead of the quiet mighty grand self-forgetting, all-creating being that he is. Think of the face of that man of sorrows that never said a hard word to a sinful woman or a despised publican. Was he thinking about his own glory, do you think? And whatever isn't like Christ isn't like God."
 
Grannie: "But laddie, Christ came to satisfy God's justice by suffering the punishment due to our sins, to turn aside his wrath and curse. So Jesus couldn't be altogether God."

Robert: "Oh but he is, Grannie. He came to satisfy God's justice by giving him back his children, by making them see that God was just, by sending them back home to fall at his feet...And there isn't a word of reconciling God to us in the New Testament, for there was no need of that; it was us that needed to be reconciled to him...It wasn't his own sins or God's wrath that caused him suffering, but our own sins. And he took them away. He took our sins upon him, for he came into the middle of them and took them up - by no sleight of hand, by no quibbling of the preachers about imputing his righteousness to us and such like. But he took them and took them away and here am I, Grannie, growing out of my sins in consequence..."

Self-denial: Interpreting Language

There's more to language than simply the surface meaning of words. Language is laden with unconscious meaning that comes from sources such as family upbringing and experiences, gender and personality, etc.  For understanding hidden and unconscious meaning in a language, the hearer must care about the speaker and about the "world" they speak out of.

I've been thinking lately about the way of love which God exemplified and demonstrated in Jesus. The thought came to me that if I want to love and accept those I have contact with, I must be willing to listen to their words in the context of the world from which they speak. This applies, not only to a person from a different language from mine but to persons who speak my native tongue.

The book of John has approximately 27 stories of personal encounters that Jesus had with very different people. As far as I know, Jesus and each of them spoke the same language of that day and location. But because each person was uniquely formed by their "world" (upbringing, life experience, status, gender, vocation, personality, etc), Jesus listened and spoke differently to each of them. He heard "their language", understanding what they were trying to say and then He responded in "their language". I believe His love and compassion motivated Him to make the effort to truly understand "their language" in order to relate well with them.

In these times of polarization in society at many levels, I'm realizing my need to make the effort to listen with love and care to really "hear" what the person is saying rather than take their words literally and insisting on interpreting them through "my language". This is part of self-giving love, the self-denial to which we who follow Jesus are called for the sake of love.

The Journey IS the Goal

I've had a recent setback in my journey towards recovery, and as I was silently listening one day, a thought came to me along the lines of the following: "the journey is the goal." As I considered that, I realized afresh that we humans typically see the goal as some "shiny object" out there that we're working for and we miss the reality that this day, this moment, is the goal, and how I live it will determine where I arrive one day. 

I'm not saying that having goals is wrong or bad but that it's wise to be aware that focusing too intently on that "shiny object" can prevent us from enjoying God and others and oneself today on the journey. I read the following poem recently in a Lent devotional reading along these lines:

Patient Trust
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing though
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

~Pierre Teilhard di Chardin, SJ

Letting Go and Giving Up

I was recently on a panel in a small gathering of college young women. We were gathered to tackle their questions about dating and marriage and family and singleness. One question asked was something to this effect: "Does being content in singleness mean I relinquish my desire to be married?"

In my journey of injury and pain, I remember that around 2-3 years into it, there was a moment when I let go of the idea that I might walk again without the aid of a device. I accepted the reality that perhaps I would need help the rest of my life with walking. In some circles of faith, this is anything but faith! But I had a sense of peace in letting go of my determination to walk independently someday.

This, however, didn't mean that I gave up on a normal desire; you can't really let go of what is normal human desire without dehumanizing yourself to do so. But I placed that human desire within the space of peace. I continue to work towards wholeness in my injured leg but now I do so in and with peace, without trying to control the outcome. (Control, by the way, always has some form of fear behind it.)

All this to say that I believe that letting go and giving up on certain good normal desires doesn't mean that the desire leaves us. It simply means we cease to try to control and force the outcome but instead we give the desire a place of peace to dwell in as we continue to hold it in our being.