Several pictures of Jesus stand out from my childhood. In one he is carrying a lost lamb on his shoulders, with the rest of the obedient flock in the background. (That was in the room where the Sunday School met; the implication for us wayward children was obvious.) In another he stands at a door and knocks. The third is at the garden of Gethsemane, when he kneels and fervently prays. The largest one was behind the pulpit of my father’s church, Jesus walking on a path along the Sea of Galilee. In all of them, Jesus is tall and white and handsome. The backgrounds are idyllic; the setting Victorian. Jesus could be knocking at the house where Santa Claus lives, for all we know.
In my current church there is a picture of Jesus that is clearly more modern. He is still white, but now bearded, and laughing. No longer is he the somber, you’d-better-watch-out Jesus of the nineteenth century. This is definitely a 1960s portrait. Only his head shows, but you can sure that he’s wearing sandals. He might even have beads around his neck!
How can we reconcile this friendly, mild-mannered Jesus with what we read in Scripture? “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword,” the letter to the Hebrews tells us, “piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” And in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus calls remarriage adultery, and says that it is practically impossible for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God. No wonder his disciples object! This is not the warm, fuzzy “What a friend we have in Jesus” that they’ve been looking for. This is a demanding Jesus who turns every expectation upside down.
I think that’s why I’ve always had a problem with some of the revival hymnody of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It’s just a little too chummy, too focused on the self. “And he walks with me, and he talks with me” is reassuring, no doubt, but hardly how one would describe a person who drives out moneychangers with a whip of cords.
Yet in the midst of that severity, there is always love. The rich young man got off to a rocky start by calling Jesus good teacher. But his earnestness and his devotion to right behavior impressed Jesus, who looked searchingly at him and loved him. Jesus wanted him on board. So he asked him to do one more thing – the very thing that it turned out he could not do.
That’s where the living and active word of God appears, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joint from marrow. Nothing is hidden from God. And God demands nothing else than all of us. If there is anything in our lives that is more important than God, it must go. For some, that means selling what they own and giving money to the poor. For others, it will mean leaving home and family. (I should point out that, in spite of Peter’s statement that the disciples had left everything, it appears that he still had a house in which his mother-in-law lived, and a boat from which to fish.) The critical element is to jettison whatever separates us from God, and then obey Jesus’ words: “Come, follow me.”
Can that be captured in a picture? Probably not. Besides, no one wants to meditate on a painting of someone walking away from Jesus, grieving and shocked – especially not a rich man. We’d rather have our prosperity gospel. We’d rather believe that being rich is a sign of being blessed by God. But that’s a blog entry for another day!
Pentecost 19 – Job 23:1-19, 16-17; Psalm 22:1-15; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-21
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
We heard quite a bit about St. Francis over the weekend. Everyone loves him; he talks to birds, says sweet things about "brother sun" and "sister moon," has a good prayer about being instruments of peace.
People prefer not to think about his absolute commitment to Lady Poverty, or his work with the lepers, or the stigmata. Francis is one of the greatest of all saints, but not without these aspects. Part of the miracle is that he can be as innocent and happy as a child right in the midst of washing lepers and scrounging food from the garbage heap.
I agree about the so-called "Gospel hymns" of the urban revival movement. They tend to make the Gospel very comfortable and genteel. There are some that are still worth singing, but for the most part the style is a debasement of the old shape-note and early camp meeting hymns, which were not mild-mannered and genteel at all.
My colleagues in evangelical circles tell me that the revival hymns have almost disappeared from active use in their churches, having been replaced from the 1970's onward by something worse: the "Contemporary Christian" genre. CCM songs make Fanny Crosby and W. H. Doane look mighty good, in retrospect.
Sometimes when I am driving alone I'll listen to an evangelical radio station, where Christian faith is actually considered something that matters in everyday life. But I never listen to the "songs." The music is vapid and the theology even more self-centered than the revivalists. If what we sing forms what we believe, evangelicals are in trouble.
I agree with your comments about St. Francis. Maybe that's why I prefer St. John of the Cross and his ilk: there's nothing about him that can be made sappy and obscure the fire within, a refining fire found also in Francis.
Post a Comment