Beyond all of that, as I sit here, drinking my magic morning elixir through which I become a human being every morning, I can't help but think back to yesterday's Gospel reading...John 9, for those of you who don't use the Revised Common Lectionary. I chose to take a slightly tamer (or is that lamer?) route in my preaching of the text (see the forthcoming video), but the more I think about it, the more dominant the image of Jesus as radically subversive proves to be.
Wait, what? Jesus as subversive? That can't be right! Jesus is the perfect image of law-n-order, conservatism, "family values" (as long as your family looks like they belong in a laundry detergent commercial), and Prozac-colored blue skies and butterflies, isn't He? Let's consider that in light of the Gospel reading. Jesus...
-Completely rejects the dominant theology of the time. A person's misfortune is not, in fact, divine retribution for wrongdoing. In other words, the poor, and AIDS patients, and people with mental illness, or who come from broken homes and suffer from emotional disorders don't just "have it coming" because they're "bad people."
-Dares to interact with the rejected. He doesn't just drop a coin in the guy's empty McDonald's cup, or refuse to look him in the eye while saying "sorry, I don't have any change."
-Anoints him. Yes, that's right - anoints him. Learn some Greek - the word translated as "spread" or "smear" here is the same word as "anoint." Now HERE is some mind-bending stuff. Not only is Jesus, literally, getting down in the dirt with the lowest of the low...Jesus is ANOINTING (the sign of, among other things, the coronation of a king) the lowest of the low. Who do YOU think is the apple of God's eye here - wealthy, healthy, upwardly mobile movers-n-shakers? Or is Jesus up to something different?
-Calls out the Religious Right of the time period. It's bad exegesis to do this in some ways, but if we're going to layer contemporary realities onto the text, the Pharisees are the Pat Robertsons, etc. of the four gospels. They insist upon literalistic, rigid, legalistic readings of the scriptures, which ultimately just isolate people from one another as they emphasize who's in, and who's out, by casting the less-than-perfect as unrighteous dolts who deserve every misfortune they get. They're also violent, power-hungry hypocrites. And...Jesus calls them (I'm paraphrasing) as lost as geese in a hailstorm. The ones who claim to "get" what God's all about actually are total failures on the "understanding God" front because they can't see past their own selfishness, hard-heartedness, and judgmental dispositions.
When we try to tame Jesus down to being a benign endorser of all of our ideas of what counts as "righteousness," we lose touch with what the scriptures actually SAY about Jesus. Jesus doesn't give a nice, big thumbs-up to the way things are; Jesus relentlessly challenges the systems of exclusion and oppression that human society excels at creating. And, as much as I'm stepping on my own toes here, I'll say it - when we think we've got Jesus all figured out and put into a nice, red-white-and-blue box that fits in perfectly with what we'd LIKE to think is the way things ought to be, then we've lost sight of Jesus and started worshipping ourselves....and if there's one thing the Bible isn't ambiguous about, it's idolatry. Maybe we need to let Jesus come bursting through the walls of that box (like the SNL skit where Janet Reno busts in on Will Farrell-as-Janet-Reno and breaks up the party) and remind us, again, that when we follow Him, we're called to be outsiders by the standards of this world, not the grinning face of middle class prosperity.
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