July
1, 2012
David Timbs
Jesus
is too much for us
An
element, integral to the Gospel story is that Jesus underwent something akin to
a profound conversion experience
despite the fact that he himself was sinless and in no need of repentance. At
some stage in his human consciousness, he became keenly aware of the desperate
plight of the people around him. Perhaps it was the preaching of John the
Baptist that jolted Jesus into his own sense of an ethical apocalyptic, that
is, the revelation of God’s moral claim on the world and on humanity and of
God’s wish that humanity be restored to wholeness.
Jesus’
encounter with John was probably key to this understanding. Sinless though he
was, he submitted himself to a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin.
Jesus identified himself with humanity, sinful, estranged and alienated from
God. It was this conversion that
provides the context for the descent of God’s Spirit upon him and for his
vocation as the Son, the beloved, in whom God
is well pleased.
Immediately
after his baptism, Jesus, now full of the Spirit moves off alone into the
chaotic world of the demons in order to serve notice on their native ground that
he was here to stay and that he would get the better of them. He was aware that
the power of the demon lay in its
capacity to strip people of their human integrity and drive them to despair.
Jesus himself would meet this demon again in Gethsemane.
After
this opening contest, the first great act of Jesus’ ministry was to go home to
visit his family and clan.
Luke’s
setting is probably on the feast of Yom
Kippur and at the beginning of the Jubilee
Year, decreed in Jewish law to be
observed every fiftieth year. Jesus pays a visit to his home town of Nazareth
and it was in the meeting place for the local worshipping community that Jesus
was invited to read the passage for the day. The prescribed text for that solemn
occasion was from the third book of Isaiah 61: 1-2,
The
spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to
the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of
sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the
acceptable year of the Lord. (Lk
4: 18-19)
Jesus
immediately scandalized his own folk by announcing that the words of Isaiah
would be the programme for his public life. He made it clear that he felt most
at home with those who were the victims of oppression and that the ancient
commands of God etched into the collective Israelite psyche would be honoured in
his words and deeds,
You
shall do no wrong to a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the
land of Egypt ….. You shall not
oppress a stranger; you know the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers
in the land of Egypt.
(Ex 22: 21; 22: 9) ….. learn to do good; seek justice,
correct oppression. Defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. (Is 1:
17)
Jesus
was extremely conscious of the oppression and burden people experienced as a
result of the intense application of the Mosaic Law and the myriad regulations
which flowed from it. His parables constantly reflected popular oppressions of
many kinds: social and religious alienation resulting from class discrimination,
association, ritual uncleanness or disease; the bitter hardship of heavy
Herodian taxation and the ongoing tensions between the peasant farmer and the
wealthy landowners. In word and dramatic gesture, Jesus revealed that he felt
natively at home in this world and that he identified with its excluded and
despised people. They were his family, his mother, his sisters and his brothers.
Theirs was the Kingdom of God.
In
Mark’s brutally confronting narrative, Jesus is depicted as being so involved
with the wrong people, those scorned as sinners and outcasts by Jewish religious
authorities, that his own blood family determined that he had lost his mind. For
the sake of family honour and for his own wellbeing, they came to rescue
him. The scribes and Pharisees, following their own script, attributed his
behaviour to demonic possession (Mk 3: 20-30).
Jesus
continued to agitate and disturb both clan and religious opponents with his
outrageous preaching and
action. He so affronted and scandalized the people of his own village that their
faithlessness rendered him utterly powerless. Jesus became himself the primary
symbol of those he stood by and represented the rejected, the outcast and the
excluded ones.
Luke
illustrates just how deeply offensive and subversive the parables of Jesus were
in the ears of his audience. He asked questions and demanded answers which
defied logic. Jesus was unreasonable. When criticised by the religious
authorities for eating with toll collectors and sinners, Jesus took hold of
their world of comfortable moralising and turned it on its head. He told them
three stories of loss and the lengths to which a shockingly uneconomical God
will go in search of the alienated. But Jesus stresses reason to its limits as
he ventures even further into the territories of the unimaginable and
preposterous.
What
if, Jesus might suggest to the sanctimonious religious bean counters, the
lost sheep is GOD, the lost coin is the missing GOD, that the prodigal son is
the prodigal GOD, that Zacchaeus up the tree is GOD on the lookout, that the
leper, the woman with the haemorrhage, the grieving widow, the blind, the
crippled man are GOD?
The
driving principle of Jesus was that to identify with the despised, the
marginalised, the lost and outcast was to identify with God. Jesus reflected
congruence of this message in his actions by constantly demonstrating the
welcome, bounty and hospitality of God to all. Israel was not ready for this
kind of news and Jesus, its messenger, paid the price.
He was ultimately rejected by his own people as breaker of God’s Law
and as a dangerous perverter of the people. He was accused of and condemned for
leading the people away from God (Lk 23: 2).
Jesus
was the most dangerous man in history. The temptation, ever facing
even his own closest followers, is to limit and domesticate him within the
boundaries of our own logic, presumption, manipulation and comfort. He will
never be contained by these.
No
outcasts were cast out far enough in Jesus’s world to make him shun
them…this includes Judas…A tremendous ingenuity has been used to compromise
these uncompromising words, Jesus is too much for us.
-
Garry Wills (2006), What Jesus Meant.
David
Timbs writes from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.