Christ Walks In Our Shoes

IN RECENT YEARS there was a popular religious meme with the question, “What would Jesus do?” But it has faded as these trends usually do. One of its weaknesses was that it seemed to invite us to supply the additional qualification “if he were alive today and in our shoes.” This month provides a great opportunity to explore in preaching and reflection the magnificent but neglected theme of Christ the Intercessor, found in the readings from the letter to the Hebrews. The question here is: “What is Jesus doing since he is alive forever?”

The answer is that, in total solidarity with us all as fellow human beings, the Risen Christ is representing and offering to the Holy One all that we are undergoing and struggling with and needing. “He holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. Consequently he is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (7:24-25). Christ was and is “in our shoes” as struggling human beings.

It is not as if Christ prays instead of us so that we don’t have to. Rather our sense of his total sympathy for our human vulnerability and weakness removes our inhibitions and encourages us to offer them to God, knowing that the Living Christ is identifying with our prayers and making them his very own. What riches we discover when learn from scripture what praying “in the name of Christ” actually means!

[ October 7 ]

Human Nature?

Genesis 2:18-24; Psalm 8; Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16

AS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE arrives in our culture, and our electronic devices behave as synthetic pseudo-companions, our concern as Christians with human personhood, human nature, becomes ever more urgent. Psalm 8 poses the question in terms of God’s mindfulness: Only what God has in mind for humanity ultimately counts. “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (verse 4).

The question is not one that human beings settle for themselves. It is a question that God must answer. And the Human One is that answer – if it is the case that God raised him from the dead, and we are right to claim that “fullness of the Godhead” dwelt bodily in him.

The scriptures for this Sunday further our searching exploration of the humanness that God has in mind and which God expressed in the humanity of Jesus. The creation of a companion for ’adam in the second chapter of Genesis insists on the impossibility of being fully human without relationship, intimacy, and mutuality.

In the passage from Mark’s gospel, Jesus insists that the provision for divorce in the Torah is a pragmatic concession to hardness of heart and doesn’t reflect God primal desire for costly and enduring perseverance in marriage. Our sustaining of that bond “for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer” is one of the most profound expressions of what it means to be in the image and likeness of God. Breaking that bond is a kind of violence, and so there is a special poignancy that Jesus goes on to rebuke the disciples for bullying parents who wanted to bring their kids into contact with him. His tender embrace of the children places tenderness and vulnerability, the antitheses of violence, at the very heart of the definition of humanity.

[ October 14 ]

Scandalous Wealth

Amos 5:6-7, 10-15; Psalm 90:12-17; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

THE LETTER TO THE Hebrews gives us the dramatic image of God’s self-revealing speech as “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow: It is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (4:12). These words highlight the heartbreaking scandal of the rapidly spreading “prosperity gospel.” Is broken human religiosity so cunning that it can successfully shield the heart and block the ears from being penetrated by the gospel’s warning that wealth –far from being the supreme indicator of divine favor – is a massive barrier blocking entry into the beloved community of God’s new reign?

In the warning against wealth – following the rich young man’s rejection of the invitation to sell his possessions and join the band proclaiming the onset of God’s reign – Jesus’ sorrow is not mixed up with moralism. Jesus is so indifferent to “being good” that he even refuses to allow the young man to call him that: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18). No claim is made that the rich are to blame for sinful indulgences and luxury, or failure to give regular alms. Rather the eye of the needle through which the camel cannot pass is the crucial test of heartfelt solidarity with God’s poor and destitute, a solidarity that the rich and powerful know would undermine the self-interest and political entitlement of their class.

I remember a moment of candor in a Bible study on the Beatitudes when I asked the question: Do you want the meek to inherit the earth? “Good heavens, no!” a man replied, “They wouldn’t know what to do with it!” This is self-assured and instinctive entitlement indeed that calmly brushes aside the Beatitudes of the Messiah as impractical nonsense. But there are more overtly cruel forms of this detachment from God’s poor, and today’s reading from Amos records his denunciations of the corrupt practices and endemic exploitations by which, in his day (as in ours), the powerful work the system to become richer and make the poor poorer, in defiance of the burning desire of God’s heart for justice.

[ October 21 ]

Watch Out for Winners!

Isaiah 53:4-12; Psalm 91:9-16; Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45

“WE GAIN SO LITTLE by the change when the downtrodden in their turn tread down.” This is how the Countess in Christopher Fry’s play The Dark is Light Enough comments ruefully on the fate of most revolutions. In similar vein, Simone Weil wrote in her notebooks that we must “be always ready to change sides like Justice—that fugitive from the camp of conquerors.”

In this week’s passage from Mark’s gospel, the “thunder guys” (James and John) are already dreaming of the regime change that they imagined Jesus would achieve, a new administration free from Rome with important ministries that would be up for grabs in the new glory time. “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left in your glory” (10:37). The sons of Zebedee have gotten ahead of themselves and are already in spirit on the winning side. But it is ambition for power, masked by their rhetorical fervor for justice, that drives so many revolutionaries and guarantees that justice will be the first deserter from the new regime. They are bound to resort in turn to oppression because their concept of power is fundamentally no different from the one espoused by the politicians they have replaced.

Jesus insists that he will not “win” on the world’s terms and there will be no winning side within which power can be awarded. Jesus is redefining power itself: not ideologically, but by actual submission to the baptism of suffering that nonviolent witness to a nonviolent God will make his certain fate. His intimate associates will not be power brokers in a new order, but those whom God will appoint to give their lives in the ordeal of God’s Anointed.

The passage from the Servant Songs of the anonymous prophet of the time of Israel’s exile in Babylon, the Second Isaiah, gives us the scriptures that Jesus himself internalized in the exploration of his epochal vocation. He himself was to be the Suffering Servant who “shall make many righteous, and shall bear their iniquities” (53:11).

[ October 28 ]

Blind Bartimaeus

Jeremiah 31:7-9; Psalm 126; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52

THE SCRIPTURES ARE central to spiritual formation, the healing and reshaping of our very consciousness itself so that our hearts resonate more and more with the yearning of God. Those who practice the vocation of spiritual companionship or “direction” very regularly invite the seekers they are serving to meditate in an intimate way on the story of the healing of blind Bartimaeus.

Time and time again this meditation proves to be challenging. Jesus does not presume to know what Bartimaeus means by asking in general terms for mercy. He doesn’t lunge at him, but holds back. For authentic healing to occur, Bartimaeus must find and own his heart’s actual desire and take the risk of expressing it. “‘What do you want me do for you?’ The blind man said to him, ‘My teacher, let me see again’” (verse 51). The grace of God heals first by arousing our own desiring that we so often repress.

In today’s gospel we see Jesus insisting that we risk expressing who we want God to be for us and what we want God to give us. The necessity of asking is a leitmotif of Jesus’ teaching. “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (Matthew 7:7).

It is a lesson that those in ministry find particularly difficult. In giving spiritual direction to pastors, I frequently invite them to pray with the question: Who do you want Christ to be for you just now? It is astonishing—or perhaps not—how many times they have reported back that they prayed with the question: Who does Christ want you to be for him just now? When I have pointed out that their brains flipped the question around, as if it were impossible to hear and process my actual question, a light goes on![]

“Living the Word” reflections for September can be found here. “Preaching the Word,” Sojourners’ online resource for sermon preparation and Bible study, is available at sojo.net/ptw.