Thursday, March 24, 2011

Reclaiming A Scandalous Christianity

Christians have gone to great lengths to emphasize Jesus' rejection of the Old Testament conception of Messiah. Jesus, we are told, disavowed political and military power, and instead sought a Kingdom more universal, and more spiritual, than the one the Jews of His day sought. Thus Christians tend to see Jesus' mission as a success. Jesus did indeed usher in a Kingdom spiritual and 'catholic'. It is just at this point that, I fear, we lose the full force of the Gospel message. The Gospel, we are told by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:23 is a 'stumbling block' and 'foolishness’. Indeed, early Christianity was considered scandalous by most people. But where is there any scandal in a fully successful Jesus?

Luckily, we are part of a tradition that allows us to utilize source-critical tools in studying the Bible, and one of the values of this kind of approach is it can allow us to re-discover the scandal of the gospels. Because the real scandal is that by the yardstick of Jesus and His disciples, Jesus life ended in failure. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the conversations surrounding the Last Supper. Here we see a fully Jewish Jesus with a fully Jewish mission which He is trying to fulfill. At this paradigmically Jewish event, the Passover meal, Jesus proclaims a paradigmically Jewish image of The Kingdom of God. In Luke 22:29-30, the disciples are promised a place of real political authority in a worldwide Kingdom centered in Israel. To be sure, Jesus disclaims political and military authority for himself, and rejects the idea that the Kingdom of God will be brought about by the political machinations of mankind, believing that God alone will come to 'make things right'. However, the substance of that ‘made right’ Kingdom is a fulfillment of the hopes and wishes of the Jewish people: a universal kingdom of peace and justice, centered in Israel herself. Ultimately Jesus' obedience to God was an attempt to fulfill scripture in such a way to ensure that this kind of Kingdom would indeed come to pass. But it is clear that God did NOT come and upend the fortunes of Israel, or supplant the Roman Kingdom with a Universal Jewish Empire. Is it any wonder that some of Jesus' last words are a cry of confusion and abandonment?

The idea of a failed Jesus may bother Christians, but it is just at this point that Jesus' real salvific role can become apparent. Looking, for instance, at the horror going on in Haiti right now, seeing so many lives lost, so many stories that will never be told or remembered in this world, I realize just how profound the idea of God-In-Christ really is. The scandal of Jesus is the salvation of mankind. It is proof that even at our lowest, when all of life seems empty and loss, God is still with us. Jesus did not know, could not have known, the full breadth and meaning of what it was He was doing. His promises to His disciples betray a more limited goal, one that was not fulfilled. But in that unfulfilled dream, in Jesus not-knowing, we see the most profound meaning of His Divinity: the salvation of all that we have, of all that we are, and the sharing of God in our own lives at the point when they seem the most lost and void of meaning. Jesus can only truly be the God of our lives when we finally face what it meant for Him to be a man in this world.

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