Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Finding God In The Conversation

Reading the Gospels, it is hard to shake the feeling that one is listening to one side of a telephone conversation. So much of what is written is really Jesus speaking ‘at’ people, rather than ‘to’ them. Sure there are questions peppered in, but they seem more like excuses for Jesus to go off on His own tangent, more like literary devices than the words of real people.
The reason for this is simple: the Gospels are based on an oral tradition that rose up around the person of Jesus. Since what was retained was primarily what He said, and not what was said to Him, the Gospels come off too often as a series of sayings and events rather than as the life of a concrete individual. And His lessons seem more like sermons, rather than one part of a broader conversation, which they probably were.
There are a few exceptions to this tendency in the written Gospels, and one can be found in Mark 12. Here we have an example of Jesus in conversation, and while it still feels like a lot is being left out, we get a much more organic picture of Jesus’ interaction with those around Him. There is a particularly beautiful exchange with one of the teachers of the law in verses 28-34, where Jesus gives the Greatest Commandment. Jesus is impressed by the young man and you can almost feel Jesus smiling when He tells the man that he is ‘not far from the Kingdom of God’.
This image of Jesus as someone who engaged in dialogue and dialectic is of supreme import to me. For me the primary picture of Jesus is God in this everyday person, just talking to people, having conversations with them. In and through those conversations lives, and ultimately the world, were changed. It must have been an experience like no other: to just be able to sit and talk to God in human form, like He was any other person. It is in conversations with others that I personally have had the most profound encounters with Christ, and so that image of Jesus is the one that I cling to most.
This has been the very nature of the youth groups I’ve led: just sitting with a group of individuals focused on important moral, religious, and theological issues and through that conversation finding God. One person brings up some point, another comes along and criticizes it, or bolsters it, and through it all we are trying to reach out to Something Bigger than ourselves. In those moments, through these people at this time, just talking these matters through, I feel lifted up to some Higher Place, and I know that we are all reaching out to something Ultimately Real, and that it is also reaching out to us. It is not like God is one factor within the conversation. The Revelation of God takes place in and through the conversation itself, through the struggle, the self-examination, and the directing of hearts and minds toward the Divine. That is what Christianity, and revelation, is all about to me. This transcendent experience, found in and through dialogue and community, has colored my entire view of the Bible. I see scripture as a dialogue between God and man, and between man and man, and I see God’s Revelation as being within the very fabric of that dialogue.
When Jesus is called “The Word of God” I take that to indicate that we are in conversation with the Divine, and that Jesus is the center of that conversation. Whenever people of good conscience come together to try to discover who they are in their relationship with each other and with God, and use dialogue to overcome their isolation and find something deeper, higher, and better, if you look with the right eyes, you can see the very Incarnation of God. You can see Jesus Christ. I know I do.

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