The Jesus Question

 

In Kentucky, I served for years on the Commission on Ministry. That’s the diocesan group that gets to advise the bishop about people who feel a calling to ordained ministry. Interviews before the Commission on Ministry are one of the most daunting challenges of discernment for the priesthood and the diaconate. One colleague was well-known throughout the diocese for asking postulants what we referred to as the “dreaded Jesus Question.” You know, the same question that Jesus asks the disciples in today’s Gospel lesson: “Who do you say that I am?” Or in our case, “Who is Jesus for you?” Even the most well-prepared and articulate interviewees would often choke over their answers to this one question. I always felt sorry for them. To find the right words to proclaim, with authenticity, how Jesus is the face of the “Living God,” for us makes most of us wiggle and squirm.

          For a long time, I would have been one of the biggest wigglers and squirmers of all. I’m a cradle Christian, raised in church and Sunday School in the mainline Presbyterian Church. As a young person, I had certainly been taught all the “right” words, all that stuff that we say in the Creeds. The trouble was that I didn’t believe it. I never had any problem believing in God, but Jesus, this man who was supposed to be God, this man who rose from the dead … I just didn’t know what to make of him. When I was confirmed in seventh grade, I remember slyly crossing my fingers behind my back when it came time to profess in front of the congregation that I believed in Jesus. I figured that God’s disappointment over my dishonesty was less immediate and threatening than my parent’s disappointment, should I choose not to be confirmed.

          Later on, as I studied Christianity as an academic discipline in college and graduate school, I struggled to make myself believe. I loved God; I had a deep prayer life; I was a faithful church-goer; I even felt a call to ordained ministry …. but I could not for the life of me answer Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” I thought that it was an intellectual question, a problem that I could figure out if I just studied it hard enough. I took refuge in abstract, philosophical descriptions. I was ashamed to bring up my lack of faith at church, and, to cover my tracks, I became very good at the disciples’ “some say” response: “Some say Jesus is the Word.” “Some say Jesus is the Good Shepherd.” “Some say Jesus is the Liberator.” “Some even say Jesus is their friend!” After a while, I got so used to quoting others that their answers became the crutch that I leaned on to navigate the language of faith—but at the center, the language was empty. There was no risen Lord inside.

       So what happened, you’re perhaps wondering? How did I get to the place where I can stand up here in the pulpit week after week and honestly proclaim the risen Christ? Thinking back, I think that it was deeply studying the Bible that began to change me. I had to break open the too-familiar, yet vague, language of the Bible, to find the strange, unsettling Jesus within. My Jesus is a Lord of paradox, a Lord who can’t be pinned down, a Lord who turns things topsy-turvy. But there was more. I had to learn that knowing Jesus doesn’t center around some kind of intellectual assent to a bunch of doctrines. I'll never forget reading that the Old English word, “believe” comes from the root, “be-love.” To believe literally means to “give my heart.” To answer the Jesus question, I had to let life and the Holy Spirit knock me around enough to open me up to love.

To believe in Jesus, to know Jesus, I had to be willing to follow Jesus, you see. I had wanted a safe, comfortable life, a life lived on my terms. I didn’t want to follow a Lord who might ask me to change or to give up things. But when I grew up enough to see all the pain and trouble we have in our world, it became clear to me that changing is exactly what God calls all of us to do, including me: to hand over all of the things that keep us from following Jesus down that path to the cross—and to the resurrection. For you see, when we confess Jesus as Lord, as the Son of the Living God, we, like Peter, are at the same time giving up being plain fishermen on the cozy Sea of Galilee. Instead, we agreeing to be sent out into the world to proclaim—and to live—the Good News. When we define who Jesus is, Jesus simultaneously redefines who we are. With Jesus, it’s not just a matter of words, it’s a matter of transformation.

Paul understands. In today’s lesson from Romans, Paul explains that to proclaim who Jesus is, and to mean it, is to present our very bodies to God as a living sacrifice: “I appeal to you therefore, my siblings, through the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Did you know that verse is also one of the phrases in the Prayer Book that we could say before the Offering? I don’t use it much, because it sounds kind of off-putting, doesn’t it? When I hear it, I vacillate between picturing my body drooping from the Cross and picturing us sitting piously in the pews, eyebrows scrunched and heads bowed in vague “spiritual worship.” Our “spiritual worship” isn’t pious prayer, though. It’s to act like Jesus, to follow Jesus, and to risk everything, as Jesus did.

The “sacrifice” that Paul is asking of us is indeed the gift of our whole selves. Paul makes clear that in baptism, we die with Christ. We’re swept under the deep waters, our sins and our self-centered hearts alive no more. When we rise from those baptismal waters, we are alive in Christ. We live no longer for ourselves but for God. We live a new life “in Christ.”  This new life isn’t some disembodied hovering on earth, however, or some pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by life that we’ll reach someday in heaven. The new life that we’re given is a fully embodied life on earth—a life full of grace, a life lived with Christ’s love flowing through us and from us. It’s a life lived in community. It’s lived out in the giving of ourselves through our actions in the church and in our daily lives. It involves taking on the “mind of Christ,” letting Jesus’ image shape how we see the world. And it involves discernment, testing our ethical choices using this “new mind” that Christ has given us.[1]

                The question, “Who do you say that I am?” is hard, I think, because it it’s a question answered with our lives, not our words. Perhaps you know the famous lines from German poet Rainer Maria Rilke? Rilke writes: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.  Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”[2] Live into the answer. That’s how the “Jesus Question” works, I think. Who Jesus is, isn’t something that we figure out on our own. Who Jesus is, is something that we live, something that we practice, something that we become—together.

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[1] Luke Timothy Johnson, Reading Romans (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2001), 190-191.

[2] Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet,” quoted in Debie Thomas, “Who Do You Say That I Am?,” in Journey with Jesus, August 16, 2020. Found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2724-but-what-do-you-think

Jesus' Teacher--and Ours

 

 

"O, how good and pleasant it is," sings the psalmist, "when siblings live together in unity."
          Except when they don't. Antagonism and hatred between neighbors is rising from the depths of our society like deadly toadstools on a foggy morning. David Brooks just wrote an interesting article in The Atlantic called, “How America Got Mean.” Indeed. Such hatred and division certainly isn’t new for humanity, though. In the Middle East, the Holy Land of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, neighbors have been fighting and hating for as long as we have historical documentation. In Europe, I once visited a museum exhibit about the role of caricature during the sixteenth-century Reformation. The media of the day used the new printing presses to spread caricatures of opposing religious groups. Each side gleefully portrayed the other as roasting in hell and sprouting demon horns. Governments used the religious differences to jockey violently for secular power.

In this fractious world, how on earth will God bring about the love and unity that God desires for human beings? How will God turn our hatred and division into the smooth and healing balm of love? Today's Gospel lesson gives us a glimpse of an answer, although it sure doesn’t look like it at first. Jesus, you see, is caught in the same painful web of broken relationships in which we live. Here he is, traveling outside of his comfort zone in Gentile territory, up to his eyeballs in disputes with the leaders of his own nation. And in waltzes an outsider—and a woman, at that—shouting and causing a ruckus. She’s one of the desperate ones, one of those on the margins. She has no healthcare, no hope, no standing in the community.

According to Matthew, she’s a Canaanite, born of the peoples that Israel had defeated long ago and whose land Israel took as their own. As a woman in this place and time, she should have been at home caring for her family, not parading around the town calling attention to herself. But she’s also a tiger-mom with a sick daughter. She won’t be silenced. She’s loud, and annoying, and no longer mindful of risk or decorum. She’s like the undocumented migrant worker in the emergency room, clasping her dehydrated baby to her breast, demanding medical care from a system that rejects her. She’s someone whose pain we would rather not see or hear.

Even Jesus.

"Maybe if I just ignore her," thinks Jesus, "she’ll go away." We all know how it goes … you can't be expected to do something about a situation that you don't see, right? It's easy to ignore an injustice on the other side of town, to bury our faces in our own lives, our own problems.

While Jesus tries politely to ignore the woman's shouting, the disciples decide that she needs to go.

"Israel first," they chant.

"Gentiles will not replace us!" they cry.

"Salvation belongs to us! There might not be enough to go around," they grumble.

          Jesus nods his head. Jesus is fully divine, yes, but he’s also fully human, a product of the attitudes of his place and time. He agrees with a sigh, “I have enough to do taking care of my own people. There’s nothing left over for Gentile dogs like you. My people are ‘children.’ Your people are animals. My people are in. Yours are out. I can’t help you," he tells the woman.

Wow! That all sounds familiar, doesn't it? “Dogs!” he names the foreign woman and her daughter, as he bluntly refuses to help them. In Jesus' world, dogs aren’t the cute, tame pets that we enjoy today. They roam and scavenge around back alleyways. They’re dangerous and unclean. While Gentiles might let their dogs in to clean up under the table during meals, good Jews keep their dogs outside. There’s no way around it: Jesus is using shocking name-calling language in this text.

Some scholars insist that our compassionate Jesus must not have meant his insulting words, that he was merely nudging the Canaanite woman forward in her faith, or that he was teaching the disciples some kind of lesson. I believe, however, that it’s the Canaanite woman who teaches Jesus—and us—a lesson in this text. It’s this Gentile woman, not Jesus, who first brings grace to this situation, who allows God's healing love to flow between two opposing peoples. Because of her faith, Jesus himself learns and grows.

The question is, what exactly is it in the woman’s petition that’s able to breach the boundaries that Jesus sets on his own mission? What is it in her that so effectively pierces the barriers that we human beings set up between us and those who are different? There are all kinds of possibilities:

Is it the woman’s persistence that wins the day? Her determination not to give up despite the disciples’ rejection and Jesus’ ugly words?

Or is it that she honestly admits her need before the Lord, kneeling down and humbly pleading, “Lord have mercy?”

Or is it that she recognizes that Jesus is the divine Messiah and believes that he can heal her daughter?

Or is it that she’s clever with her words and able to turn Jesus’ insult to win her argument?^[1]

The Canaanite woman’s faith is probably made up of all of these things, to some extent, but one thing stands out to me: her courage in the face of fear.

In last week’s Gospel lesson, we just heard Jesus upbraid Peter for his “little faith.” Remember? Peter’s fear gets the better of him as he attempts to cross the waves to come to Jesus. It was the blowing winds, those turbulent winds of the world, that unnerved Peter, and he stumbled and sank. The Canaanite woman in today’s story is somehow able to push beyond her fear, though. She must have been afraid. Afraid that her daughter would soon die. Crossing the no-man’s-land between unfriendly cultures and separate religions, she must have felt shaky and battered by the hostility around her. And yet, intently clinging to Jesus as the only hope for her daughter, she pushes onward until Jesus understands.

Whenever I think about the faith of people like today’s Canaanite woman, or about the faith of those who defied the Nazi’s in World War II, or about those who risked their lives for Civil Rights, I tend to hold my own faith up in limp comparison. “I’d be afraid to do that,” I shrug sadly, letting myself off the hook.

I tend to forget that courage is not lack of fear. Courage is acting in spite of fear. The point of today’s lesson isn’t to start us picking at our own “little faith.” It’s to get us thinking about what we would do if we were not afraid—and then to do it.

How do we move past our fear? It takes practice, one step at a time.

That’s why I invite you to join me in reading Bishop Mariann Budde’s new book this fall, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith. We’ll be discussing it each Sunday in October during Adult Formation hour. Budde is bishop of the Diocese of Washington, DC. She’s the clergywoman who spoke out to the nation on CNN when President Trump appeared on the steps of St. John’s Church with that upside-down bible in his hands while police beat peaceful protestors. To encourage us, Bishop Budde writes, “Some of our decisive moments require action; others, acceptance. Some are dramatic .... others are internal .... Heroic possibilities lie within each of us ... We matter in the realization of all that is good and noble and true. We can learn to be brave.”[2]

  After all, if God’s Son can change and grow in love, so can we.

O how good and pleasant it is, when siblings live together in unity.

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[1]  Karoline Lewis, “Getting Great Faith,” found at https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=3298

[2] Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to be Brave (New York: Avery, 2023), xx.