Forgetting, Remembering Jesus
Studying about the faith we profess is insightful, but meaningless unless it transcends the shadow land and moves us into a life more discernibly real and true. What do I gain by it though? Do I even remember what all this is for? Can you get lost in church and the Bible and wander from Jesus? Today, I confess that the hollowness of much study- as Ecclesiastes proffers- has wearied me. I never sat down to write because I have solved the great mysteries of our faith, but rather because I do not understand them. Poet Cecil Day Lewis put it this way: “First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.” So too, I write to understand. Understand what?
I want to understand the Bible. It is used in so many ways, but have we forgotten what it is for? I do at times. The Bible tells the story of God’s great love and faithfulness to us, culminating in the person of Jesus and His gift of the Spirit to us. So it is about Jesus. Yet we forget. I forget. My life is now hid in Christ. Beyond apologetics, evangelical politics, denominations, in-depth Bible study, word studies…, what remains? I do think we honor God with our minds when we search a matter out (Proverbs calls it the “glory of a king”). But a child simply looks with trust to their mother and father. It is the relationship the child holds precious. All else is counted as loss if its gain comes at the expense of relationship. I seek to understand when Jesus simply calls me to obey. I want to understand Christ, figure Him out, when all He expects of me is to abide with Him, rest with Him. Where is He then?
What lights have blinded our eyes to the One we love? What dreams have we exchanged for the one He has given to us- a dream of life under His rule in His Kingdom, even now? What has distracted us? In The Greatest Showman, PT Barnum’s eyes lost sight of Charity and his girls. All that he thought was for them became an edifice to himself under the guise of “doing it for them.” The same distractions fix my eyes and I see it in the church as well. Our call is not in fighting culture wars. Our call is not to do battle with same-same sex marriage, deniers of climate change, Colin Kaepernick, social media, gun rights or whatever gets evangelical groups fired up. Our call is to obey the things Jesus said to us in passages such as the Sermon on the Mount. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship about Jesus being the Mediator between each person and the other, between God and each person, and (if you extend the logic) man and the land. How we interact with each person and the earth is mediated through Christ because we are hid in Him. My eyes have grown too accustomed to topics (to shadows) and not the Mediator (fullness of Life) showing His love to all people- to all people. I can viscerally discern when I am lost in religious stuff and not “in Christ.” From Now On uses these lines:
saw the sun begin to dim
And felt that winter wind
Blow cold
A man learns who is there for him
When the glitter fades and the walls won't hold
'Cause from then, rubble
One remains
Can only be what's true
If all was lost
Is more I gain
'Cause it led me back
To you
That is where I am now. I study, but desire intimacy. I wrestle, but I want acceptance. In the brokenness and clamor of this world, I long for rest and stillness with others. Echoing in all of this is love. I am reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer again; he challenges the reader not to debate the Sermon on the Mount, but obey it. He also writes: “Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are (p206).” I am reminded of Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche: “Love doesn't mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness” and “To love someone is to show to them their beauty, their worth and their importance.” That is the point. I am not a scholar. I hope to be a storyteller, but my greatest aim is to become the story of Jesus loving people. Where is Jesus when I need Him? He is waiting amongst the hurting and the outcast, amongst the rubble and beyond the topics of debate.
Leo Tolstoy’s short story, “Where Love Is, God Is”, illustrates the kind of Bible study I hope to do from now on. Like Martin, I want to know Jesus. Martin was a lonely and aging man. All but one child died in infancy and his only surviving child died several years after his wife. He had no will to live and discussed this with an elderly pilgrim in his shop. “‘As to your despair- that comes from because you wish to live for your own happiness.’ ‘What else should one live for’ asked Martin. ‘For God, Martin,’ said the old man. ‘He gives you life, and you must live for Him. When you have learnt to live for Him, you will grieve no more, and all will seem easy to you.’” The crux of all this is in Martin’ next statement; “But how is one to live for God?” The old man gave the answer- Christ has shown us. Read the Gospels. It is all right there. From this moment on, Martin began to understand what God required of him, “and his heart grew lighter and lighter.” Reading Luke 6, he was challenged to think of his guests and not of himself. “Yet who was the guest? The Lord himself! If he came to me, I should behave like that?” That night he had a dream in which Jesus told him He would visit him the next day. Throughout the day Martin looks for Jesus but encounters people in circumstances that give opportunity to demonstrate the words of Christ. At the end of the day, he returns to the Gospels and a voice calls to him: “Martin, Martin, don’t you know me?” He then saw the people he encountered throughout the day and he looked back at his reading. “I was hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in…Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren even the least, ye did it unto me.” If I want to know Jesus, I will find Him where He is.
I know where to find Jesus when I need Him. He is not in a book. He is with anyone in need of tenderness and compassion; Jesus is found in the rubble, rebuilding and restoring. I must not run the risk of losing sight of Jesus by tinkering with religion. “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer”, by CS Lewis, captures this sentiment well:
From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.
Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.
To meet with Christ every day, I must serve others. I must love them with the same grace and mercy with which Jesus loves me. Even complex thoughts and arguments centered around God can lead me away from God Himself. Yes, it is possible for the Bible itself to lead you away from Jesus if it becomes the end within itself. A faith trapped inside the cave of your own mind and pretexts is still trapped in a cave, a tomb. The Divine Ideal of Jesus does not give us more interesting shadows, but fullness of Life. Mine is not to question worthiness. In knowing Christ, I am well acquainted with my unworthiness. I am too eager to self-protect, withhold forgiveness, judge, elevate myself, consider violence, and not as ready to give self-sacrificing love, forgive, show mercy, walk in humility, or seek peace. What do I really want to understand? How God can love us this way and why I, and the church, have such a hard time hearing and doing the love of Christ. I suffer the self-inflicted wounds of an introverted faith in a Jesus that would leave comfort to embrace a Pharisee, a tax-collector, a harlot, fishermen, a Roman soldier, a Samaritan- a Jesus that would bend the rules and customs to love others. Perhaps, if I want to know Jesus, I need to understand God’s love for mankind the way He did- by joining Him, working with Him, abiding with Him in surprising places and with all the wrong people . In doing so, I come back to my heart’s home. I remember what all this was for- Charity.
Afterword
These thoughts derive from my own experience of listening to cultural debates and angst, especially by the evangelical community. I have learned the value of those who profess Christ, yet are are on opposite poles of my assessment of how to follow Him. In the end, I must be faithful to following Christ. I am inspired by followers of Christ who simply do the work of serving and loving others in steadfast and tender ways. Oh, that I would express Jesus so genuinely! Within this, however, I must confess that I am not where I thought I would be. I hear vitriol from those that would quench the Holy Spirit’s work in women, that would do battle with the LGBTQ community, that would rage against Colin Kaepernick for a peaceful protest for social justice, that would find defensible the indefensible treatment of “the least of these” who seek refuge, that would merge the idolatry of weapons with the message of the Cross, and yield to the “Cult of Caesar” as if to kneel before Christ. All the while I read the Sermon on the Mount and am convicted. I know where Jesus is and yet I am sitting here. He is speaking through women, He is reaching out in love to the LGBTQ community, He is looking to defend the vulnerable that suffer fear and oppression, He is comforting the poor and mistreated who lack the power to protect themselves, He is looking to beat our swords into plowshares, and He is calling for our allegiance to Him and Him alone. Will Campbell famously lived as to “love them all.” He loved and served klansmen and loved and served within the inner sanctum of the civil right’s movement with Martin Luther King, Jr. Following Christ is learning to love them all. It is not my judgement, but His grace that I must obey. My heart is not to protest or divide, but to practice love and perhaps gently challenge. I am convicted by how I would rather study than to do the work of love. But, if I want to remember what all this is for, if I want to rest in my heart’s true home, from now on I must give my heart and mind back to relating with Jesus.
*****
“If I condemn his evil actions I thereby confirm him in his apparently good actions which are yet never the good commended by Christ. Thus, we remove him from the judgement of Christ and subject him to human judgement. But I bring God’s judgement upon my head, for I then do not live any more on and out out of the grace of Jesus Christ, but out of knowledge of good and evil which I hold on to. To everyone God is the kind of God he believes in.
Judgement is the forbidden objectivization of the other person which destroys single minded love. I am not forbidden to have my own thoughts about the other person, to realize his shortcomings, but only to the extent that it offers me an occasion for the forgiveness and unconditional love, as Jesus proves to me.”
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
