Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians
July-August 2021
What Did Jesus Do?
We often hear among Christians “What would Jesus do?” as a supposed guide to our own behavior. The problem with it, of course, is that we usually answer that question with our own personal image of an imagined Jesus, and end up with directions to basically follow what we already think we ought to do. As a result, WWJD folks have acted in a wide variety of ways, often at odds with each other in their images of Jesus.
I think a better question would be “What DID Jesus do?” As a guide for action, it is not so up for grabs. To be sure, the four Gospels give us at times differing pictures of what Jesus taught and did, and finding the historical Jesus’ actions amid the varied Gospel pictures of the Christ of Faith is an art and science all to itself, a branch of modern Biblical Studies and historical theology. But despite the variances outlined in critical study of the Bible, there appears to remain a deep coherence in the Four Gospels about the actions of Jesus, a convergence of the four-fold picture we find in the Bible.
Jesus was a marginal Jew: he accepted and tried to follow the religion he was raised in, but in so doing found himself at the edges of tradition. The Judaisms of his day all agreed on careful adherence to the Law; he was a legal liberal, open to broad and gentle interpretation of the specific requirements of the faith. In his desire to serve and help others, he often did things seen as breaking the commandments: healing and helping others on the Sabbath, not worrying so much about what he ate or who he ate it with. He spent much of his time with those seen as sources of ritual and moral contamination, connecting with them and trying to help them: irreligious people and foreigners (“gentiles” and “Samaritans”), sex workers, alcoholics, and even traitors to his nation (“publicans” or “tax collectors”) who extorted money from their compatriots. This, despite the Hebrew Scriptures’ demand that the righteous avoid and keep themselves apart from the wicked.
Jesus did firmly hold to a few key ideas in his Jewish tradition. Because of his firm devotion to his core experience of a loving, intimate parent God, he taught against taking oaths and making God and things associated with God objects to be used in making our affirmations more credible. “Make your yes mean yes, and your no mean no: that is enough.” He saw swearing by the Temple, the name of God, or the all that is holy as the manipulation of others through appeal to holy things. This for him was impious, a form of “talking the Lord’s name in vain.” Because of his firm prophetic devotion to social justice and upholding those on the margins, he forbade the casual repudiation of a dependent woman spouse by a man, though this was allowed in scripture.
Jesus consistently stood with the down-trodden, and asked his followers to do the same. This at times meant stretching or breaking requirements seen as commandments from God by his faith tradition.
Jesus announced the active presence of God in our lives, said this was a thing of joy not of fear, and said that it demanded our stretching our minds and ways of thinking, as well as our hearts and emotional prejudices: “God’s Reign is already among you! Change your way of thinking!” (This is usually, but misleadingly, translated, “The Kingdom of God has arrived. Repent.”)
Jesus reserved his anger for religious people who abused and dominated others for their own advantage. He called them hypocrites and prettified sources of deep contamination (“whitewashed sepulchers”).
Jesus prayed daily, sang the Psalms and took them to heart, and regularly sought respite and personal spiritual renewal. Many of the questions he raised about his faith tradition’s application of the Torah were spurred by his taking to heart passages in the Psalms and the Prophets otherwise rarely cited. As a result, he taught that the core of the Law was a balance of equally weighted texts: you shall love God with everything you are, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Jesus taught that neighbors were created by our showing them compassion, not by their fitting into our religious, national, or family group legally defined (that’s what the parable of the Good Samaritan is all about). Creating relationships through love mattered more to him than sharing a common group identity.
Jesus practiced open table fellowship. For him, compassion and love were contagious and expanded the scope of God’s active presence, and were more powerful than the contagion of ritual impurity and sin defined in the Law. He observed the rites of purification; he sent the lepers he had healed to see a priest. But he also taught that it was what the heart felt and the mind thought that were the real source of harm and evil in the world, not exterior sources of ritual impurity (“What comes out of the heart and mouth are what defile, not what you eat or drink.”)
Jesus did keep many of the laws of his faith tradition, and tried to be a “good Jew.” But he put his relationship with the God he called “Abba” (Papa) before the expectations of others.
Peace and Grace.
--Fr. Tony+
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