We Get Him, Or Do We?

After last week’s blog, “He Gets Us and Other Scary Things” I got to thinking, what does it mean for us to “get” Jesus? How well do we understand what Jesus was all about? As we enter the season of Lent it’s a good time to do some pondering about what Jesus was all about.

Pondering is one of those words that has fallen on hard times. It’s too bad, because it’s a great word. Pondering is an invitation, as my favorite seminary professor Maria Harris said, “to sit back on your soul.” It means we kick back and do some serious noodling on the subject at hand.

Most of the time we are so busy and our lives are so filled with noise, its seems all but impossible to carve out a few holy silent moments to ponder. I’m suggesting this might be a good Lenten discipline, to consider who Jesus really is. And if we read the gospels closely, the Jesus of the gospels is very different from the Jesus of our culture.

Lent denotes the season when Jesus makes his final entry into Jerusalem. Jesus and his ragtag band of followers have been rabble rousing wherever they and the religious poo bahs of the day were getting a little (a whole lot) annoyed with his antics. So going to Jerusalem was where the waste would hit the oscillator.

Here’s the low down. During Jesus time the Romans occupied the Holy Land. They were in some unholy cahoots with the religious leaders. They colluded to extort taxes from people who had no hope of paying them, and as a consequence lost their land. The laws of Judaism were selectively applied, and usually in ways that added tremendous piety burdens on the people.

For example, religious leaders required unblemished animals to be sacrificed at the temple. So, a marketplace was set up in the outer court of the temple where people could buy such animals. Of course the price was exorbitant and another burden was placed on the people.

At the same time other laws were systematically ignored. For example the Deuteronomic Hospitality Code, which required doing justice and loving mercy, letting the fields lie fallow in the seventh year to care for the earth, and the principles of Jubilee, which cancelled debt and returned land to its rightful owner every 50 years. Somehow they conveniently left those commandments out.

Jesus and his followers had a habit of pointing out uncomfortable truths that rocked the status quo. Those who benefited from the status quo sought a way to get rid of this trouble maker. The last trip to Jerusalem would be the time.

Jesus and his followers also had a habit of hanging around with people everyone else ignored. Tax collectors (who were particularly hated because they extorted money from people), prostitutes, various other “sinners,” lepers and more were his preferred company. It made the religious leaders look bad (an appropriate consequence).

Jesus healed on the Sabbath. He fed hungry people; he healed and set people free. For example, the woman with the issue of blood for twelve years touched the hem of Jesus garment and was healed. Her healing was a lot more than not bleeding anymore. In the ancient culture, women were ritually unclean when they were menstruating and were isolated from their community. By healing her, Jesus restored her to community. The same with healing the lepers; their disease required they be isolated from their community. By their healing they were restored to their place in their community and society.

Jesus was no friend of the status quo. Our times are not so different from his times. And our silence is the equivalent of assent to the loudest voices. The “he gets us” campaign is code language for a lot of hatred, bigotry and double standards. Our silence in the face of it means we agree.

I would love to see the loudest voice about family values be the one that says love makes a family and acceptance is how we live in the world. I want to hear the loudest voice of faith say that hatred is not a family value. I want the voice of Christianity to say that the moral issues of our time are adequate housing and healthcare, reproductive choice, elimination of poverty, global climate change and the unequal distribution of resources. I want the Christian voice to proclaim loudly that Black Lives Matter and work to dismantle racism and the system that promulgates it. I want the voice of faith to proclaim that the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is evil.

If we want to say we “get” Jesus, then we must see him as he was in his time and act that same way in our time.