Password: Jesus

Right from the beginning Jesus was too powerful to fit comfortably into literary and religious constraints. It is no accident that four different and at times conflicting accounts of Jesus where incorporated into the canon of scripture. It is no accident that at various times in the Church’s history, when it has become bogged down with its own importance, power and piety, a small group of people, claiming inspiration from Jesus, have broken free.

A Christian needs to breathe in the stories and spirit of Jesus. She or he needs to let those stories radically affect how they view the world. When one group is proclaiming they are right and others are wrong, the Christian needs to think about Jesus - who usually took the unpopular position of leaving the game to stand with the marginalized. When one group is saying they have the truth, or the correct interpretation of God, then the Christian needs to remember Jesus who was usually highly critical of people who thought they had a monopoly on God.

Every Sunday in our worship we symbolically place great value on hearing the Gospel read. It is the Jesus story that is our interpretative key for understanding all the other writings of the Bible. If a text doesn’t measure up to the Jesus standard, then it’s not worth listening to.

We need to understand though that Jesus wasn’t faultless. He made mistakes – like when he ridiculed the Syro-Phoenician woman. His views were shaped by his context: male, Jewish, first century, Palestine. He would have been appalled to think that people would spend centuries after his death worshipping his literal words, as if words from the past have a sacredness devoid of context. He would though have been pleased to think that people would interpret his message of radical, inclusive, forgiving and self-giving love into their own time and day, and live it.

Jesus was an unrepentant iconoclast – smashing oppressive images of God. I think it is much more faithful for us to follow in his questioning, challenging, and confrontational tradition – even when we are in conflict with individual texts of scripture – than to try to replicate his worldview, moral code, and theological givens. We are called to be Jesus’ disciples, not his imitators.