The Face Of Jesus

A colleague of mine posted a comment on her Facebook page about seeing the face of Jesus in the faces of the people who surround us. I'm not completely sure what she means by that, even though I agree with the statement on it's face (you should excuse the pun). I've always understood that this phrase refers to the need to treat the people with whom we come into contact every day as if they were, in fact, Jesus. "Whatsoever you do for one of these, you do also for me" is the scriptural foundation for the idea. It's not so much a matter of "WWJD" as it is about "what would I do/say if this was Jesus with whom I am interacting". That has to give pause to anyone who professes to be Christian.

When you think about Jesus as a human being, you begin to demythologize the divinity almost immediately. A few years ago, I read Christopher Moore's book, "Lamb: The Gospel According To Biff" which takes an absurdist look at the life of Jesus between the time of his visit to the temple at twelve, and the emergence of his ministry at around age thirty. I can't, in good conscience, recommend the book because it is EXTREMELY irreverent, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. What it did was push me once again to look at the humanity of Jesus. Not only the obvious things like appearance, voice, and mannerisms but the less obvious things that make us all human. Imagining Jesus in the bathroom, for instance, is a "demythologizing moment", if I can coin a phrase.

The scripture, at least as filtered through the lens of the early church, assures us that Jesus was indeed human AND divine. As a human being, he had a navel, was circumcised, breast fed, and probably fell and skinned his knees a couple of times. As a divine being, he had insight into human frailties, behahaviour, and that realm of the Spirit that is closed to other human beings. Balancing the two has never presented a major problem for me until I consider the impact of "doing onto others" as I would do unto Jesus.

The key passage is found in Matthew 25:31-46. When we see those in need and give them assistance, we are to do that as if we were doing it for Jesus himself. However, the truth is that people's needs are not usually as simple as those listed. Some people are mentally ill. Some people are so damaged that they are dangerous to even those who want to reach out to be helpful. Some people are users. Some people are broken. Some people could absorb all of the help that the wealth of an entire nation could provide and still would want more. How do we protect ourselves and still remain faithful to our impulse to treat them as we would treat Jesus? There's no easy answer, of course, because there never are for complicated questions. Do you pick up the hitchhiker with the blood on his shirt and assume that he had a bloody nose? Do you engage the rioter in an assessment of their lack of self-esteem? Do you allow the spousal abuser or child molester to continue doing so while in therapy?

As human as Jesus could have been, he was neither a murderer, abuser, rioter or molester. He was not deranged or badly damaged or severely handicapped. He was, we imagine, an exemplary human being with all his faculties intact and his personality that of the gentlest and most compassionate person that we have ever encountered. We continue to believe this despite the fact that he frequently was provoked to anger, dealt severely with those whom he deemed to be unjust, and in at least one case withered an unsuspecting tree for not bearing fruit when he wanted it. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, was never a faithful image from scripture. The Jesus of the gospels was, in fact, demanding, confrontational, challenging, and occasionally had a pretty barbed tongue. In other words, he was very human.

It's easy to talk about establishing and respecting boundaries and of doing justice and loving mercy. However, when I look into this passage from Matthew, I find that Jesus not only referred to a very clear boundary but also banished those who didn't meet the criteria. Many in the church are fond of saying that Jesus was inclusive. When I look at what he did and said, I see someone who required that the people of whom he was inclusive must be willing to commit themselves to his teaching. It's true enough that he didn't pay much attention to wealth, status, or gender and was even willing to minister to those who did not share the Jewish faith. It seems to me that there is a level of exclusivity in everything he did. Unless a person was willing to put their faith in him, he could be indifferent or even nasty. He certainly hated hypocrisy and self-indulgence and nothing is more hypocrital or self-indulgent than making Jesus over in our own image.

There are times when I get angry at God. There are times when I have cursed the day I was born and there were even times when I considered ending my own life. There were times when I challenged God to prove his existence and there were times when I even denied that God did exist. How very human of me! I firmly believe in justice, mercy, love and compassion as a way of life. I also firmly believe in protecting myself and society from any kind of threat. I am in awe of those who simply reach out regardless of the potential consequences to anyone in need. My hat is off to Mother Teresa. There is something very Zen about the way she approached her calling, even though it was rooted deeply in Christian faith. Maybe I just haven't reached that plane of existence, that age of Spirit, that sustained her. I do believe that every face is the face of Jesus in some regard and to some degree, in that every face is human. Even some of the non-human ones. I believe that it is my calling to do what I can, when I can, for those who look into my face for a trace of compassion. Thankfully, a big part of my belief system is based on the idea of forgiveness of sins for without that, my limited ability to love would surely have me excluded from the kingdom of God and the fellowship of Christ.

Eighty-five And Counting

No, I am not eighty-five even though some of my thinking is, inevitably, fossilized. It is the United Church of Canada that has reached that venerable age. I'm an historian as much by temperament as by education and I can't help looking at just about everything in the larger context of the last five thousand years. When you do that, eighty-five years isn't much. Christianity has been around for two thousand. The Presbyterian Church for four hundred. The Roman Catholic Church for eighteen hundred, though they would probably argue that they have been around for the full two grand. The sturm und drang that accompanied the birth pangs of this denomination are legendary...at least in the church. There are even a few around who actually remember the fist fights, threats, curses and general chaos that surrounded the debate. Change is hard on everyone in every age, I guess. My generation didn't invent change, after all. It just put wheels on it, a hemi engine in it, and painted flame decals on the outside. Let us be most generous and say that people were passionate about their denominational roots, their buildings, and their history. You could be sarcastic and say that they were passionate about which end of the boiled egg to open, but generosity is always the high road. The Presbyterian Church in Canada, the Methodist Church in Canada, and the Congregationalists were able to get enough people to think rationally to create a truly exciting experiment. Mark Twain proposed pretty much the same experiment in one of his essays called "The Damned Human Race" with a much more cynical expectation of the outcome.

Perhaps because we are the grandchildren of people of rationality and thoughtfulness, we have pursued a course of collegiality and consultation throughout our history. It has led us to take some great chances and to miss some great opportunities. It led us, for instance, to affirm that gay and lesbian (and, I think, transgendered) people were welcome to apply for positions in ministry. It led us to recognize our complicity in the shame of the Residential School System and to apologize to First Nations people long before it became fashionable to do so. It also allowed us to skim past some hard realities. We were so busy consulting, considering and giving sober second thoughts that we missed the fact that we were short of breath, had severe chest pains, and were sweating membership. Ralph Milton tells the story that while he was under doctor's orders to take things a bit easy because of a heart condition, he decided to build a deck at his home in his spare time. One day he dropped a hammer on his foot and jumped around in pain. He said the church was the same. We're yelling about our sore toe when we have a heart condition.

Our dedication to consultation is slowly killing us now, I'm afraid. We want consensus. We want everyone "onside". We want "buy-in". We want everyone to be happy. Maybe what we need are a few fist fights instead. We have spent endless hours in this presbytery alone, carefully stepping through the minefield of problems that have arisen just during the last two years I have been here. Although we have artillery at our command, we have used fly-swatters to deal with issues that fly-swatters won't fix. It's not that we can't see the problems. For instance, everyone agrees that everyone else should sell their church and use the money to fund ministry in more effective ways. But nobody, of course, wants to sell their church. Even those who have decided that their demise is a matter of time are slow to realize that every day wasted, every dollar spent to prop up aging buildings, every opportunity missed to stop being the church of yesterday and leap toward being the church of tomorrow hastens the day when we will be a church of history.

The saddest part is that there are still many people who are passionate about ministry, about faith, about spirituality, and about the future. There is energy, joy, strength, courage, and love in all of the congregations of which I've ever been a part. If we could arrange to have all of those people as part of one community, it seems as if we would be able to do great things. Maybe even create something exciting. Abraham and Sarah had a child when Sarah was over one hundred, so the Bible says, and Picasso fathered child at the age of sixty-nine. Maybe the United Church can give birth to something in it's old age, just as exciting and just as passionately as they did in 1925. Or maybe we will go on dreaming of the glories of our youth and adulthood and not notice that aging goes on, even when we are dreaming. I think that we have some hard but possible choices to make but we do not have forever to make them. The genius of our church has been our consultative nature but the time to consult is short, and the time for action is close at hand. The question that remains is "Will we take action, or will action take us?"