A friend mentioned how he struggles with Jesus’ hard, categorical statements. You know what he means. The gospels are full of such things:
My friends said he falls short and feels like such a failure. I get it. These bother me too. After listening, my counsel (to him and me) was: “Stop reading the Bible like a 21st-century North American, and start reading it like a first-century Jew.” What did I mean? he wondered.
All of us in the western world are infected by the Enlightenment and its insistence on logic, science, and reason. Nothing wrong with those, but they create problems when they are elevated as the only, supreme sources of knowledge and truth. (Romanticism commits the opposite error when it elevates our personal emotional responses above all else.)
Christians today are likewise affected. We often read the Bible through that wooden, mechanical lens of Enlightenment absolutism. The Bible is robbed of its meaning and authority by being flattened into a scientific literalism that has no depth or ambiguity. The biblical writers had an entirely different viewpoint—one that first-century Jews, including Jesus, embraced.
Consider one aspect. Jesus acted much like a prophet or sage in the Wisdom tradition of Israel. He bore resemblance to, for example, the way the Preacher in Ecclesiastes operated. He’d say seemingly strange and hard to understand things—on purpose. He meant to startle and confuse. The Enlightenment way is to be clear, straightforward, plain, flat. Jesus often did the opposite. Why?
As with much Wisdom literature, the point was to arrest attention, get listeners to stop and reflect on whatever they have taken for granted. He wanted others to mediate on, take time with, ponder whatever issue was at hand.
He then wants them to try, however haltingly, to work it out in life. His point was not to dispense easily consumable bits of information or precise rules for life. The process of meditation and of maturing through such a process was the point at least as much as whatever conclusion one might draw at the end.
For Jesus, largely that process was one of, “Will you follow me? Will you pursue me . . . even when I say strange things you don’t understand and put barriers in your way?”
Jesus did this time and again. I’ll consider how in my next post.
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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
