Continued from Epiphany pt. 1 It quickly becomes apparent that the style of Jesus’ teaching is exactly opposite of modern televangelism or even the mainline church approach of “Dear Abby” or “Focus on the Family.” These forms of teaching conjure up inspiring advice and workable solutions for daily living. Jesus is too much of a Jewish prophet to merely stabilize the status quo by promising cute euphemisms of stability and success. He is much more interested in destabilizing the false assumptions on which an entire world view is built. In general, we can see that Jesus’ style is almost exactly the opposite of modern televangelism or even the mainline church approach of “Dear Abby” bits of inspiring advice and workable solutions for daily living. Jesus is too much the Jewish prophet to merely stabilize the status quo by platitudes or euphemisms. He much more destabilizes the false assumptions on which the entire question or one’s world view is built. Jesus knows that his hearers will soon return to the dominant consciousness totally unprepared to deal with their own inner conflicts or the critique of others. The unspoken assumptions are embedded in every aspect of the culture, and the message will quickly evaporate as impossible or irrelevant. This is the normal pattern, in my experience. The shelf life of a sermon is about twenty minutes. C.S. Lewis addresses this very issue in his essay on Christian Apologetics in God in the Dock. He says, “We can make people attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so, but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible”. This is the final anemia of any religion based primarily on sermons rather than relationships or lifestyle. Instead, Jesus asks questions, good questions, unnerving questions, re-aligning questions, transforming questions. He leads us into liminal, and therefore transformative space, much more than taking us into any moral high ground of immediate certitude or ego superiority. He subverts up front the cultural or theological assumptions that we are eventually going to have to face anyway. He leaves us betwixt and between, where God and grace can get at us, and where we are not at all in control. It probably does not work for a large majority of people, at least in my experience. They merely ignore you or fight you. Maybe this is why we have paid so little attention to Jesus questions and emphasized instead his seeming answers. They give us more a feeling of success and closure. We made of Jesus a systematic theologian, who walked around teaching dogmas, instead of a peripatetic and engaging transformer of the soul. Easy answers instead of hard questions allow us to try to change others instead of allowing God to change us. At least, I know that is true in my life. Jesus always reminds us that “God alone is good” (Mark 10:18) and we had best not try to concoct our own goodness by providing ourselves with pat or immediate answers about great and intentionally unanswerable questions. Thus he merely lists the memorized commandments to a young inquiring man, while cleverly and compassionately slipping in “Do not defraud” second to the last. He does not really answer his self-reassuring question about “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” but instead quietly reveals the likely sin of this rich young man. Jesus knows how he got rich, and that is why he dares to tell him that he must give it all away. This would-be “13th disciple” cannot bear the ego humiliation of this revelation. “His face fell and he went away” (Mark 10:22). He wanted to think of himself as good instead of rejoicing in the goodness of God. That is the problem with any religion based primarily on morality and satisfying answers, instead of questions. As a result, he missed the primary call, the moment of sheer relationship, the ultimate questioning of the soul–when “Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him”. No where else is there such a line in the whole New Testament. The rich young man wanted satisfying answers instead of an answering person, and as a result, he got neither. He wanted his question answered to reassure himself that he was in the in-crowd of the saved. Jesus told him personally–on the spot– that he was, but he did not have the freedom to hear any questions but his own.
I should give credit to Richard Rohr for the majority of the thoughts behind these two posts.
