This morning on ‘Thought for the Day’, Giles Fraser commented on our tendency to see Jesus as being like me: introverts see him as introverted, extroverts as extrovert, thinkers as a great thinker, people whose emotions lead their response to situations see him as a man of deep feelings. Fraser’s final comment was that the one thing we can be certain of, is that Jesus was not at all like us and was probably much stranger than we think.
Yesterday in the 10.30am sermon I wondered what we might make of a meeting with Jesus: ‘If I could meet the man Jesus would I immediately see him as a friend? Or might there be something about him, which would threaten to expose all the careful ways in which I have constructed my life to avoid the humanity God wills for me? Am I really afraid of God’s plan for humanity – the friendship and the mutual self-giving, the co-operation and equality, the honesty and vision which God wills for us. …. In what way might we ourselves, at some unacknowledged level, be unwilling to respond to Christ and even ourselves live as opponents of the gospel?’
Of course thinking about what Jesus was really like is enormously difficult and at one level requires a great deal of expertise. What any of us ‘is really like’ is very difficult to say – as difficult as answering the question ‘Who am I?’
This question becomes doubly difficult when thinking about someone who lived in the distant past and spoke a practically dead language (spoken now only in various dialectical forms by small communities in the Middle East and used also as a liturgical language by the Syrian Orthodox Church). How do we pick up the nuances of such a language, its colloquialisms and local references? Might Jesus have used a lot more humour in his teaching than comes across in our modern Bibles? How can we be sure that aspects of what he said haven’t been developed and modified in the passing on by word of mouth of his stories and sayings and deeds? And even more problematically, how did he think of himself and his mission, not just in terms of who he was, but in his thinking about himself as a human being. Our modern style of introspection, our individualism and psychological reflection were all developed long after Jesus lived. These are all questions familiar to Biblical scholars, but how are we to deal with them in our own day to day reflections on Jesus. If we try to spend some of the time this Lent thinking about our image of Jesus and the part he plays in our lives, how are we to do so?
We might begin with some of the dominant images of Jesus which emerge form the gospel story. For example, Jesus is always on the move. Most of the encounters most people had with him were brief. And yet they made a difference. He addressed people directly and his words hit home. He had a directness of communication which challenged, healed, and summoned people in a way which could be difficult to forget. And that might mean that in our reading of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke we should not read in large chunks but take his sayings one at a time to see how they might similarly hit home. (John with its long discourses requires a different kind of reading.) The fact that Jesus was always moving on to the next town means that we should also symbolically find it hard to keep up with him. That was certainly true of the experience even of his disciples. He was always out there ahead of them and even they found him difficult to understand – a stranger to them even after they had been with him for some time. The fact that we find Jesus difficult is the best safeguard against our doing what Giles Fraser warned against – projecting onto Jesus our own needs for reassurance and our unwillingness to be changed by him. If the old hymn, ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’, is right then this is the most challenging, provoking, difficult friend we will ever know, who when we least expect it can also provide reassurance and comfort.
Another dominant feature of the gospels is the diversity of reactions Jesus encounters. Sometimes (and we find this most prominently in John) people misunderstand Jesus by taking what he says too literally. On other occasions, people warm to his authority and directness – he is not like the teachers they are used to. He says things which tune in to their hopes and ideals but often that tuning in is only temporary. Although he clearly sowed seeds in a variety of homes and communities, they were not enough to create any major disturbances when he was arrested. In fact it would seem that some who had heard him gladly at first turned against him in the end. Jesus’ quote from Isaiah is apposite, ‘He who has ears to hear, then let him hear.’ It is relatively easy to think of the passages of Jesus’ teaching which we warm to – phrases from the Sermon on the Mount, certain parables – but how much do these passages make a significant difference to our lives? Do we hold on to them because they are simply examples of the sort of thing someone like me ought to think, or do we ‘hear’ them in a way which makes a genuine difference to the way we lead our lives – do we allow these sayings to become dangerous and potentially disturbing to our normal way of life?
A final dominant feature of the gospel story is the frequency of references to meals Jesus took with his disciples and with strangers who offered him hospitality. It is of course, easy to project on to this ‘table fellowship’ our own images of an ideal meal. Though it would seem Jesus was often invited because he was a good talker, sometimes his table talk proved rather uncomfortable for his host. And yet there is something about the imagery of a meal which makes it appropriate for our imagined encounters with Jesus. The meal is a temporary gathering and yet it is almost always a vehicle of intimacy. You have the choice of speaking and questioning, or simply listening. There is a relationship between the nourishment of food and drink and the nourishment of words – and both have to be carefully digested. The party always has to break up and people go their separate ways and yet meals can be memorable; the atmosphere of an enclosed space, lit by oil lamps, the recollection of phrases heard, the heightened sense of belonging, the fact that eating becomes something more than an answer to hunger, although that hunger may be more than just for food. In this way all meals are images of the Eucharist itself.
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker