The Big Lie

It's a bright, sunny day here in Outer Podunk...I'm listening to Diane Reeves, which is not the worst thing you can be doing with your time on a Saturday...and I'm moodling over the Gospel lesson for tomorrow, Mark 1:40-45, the story of Jesus healing the leper.

As I'm pondering the text, I am experiencing a strange juxtaposition: I keep seeing, in my mind's eye, a shot from the film Bonhoeffer, recently broadcast on PBS, that showed a Lutheran bishop enthusiastically Sieg Heiling with a group of Nazi officials.

But it's really not a strange juxtaposition. Because tomorrow's Gospel story is, in large part, about power -- who and what wield power over individuals' lives in society.

The witness of the Gospels is that Jesus refused to acknowledge the primacy of the "powers and principalities" of his religion, of cultural norm, of the government he lived under. He did not humor the powers; he spoke truth to the powers. And that's how he wound up crucified between two other lawbreakers. You don't get condemned by the authorities of your faith tradition for following the party line. You don't get killed by the government for being an upstanding citizen. You don't get rejected by your peers for adding your "amen" to the choir touting conventional values.

And yet -- this is what the Church has tried to sell Christians for centuries: Your job is to be good, obedient people of faith who listen in submission to what the Bible and ecclesiastical authority figures have to tell you; and to be good, obedient citizens who don't bring scandal to the Body of Christ by challenging authority.

How did it come to this? What on earth does this have to do with the message and model of Jesus of Nazareth?

When I was a kid, I remember hearing in church that the Gospel texts describing how Jesus would send people he'd healed to the religious authorities to have their cures officially recognized, and other texts describing Jesus attending synagogue, were proofs that Jesus perfectly followed the Jewish ritual law, and freely submitted himself to the authority of his faith community. These are untruths, pure and simple. Jesus was constantly flouting the ritual law. (With no indication that he ever underwent the process of ritually purifying himself after every infraction. If he did, one suspects he'd have no time to do anything else.) And his trips to the synagogue all seem to wind up creating turmoil. I mean -- that's all in there, right in the text; you don't have to be a seminary professor to figure it out.

But acknowledging the fact that Jesus not only disregarded the religious sensibilities of his day but also disregarded the actual ritual instructions of Torah, is such dangerous stuff that the institutional Church has been loath to go there. And acknowledging the social implications of Jesus' modeling of the Reign of God -- hierarchies turned upside down, conventional "family values" rejected in favor of a radically inclusive redefinition, ultimate loyalty focused on God alone, even the Scriptures themselves subject to critique by Jesus -- has also been too hot for the Church to handle.

And so we live with film footage of church leaders in the 1930's publicly bootlicking their Nazi masters...and with a current religious milieu where many Christians seem to have either reduced their Christianity to a private faith drama starring "me and Jesus," or have created a Christianity that conveniently reflects their own bourgeois concerns, prejudices, fears and infantile desire to be taken care of by benevolent dictators, whether those be governments all too happy to accept that responsibility or religious authority figures ready to "explain it all." We have Christians who vilify and condemn others based on a slavish devotion to certain Bible texts that conveniently validate their own preexisting bigotries, while ignoring other Scriptures whose messages might demand behavior changes of them...and while denying that fact, as well as the fact that for Jesus love always trumped law, to the point where he purposefully ignored the ritual mandates of Torah, which made him something other than the "Bible believing" moniker that so many Christians assign themselves as a badge of spiritual and moral superiority.

C.S. Lewis describes the Christ-figure Aslan as good but never safe. How willing are any of us to embrace a Christ who is good but never safe -- who is constantly calling us out of our cultural norms, our desire for security and even our cherished assumptions about how God works in the world?

A safe Jesus, a conventional Jesus, one who plays by the rules and gives his blanket benediction to all the powers and principalities in this world that demand our fealty, is a fiction. This Jesus a big lie. It's not the real Jesus. When are we, as a faith community, going to admit that in a voice loud enough for others to hear?