Today I’d like to file a missing person’s report for Jesus of Nazareth. Has anybody seen Him lately?
Not a sentimental Jesus–not a liberal Jesus who serves as little more than a symbol of bland tolerance or a conservative Jesus who serves as little more than a mascot for culture wars. But the surprising, bewildering, befuddling Jesus of the gospels who alternately captures and breaks my heart–the Jesus who is never easily fit into the rigid alternatives offered to us by the world. Have you seen Him?
For weeks now (and sometimes it feels like years), I’ve been pulled into conversations about doctrine, polity, politics, culture. There are conversations about the left and the right, conversations about Moses and Paul, conversations about righteousness and justice and equality. Scriptures are cut and pasted onto rockets that soar over my head and occasionally land on my lawn. And I don’t mind talking about any of these things. But it’s my job to talk about Jesus, and more importantly it’s my passion.
I am not disturbed by much that goes on around me, by neither notorious sinners nor Pharisees. I have spent enough time playing both parts in my own way to be surprised by what either is capable of. Storms in culture and my life do not disturb me too much no matter how much the sea is raging, so long as I don’t lose sight of Him. But when I can’t see Him, that it when I am capable of being frightened.
Alas, that seems to be the storm we are in, where almost anything and everything about culture and Scripture is on the table for discussion save the direct example of Jesus of Nazareth–His stories, His teachings, His heart. I am aware that this could sound pious, like I think I understand the “real” Jesus in some special way. But that is not the case. I actually find Jesus to be extraordinarily disrupting and unsettling, and there have been and still are plenty of times I’d prefer to escape His gaze. Yet I’ve grown strangely at ease with the disruptive force that is Jesus, so much so that I’d rather be unsettled by Him than comfortable without Him.
He started disrupting me in my early 20′s, when my friend’s father was dying of AIDS. I saw Jesus in his gaunt skeleton of a face. I saw Jesus in the face of the foul-mouthed social worker who cared for him so tenderly. I felt indicted for my tightly constructed, ordered middle class religious world. Jesus’ lack of domesticity and decorum frightened me, as did the undomesticated people He cared most about and ran with. I was surprised that I had the lost the ability to find Him in the places I had expected to find Him, and to find Him in places I was sure He did not belong. Unwittingly, I was drug out with the tide of the gospel texts. I was no longer able to “use” Scripture like I had some claim over it, no proof-texting or arguing for conclusions I had already made. I was being used and dominated by the truth of those stories, entering then as a participant rather than a spectator.
