I think I’m beginning to understand why you and I have such a hard time understanding Jesus.
I briefly lived in Spain as a child. My dad worked on offshore oil rigs so we traveled the globe and lived in many foreign countries. While living in Spain, I think I was around two or so, I pulled a pot of boiling water off of the stove and burned my chest and abdomen. I still have slight traces of the scar.
I don’t remember that incident, only the scars bear testimony, but growing up I always remembered Spain as a picture. The picture that I got of Spain (even now, it comes to mind) was of a penguin floating on a chunk of ice with an igloo and a sail on it. That was my image of Spain, what I believed with all of my heart and in all sincerity Spain was. It really never wavered and I never really questioned it. I just always believed it. I sketched the image, here’s what it looks like in my head:
That was it, and in school we learned about Spain and its conquests and wars and still the image remained. Some things just become part of the background image of your mind, you know, not anything that you think of consciously, just your own reality.
I was 23 when my wife and I had our first son. We were working in the church nursery and I was sitting on the floor, digging through a plastic toy box looking for a book to read to the kids. I uncovered a book about a penguin named Pablo that hated the cold and wanted to move to a tropical climate. So he cut off his little chunk of the iceberg and floated away. Right there, sitting cross legged on the floor of a little nursery with toddlers screaming and laughing and playing with toys that make entirely too much noise, I found Spain. It just hit me. Bam! All of my life I had carried this image, and right there in full color in an old Disney book I stumbled across my “truth”. I call it my truth because I owned it. Nobody else that I know of thought Spain was a chunk of ice floating in the ocean, just me. My mother had purchased me this book while we lived there. I don’t remember the pain of the boiling water or any of the landscape, just Pablo on his little chunk of ice.
What does this have to do with you and me understanding Jesus? Everything. You see, we have these ideas and images in our heads that we’ve picked up along the way. Some of them are close, some of them are not so close and some of them are as absurd as thinking Spain is a chunk of ice in the ocean with a penguin and an igloo, but they’re our “truth,” our reality. The problem, though, is that we never question, we never ask, we just believe and we never open the book that has the real truth about what we believe (or think we do).
And it’s not that we actually “believe” these things, not on a conscious level, but they color our perception. It’s like filtering pure water through a dirty dish rag. I can see the floaties, but I put them there, and my parents put them there, and this religion that I have been such a part of has put them there. And we drink deeply of the tainted water, and clench our teeth and squint as the grit scratches through our system.
The saddest part though is when the world sees us trying to drink it. Our “truth” seems as tough to swallow as the bitter swill the world has handed them. So why change?
There comes a time, though, when Truth, as a person, steps into our lives. It’s usually unexpected and sometimes a bit disturbing when He shows up and unravels our perceptions. The Jews were looking for an Elegant King and He strode in as a peasant, dirty feet and scruffy beard with a bunch of liars, thieves and whores. They looked for a Crushing Crusader to come in and conquer the world and found a bloody lamb, broken and naked, hanging from a criminal’s cross exposed to the world in shame. They couldn’t conceive it, couldn’t stomach it, it didn’t match the picture in their mind. They had a choice, simply choose to believe or not. Some did, a few, but most didn’t.
I’ve heard so many messages by preachers that have scoffed at and even vilified those Jews. Pointing at them in derision, mocking their lack of faith and understanding, “How could they not see the “truth” right there in front of them? I would have to ask the same question, but not of those men and women in His day, but of my own contemporaries.
How do we know so much and represent Christ so poorly? How can we take the blood of Jesus and His act of sheer grace and strain it through our dirty dish rag of religion. How can we take the beauty of the Gospel and taint with prejudice and pride and politics?
I participated in a local prayer event in my city that had little impact on the lives of the men and women that we were supposed to be praying for. In fact, the water was strained through so many layers of racism, political agendas, and self-righteousness until it was barely even palatable for those of us who claimed Christianity, much less for the world.
When will we see the body of Christ in its proper position, on its knees, towel wrapped around its waist, with an empty pitcher and a basin full of muddy water from the world’s dirty feet instead of standing with our hammer and bloody sickle of self righteousness and prejudice?
My wife said I sound like I’m mad at the church, that we’re not all like that, sometimes we just don’t know. There are a lot of us that when we’ve tried to face truth it just hurts too much, because truth makes us examine not only ourselves, but it makes us examine those around us. Then we look at people that we have put on pedestals and we realize that in their ignorance they have misled us. And sometimes it’s easier and safer to just not ask why, because it’s too scary.
She’s right, except I’m not really mad at the church, just frustrated, because our images are so far off sometimes, and not even that, but more that we don’t seek Him before we start displaying them so proudly. We don’t really compare them to anything substantial. We just draw them, frame them, hang them and expect the world to rave about them and flock to us, but secretly we don’t even like them ourselves. We are just afraid of the blank spaces.
We scorn the evolutionist, we despise the humanist, we are angry at the world for tempting us and luring us away from our sacred images, from our “truth” and then we scorn each other, despising other “denominations” and we become angry at anyone that would dare challenge the authenticity of our belief system.
The Latin root for the word religion can be traced back to the word “relegare” which means to “tie fast.” Not fast in the sense of quick, but in the sense of securely. Religion is tying yourself securely to an idea or principle, especially in regard to a deity, that’s why we have such a hard time understanding Jesus, because He came to a group of people bound to their religious laws and man made ideas and cut the cord. He wasn’t safe, he didn’t show proper appreciation for the elaborate beauty of their religious image.
He was not like the law, though He created it, He came close and embraced us, unclean, impure, untouchable, with His passion because He was truth and grace.
Grace is unmerited favor. Grace is the compassion of Christ overcoming the justice of God.
Luke 15:20 – Grace is the fervent heart of the broken hearted father running to embrace His son, simply because of his compassion.
Grace pursues us because it is the very heart of God. Grace walks through the crowd of self-righteous people yelling unclean at you and touches you.
Grace is unthinkable, unexplainable, unfair and undeniable. It’s obscene and horrible and beautiful and wonderful.
"Cornelius Plantinaga, Jr., assures us that we can never arrive at any definition of grace without sin as our point of departure. Cheap grace, he says, trivialize the cross of Christ. How can we avert our eyes from a cross drenched in holy blood? It was for sin that God, clothed in flesh, writhed in agony on our behalf. It was for iniquity; for wickedness; for every manner of wretched, despicable evil that He submitted to the beating and humiliation and finally the obscenity of death itself. Grace can only shine in its ultimate brightness because it emerges from ultimate darkness."*
Grace doesn’t overlook sin, it looks past it through the blood.
But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.
Romans 3:21
*From Captured By Grace by David Jeremiah
