Scandalously

Seen on Twitter today:

Being religious won’t save you, following Jesus will.

What does it mean to follow Jesus? If you were to ask two different Christians you might get vastly different answers. If you were to ask two different Christians from different denominations you would almost certainly get different answers. Especially if those different denominations were on different parts of the theological spectrum.

To me following Jesus means trying to be a good person. Accepting people as He did, scandalously, across the barrier of human constructs. I believe if Jesus were here today He would accept the outcasts of our society just as He did in biblical times. That means that those Christians hate the most would be loved by Him.

If He chose to live in the Israel of 2018, He would reach out to Palestinians. There would be no limit to His mercy and understanding. I am convinced that Jesus would fly in the face of how conventional wisdom would expect Him to act. Just as He flew in the face of how the Israelites expected their Messiah to act in the world of first century Israel.

What does it mean to follow Jesus? When I figure it out I will tell you.

A Point Missed

Midrash

noun

an early Jewish interpretation of or commentary on a Biblical text, clarifying or expounding a point of law or developing or illustrating a moral principle

Via

I wonder what we are losing. We read the Bible at face value, as if everything we are reading actually happened. We fight over it and alienate each other because of different interpretations. Schisms form, creating denominations and other human constructs.

The majority of people who wrote the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, were Jewish.

Jewish people read scripture differently than you and I. They dialogue with it. They search for the meaning hidden in the text. They get together and hash it out. Rarely do they concern themselves with the historicity of what they are reading. The meaning is what matters.

The people writing for this audience would think the same way. Did Jonah spend three days in the belly of a great fish? Did Jesus spend 40 days in the desert? None of that really matters when we dig deeper and find what the authors were trying to say.

Chances are Jonah, if he ever even existed, did not spend three days in a fish. Jesus may not have spent 40 days without food in the desert (if he was as human as he was divine it stands to reason that going without food for 40 days would have brought Him to the grave long before the crucifixion).

With our Western assumptions and worldview we are missing the point. The Bible doesn’t have to be factual to be true.

Literally Illiterate

To suggest that this text is in any sense the “literal Word of God” is to place extreme limits on both its truth and its power. Out of our sincere religious need to possess in some written form an infallible source of truth, we run the risk of reducing our treasured book to irrelevance. If the religiously alienated, which in many cases includes our own children, can ridicule our sacred tradition by an appeal to our own sacred Scriptures for which we have claimed too much, then we will have little to offer the world. If those elements of organized religion are allowed to claim for the Bible such words as “inerrant,” “infallible,” “the literal Word of God,” so that it is their limited understanding that becomes the only perception of Christianity in the public arena, then the Christian church, so heavily burdened, will not be able to speak with power to our own generation. – Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism By John Shelby Spong pages 54-55