Do You
Have to Know Jesus to Follow Jesus?
January
27, 2002
Stephen K. Nash
Bob and I will
be joining Marty this week at Stetson University for a week of continuing
education at their Pastor’s school.
Marty had to leave a couple of days early since he is speaking for the
Florida conference of the ICCC this weekend.
Bob and I were
glad to hear that he was flying down.
We’ve been concerned about him behind the wheel lately. And there’s more behind that concern than
the snow incident of a couple of weeks ago.
Oh yea. Did you know?
He was driving
on I-40 after making one of his marathon hospital visit loops when his cell
phone rang. It was Sandy and she was
urgently warning him, “Marty, I just heard on the news that there’s a car going
the wrong way on 1-40. Please be
careful!” “Gosh,” Marty said, “It’s not
just one car. It’s hundreds of them!”
So we’re glad
he flew to Florida this week. And we
need to keep him on our long-term prayer list.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“ . . . and immediately they left their boats and their father and
followed him.”
Do you have to know Jesus to
follow him?
Jesus was walking by the Sea
of Galilee. Matthew depicts it as a
scene where Jesus has just left his hometown of Nazareth after hearing about
the imprisonment of his cousin John the Baptist. He has come to live in Capernaum on the shores of Lake Galilee
and to inaugurate his mission. As he
walks along the Sea of Galilee he comes upon some fishermen: Peter, Andrew, James, John. He said to them, “follow me and I will make you fish for people.”
And in response to Jesus
call, they left their boats, left their nets and their families and followed
him.
Why? Why did they go with him? That’s what I want to know. Would you follow someone who you didn’t
know?
Some say that the fishermen
followed Jesus because Jesus had such a compelling, charismatic appeal that
people were instantly attracted to him.
Since we are in the Epiphany season, it would seem appropriate to say that
in their encounter with Jesus, they had an epiphany. They saw something, some undefined light that they, like the wise
men, had to follow.
This is the way that Jesus
is portrayed in most of the “life of Jesus” movies, such as Jesus of
Nazareth. The only blue-eyed,
fair-skinned Jew in all of Israel who penetratingly peers into the eyes of
those poor simple fisher-folk and they become so captivated, so mesmerized, so
seduced, that they drop their nets and off they go. Is that what happened?
You think?
Perhaps. Did Peter, Andrew, James and John simply
follow this magnetic stranger?
The problem, of course, with
this explanation is that not everyone who encountered Jesus seemed to notice
his appeal. Some who came to hear him
left unpersuaded. Some were even hostile.
Some who came to see what he was about did not follow. Why did the fishermen leave their nets to
follow Jesus? Was it the tone of his
voice? The surprise of the
invitation? Had it been a particularly
bad day at the lake? Some days on the
golf course you know what it’s like . . . I’d follow just about anybody to end
the embarrassment of my game some days.
Or were these people ready for some kind of mid-life career change? Nah,
that would probably be reading back our own sociology into the situation. Matthew simply doesn’t say.
Would you want to know where
someone was going to lead you before you decided to follow?
One of the most curious and
disturbing things about human nature is that it seems that almost anyone can
generate a following. I don’t
understand why some people will surrender mind and will to a charlatan or even
worse, to someone who is deranged and dangerous. The Jim Joneses, the David Koresches and assorted other religious
cult leaders. The Osama bin Ladens of
the world.
I can understand, I guess,
that there are people who feel so disenfranchised, so weak and empty, or so
bruised by life, so emotionally stunted in their own development they need some
kind of omnipotent, controlling powerful figure in their life. But to mindlessly and blindly give oneself
to someone who leads you to your own death.
I just don’t understand.
I don’t understand the
fanatical allegiance of the German people in the thirties and the forties to
Adolf Hitler. Didn’t they see where he
would lead them? I know the seeds of
World War II were sown at the Treaty of Versailles. I understand the collapse of the German economy and the loss of
national pride that followed the First World War and how those combined to
provide an environment in which a kind of fanatical nationalism could live and
breath. But even so, to follow a
leader, not only to war, but to a vision of superiority and domination and
ethnic cleansing. Couldn’t they see who
this was they were following?
Would you follow someone
that you didn’t know? Would you blindly
give your allegiance to an unknown person who simply came along and said,
“follow me.” No. No, you wouldn’t.
Count me among those who
believe that this conversation on the seashore was not the first time that
Peter, Andrew, James and John had encountered Jesus. Whether it’s for the economy of space or dramatic effect, or in
keeping with his own unique portrait of Jesus, Matthew has telescoped events
here to fit with his own work of gospel art.
These fishermen knew
Jesus. They had to know Jesus. They heard him preach. They heard him teach. Were they intrigued by his message? “Repent . . .the kingdom of heaven is
near.” Did that strike a responsive
chord in their soul? Were they
attracted to his person? Did he just
seem to them to be a person of exceptional integrity, a person of compelling
authenticity? The story is silent at
this point. It doesn’t say. But I think they knew him.
Where, I wonder, did they
first meet him? Where did that
encounter take place? What did Jesus
say that so captured their imagination?
I don’t know. But I know that
they knew Jesus before they left their nets.
They wouldn’t follow someone whom they did not know. And neither will we.
I know some people who are
reluctant to follow Jesus because they know him too well. Who know of his impatience with people who
are quick to make judgments. Who know
that the Beloved Life, as Marty has been characterizing it in his messages of
recent weeks, does indeed involve giving up judging others. And these people are quick to make judgments
about others, and slow to see their own shortcomings.
Why is it that you so easily
see the speck in your brother’s eye, but don’t see the log in your own? Jesus
asks them. And because they know it’s
the truth, they turn away from him. It
was the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitzin who said: “The line between good and evil does not run
between us and them, but it cuts through the heart of each one of us.”
I know people who choose not
to follow Jesus because they know of his indifference to the normal standards
by which we measure ourselves and others—by his transcendence of conventional
wisdom. Wealth. Social status. Family pedigree.
Education. Even religious
credentials and affiliation. None of
those things seemed important to him who sought to turn conventional wisdom on
its head.
No one can serve two
masters. No one can serve both God and
money, Jesus declared in the Sermon on the Mount. Now I’m a red-blooded American who believes in the positive
humanistic benefits of capitalism and free market economy under most
circumstances.
But dare quote that
statement of Jesus to those who worship at the alter of Wall Street and listen
to the rationalizations that come for greed disguised as healthy ambition and
idolatry disguised as simply trying to get ahead. Tell that to Enron executives and the countless thousands like
them around our nation and world who truly do believe that greed is good, and
see what kind of reaction you get.
So you see, some people
choose not to follow Jesus because they know him. They know that he was hard on the many human idolatries the we
fall prey to. They know that he found
it distasteful to separate people into categories and make distinctions between
pure and impure, holy and unholy.
That’s what ancient purity systems did.
And that’s one thing that Jesus hated.
They find it disturbing that he associated with people of questionable
character with a no-strings-attached kind of acceptance. How is it that you, a Jew, talk to me, a
woman of Samaria?
You see, some people find it
difficult to follow Jesus not because they don’t know him, but because
they know him all too well. They
know his priorities, his commitments, his vision of God and of the world. They know he’s counter-cultural,
iconoclastic, subversive. They know
what he asks of those who follow him.
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his
cross and follow me.”
It’s the truth. It’s not hard to understand. Some people don’t follow Jesus because they know
him. And some choose to revise the
Jesus of history and give him a makeover so that they can follow him.
It’s always a risk for the
church to try to paint a truthful portrait of the one we follow. But there’s a greater risk. If we don’t know what Jesus said and did,
properly interpreted and understood in it’s own
social/political/economic/religious context.
If we do not have a sense of the mind of Christ, we may follow a Jesus
of our own creation. We may create a
Jesus who simply endorses our own comfortable cultural prejudices instead of
subverting them, as Jesus often does.
I have a friend who tells
about a prayer meeting which he attended back just before the outbreak of
hostilities in the Persian Gulf War. My
guess is this story has its real-life analogies in our present conflict; in
fact I know it does. Among those who
gave voice to their prayer at that meeting was a young man who prayed for
Saddam Hussein and the young men of Iraq who would be going into battle. After the meeting was over, another man came
up to this person who had prayed and confronted him. He was incensed,
irate. “Who do you want to win this
war?” he asked. “Whose side are you
on? Why would you pray for such a thing
here in the church?” And the young man
replied, “bubut Jesus told us to love our enemies and pray for those who
persecute us.” And the man put his
finger in the young man’s face and said, red-faced, “my Jesus (notice, “my”
Jesus) would never ask us to pray for an enemy of the United States of
America. “My Jesus.” . . .
It is a tendency of popular
piety to domesticate Jesus rather than to hear his prophetic voice which
challenges our way of seeing things.
If we don’t know Jesus of
Nazareth; if we don’t listen carefully to the things that he said; if we don’t
watch closely the things that he did; if we don’t test our interpretation of
what we hear and what we see in the midst of the community of faith that is
struggling to know him well, then we may follow the Jesus of our imagination,
or the one we’ve come to know through indoctrination rather than education and
discipleship. Jesus as we want Jesus to
be. Jesus that legitimizes us and our
prejudices and our preferences. And our
following him will have no virtue and may lead us farther from God.
Must we know Jesus in order
to follow him? Of course. What must we know? What must have those four fishermen have known and seen in the
early days of Jesus ministry about the trajectory of that ministry?
Let me suggest three things
briefly.
Jesus became for those early
followers a powerful lens through which the Divine could be seen. Jesus was a powerful magnifying glass of
what is most central about God. And what
he revealed was this.
First, God is near to us,
right at hand, and can be experienced by anyone, anywhere, anytime. As a person
of the spirit, Jesus’ experience of God was so intimate, that there indeed
probably was a compelling aura to his life.
He demonstrated that God is not a distant being out there but the
reality in whom we live and move and have our being, to use Saint Paul’s line
from a Greek poet-philosopher. God is
Spirit in the rich biblical sense of the word.
In both Hebrew and Greek,
the word also means “wind” and “breath.”
God as Spirit is like the wind that moves around us and the breath that
moves in us. The earliest followers of
Jesus sensed the presence of God in Jesus and believed that they could learn to
experience that same intimacy. “The
Kingdom of God is within you,” Jesus taught them. And it does not take the ritual of sacred traditions in order to
have access to God. Many traditions,
both Jewish and Christian have often claimed a monopoly on access to God, even
as other voices in both those traditions have challenged the claim. Jesus challenged it. He taught and embodied an unmediated
relationship to the sacred. God is
accessible immediately to those who were “not much” or worse, including the
radically marginalized and outcasts.
And that was a compelling truth to those who were shut out by the powers
that be.
Second. God is compassionate. Holiness is not defined as separation or
purity, Jesus taught, but as compassion, which he embodied. Jesus defined the imitation of God in this
way: “Be compassionate, as God is
compassionate.” Compassion isn’t simply
the will of God, but the very quality of God.
Life-giving, nourishing, embracing, gracious. Like a mother feels compassion for the child of her womb. God’s grace is unconditional. It’s not limited to the notion of
forgiveness, but that may be the one way we most often think of it in the
Christian tradition.
I like the story Scott Peck
tells of a little Filipino girl who said that she talked to Jesus, and the
people in her village began to get excited about that. Then word got around to some of the
neighboring
villages, and other people
began to get excited about it. Finally, word reached the bishop’s palace in
Manila, and the bishop became somewhat concerned, because after all, you can’t
have any unauthorized saints walking around in the Church. So he appointed a monsignor to investigate
this case.
The little girl was brought
to the bishop’s palace for a series of psychological diagnostic
interviews. At the end of the third
interview, the monsignor threw up his hands and said, “I just don’t know. I don’t know what to make of this. I don’t know whether you’re real or
not. But there is one acid test. The next time you talk to Jesus, I want you
to ask him what I confessed to at my last confession. Would you do that”?
The little girl said she
would. She went away and came back for
her interview the next week. And with
barely disguised eagerness the monsignor asked, “So, my dear, did you talk to
Jesus again this past week?”
She said, “Yes, Father, I did.”
“And when you talked to
Jesus this past week did you remember to ask Him what I confessed to at my last
confession?”
“Yes, Father, I did.”
“Well, when you asked Jesus
what I confessed to at my last confession, what did Jesus say?”
And the little girl
answered, “Jesus said, ‘I’ve forgotten.’”
There are two possible
interpretations to that story. One is
that the girl was one smart little psychopath.
But the more likely is that she really did talk to Jesus, because what
she was expressing was pure, thoroughbred Christian theology. “For I will forgive your sins and remember
them no more.”
The compassion of God is
tender, forgiving, gracious. But like a
mother who sees some of her children being victimized by others, God’s compassion
can become fierce. The compassion of
God is commonly and more abstractly spoken of as the love of God. God is love—and it can be a fierce love. Which leads to the third and final thing to
be said.
God is passionate about
justice. God’s passion for justice is
central to Moses and the prophets, voices of religious social protest against
the domination systems of their day.
Jesus stood within this stream of the Jewish tradition.
God’s passion for justice
led Jesus to side with the poor and marginalized and to indict the religious,
political, and economic elites, including Jerusalem and the temple as the
center of the native domination system.
A compassion that is simply
individualistic and fails to see that the greatest single cause of human misery
in the history of the world flows from systemic injustice, is still partially
blind. It was his
passion for justice that was
the cause of Jesus death by the powers that be. He died advocating for the dream of God.
“The dream of God,” to use Verna Dozier’s wonderful phrase is the
kingdom of God: what life in this world
would be like if God were king, and the rules of the present age were not. This quality of compassion-justice is a way
of seeing the world and human persons.
It is how Jesus saw. It his how
saints and mystics in all traditions saw:
Paul, Saint Francis. In our own
century Martin Buber, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother
Teresa. The Spirit leads us to see
other people not in cultural categories of attractive and unattractive,
successful and unsuccessful, interesting or uninteresting, deserving or
undeserving.
Some scoff at the notion of
a dream of God for this world. The
apocalyptic fundamentalists who have little use for this world. Thomas Clark put it this way:
Dreams are they? But they are God’s dreams.
Shall we decry them and
scorn them?
That men shall love one
another
That white shall call black
man brother
That men shall cease from
hating,
That war will be abating,
That glory of kings and
lords shall pale
That the love of all
humanity prevail—
Dreams are they all:
But shall we despise them—
God’s dreams!
Do we have to know Jesus in
order to follow him? Yes. Indeed we do. How can we authentically follow him without seeing that he is
leading us on a spirit-filled path of compassion and justice. We must know the Jesus of that path if we
are to follow him.
But the opposite is also
true.
I once knew a man who was a
student of the gospels. He read them in the original Greek. His library was filled with commentaries on
the gospels of every era. He was
conversant with all the great theological descriptions of the person and the
work of Christ. But he did not follow
Jesus. He admitted that he didn’t like
people very well.
Jesus, to him was an
academic curiosity, a historical figure who intrigued. Now, you tell me, did he know Jesus? No.
It’s not enough to know about this carpenter’s son, this Jewish
peasant, migrant preacher, social reformer, mystic, teacher of alternative
wisdom, rabbi who taught and ate and drank and lived and died and, faith
believes, lives still. The paradox of
faith is that unless we know him, we cannot follow him . . . but unless we
sense God at work in him . . .unless we commit ourselves to him and follow . .
. we will never really know him.
We must know Jesus in order
to follow him, but it is equally true that we must throw down our nets, leave
everything, and follow him, if we are to know who he really is.
Amen.