What if you had just spent the last three years of your life with Jesus, as one of his first disciples? You've spent every day watching Jesus reach out to the outcast sinners and forgive them, heal the sick, teach about the kingdom of God, and challenge your thinking with parable. You've worshiped with him, worried about his clashes with the religious establishment, and wondered just what kind of Rabbi or Messiah he really is. Then, just when you think you have it figured out, Jesus is arrested, tried, and crucified. But before you write off the disappointment as a lost dream, Jesus once again turns everything you thought you knew inside out when he reappears alive – after his dead, battered body had been placed in a tomb.
How would spending those three years with Jesus change your life? How could it not change your life?
The late Michael Spencer asked this question on Internet Monk several years ago. He warned that this might not be for everybody, but it’s a good way of exploring how to incorporate the Gospel into our every-day living.
“The key to this exercise is the idea of seeing the integration of life, ministry, teaching, priorities, worship and relationships in the life of Jesus…. [It’s] not what conclusions would I draw, but HOW WOULD I BE DIFFERENT? What would I see differently? How would I conceive of life, priorities and the continuing Jesus movement?”
At the time I first wrestled with the question (I revisit it regularly), I was beginning the third year of reading the Bible from beginning to end. It made me pay even more attention to the accounts of Jesus in the Gospels – not a romanticized, sanitized, or otherwise edited Jesus, but the unadulterated Jesus with his acts of love and forgiveness, hard sayings and genuine, non-hypocritical living and all. I realized there were a lot of things I'd grown too comfortable in accepting.
I'm continually re-discovering the Jesus who attracted me back to church after I had left as a young adult because I thought it was too hypocritical and not particularly relevant to my life. “Continually re-discovering” is a polite way of saying I keep finding myself becoming a little too comfortable with things that should be disturbing me if I’m truly a disciple of Jesus.
In her book Evolving in Monkey Town, Rachel Held Evans described her experiences re-reading the Gospels after struggling with some hard questions she didn't find good answers for:
The most startling thing I noticed as I grew more acquainted with the Gospels was that Jesus had a very different view of faith than the one to which I was accustomed….
I encountered a different Jesus, a Jesus who requires more from me than intellectual assent and emotional allegiance; a Jesus who associated with sinners and infuriated the religious; a Jesus who broke the rules and refused to cast the first stone; a Jesus who gravitated toward sick people and crazy people, homeless people and hopeless people; a Jesus who preferred story to exposition and metaphor to syllogism; a Jesus who answered questions with more questions, and demands for proof with demands for faith…a Jesus who healed each person differently and saved each person differently; a Jesus who had no list of beliefs to check off, no doctrinal statements to sign, no surefire way to tell who was “in” and who was “out”; a Jesus who loved after being betrayed, healed after being hurt, and forgave while being nailed to a tree; a Jesus who asked his disciples to do the same…
This radical Jesus wanted to live not only in my heart and in my head but also in my hands, as I fed the hungry, reached out to my enemies, healed the sick, and comforted the lonely. Being a Christian, it seemed, isn't about agreeing to a certain way; it is about embodying a certain way. It is about living as an incarnation of Jesus, as Jesus lived as an incarnation of God. It is about being Jesus.
Jesus has a way of pulling us out of our complacency, challenging us to live the Gospel, not just acknowledge it or put it up on the wall to save for some future judgment day.
So, if you had just spent the last three years of your life with Jesus, how would that change your life? How would you be different?
If you had just spent your life witnessing Jesus’ ministry among the marginalized (the sinners) and hearing Jesus speak of the kingdom of God, how would that affect your priorities in life?
How would that change the way you see the political and social hot-button issues of today?
Happy Easter!
After doing the Bible in a year two or three times, one of the things that struck me the most was the disciples. They certainly didn’t live well, experienced some of the same rejection Jesus did and to top it off, by tradition, 11 of the 12 were ultimately killed for their belief in Jesus. Some reward for the ones chosen to be closest to Jesus. It doesn’t really make sense unless you take an eternal view of life and consider that loving God (the greatest commandment) is the most important thing in the world. If you were to be able to experience God physically on earth every day, experiencing His wisdom and feeling His love, then I think it finally makes sense.
ReplyDeleteSo, three years would still be an incomplete apprenticeship? That would explain why Jesus said he wouldn't leave them without an advocate (Holy Spirit)... and why he said there's much more to teach them but they weren't ready.
DeleteOne impact I think the experience would have would be to open my eyes to God's work outside of the conventional bounds/norms/expectations. The disciples all had an idea what a Messiah should be like (once they caught on), but none of them expected what Jesus would actually become.
I still need to return to the Bible regularly (even though I've read it through several times now). There always seems to be something there I forgot or missed. And I have to re-examine my knee-jerk reaction to new things that pull me out of my comfort zone.
When I look at things - both on a large scale (the current political climate in this country, the ordeal our friends in Nablis face, orphans in Russia, or any number of global concerns) and a more personal one (being a parent, for instance) - I tend to see different perspectives or options when I try to consider it in light of loving God and loving others than if I follow the "conventional" thinking on the topics. That, I believe, comes from trying to follow Jesus as a disciple.
Interesting point that even after spending three years with Jesus, they still had much to learn. When you see somebody come back to life though, it has to get your attention. Once you turn the head of a bull, the rest will follow. Maybe that’s what happened. I suppose that part of the answer to your question of how spending three years with Jesus would change you, would be that it would prepare the way for your further change.
DeleteBTW, if you accept the Holy Trinity, which I’m not sure that all Christian religions worldwide do, then if we have been walking with or led by the Holy Spirit, haven’t we already spent that time with Jesus?
Seems to me that walking with / listening for / following the Holy Spirit would be another way of spending time with Jesus (perhaps not in the way the first disciples experienced, but in the way they grew after the resurrection). The question might be how much we actually listen and how much we try to wing it (I'm guilty of that).
DeleteI like your observation that spending time with Jesus would prepare you for further change. I've been surprised to find how some of my thoughts about some topic or the other have changed over time as I've spent time in the Bible or reflecting on what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. A lot more of what I do (at work, in church, with family, whatever else I'm doing) is focused on trying to live out that discipleship.
To answer your original question about seeing the political issues of today, I think it would make me pretty skeptical of both ends of the political spectrum. I think that he people you find there are too often self-righteous, which is the thing most often spoken against in the Bible. Largely unwilling to compromise, I find their rhetoric too frequently hateful at its base. Clearly, this is not how to love your neighbor. You can see the corrosive effect that it is currently having in our country, too.
ReplyDeleteIf Jesus’ method was political, the first thing he would have done would be to defeat the Romans, who were really oppressive and did some horrible things. Then he would have agitated for state (King/Sanhedrin) action to end hunger, poverty, etc. in Israel; I can’t recall that he ever did that. Instead, he took those problems on himself, and I think that we should do the same. It’s interesting, though that the early Christians were true communists, although it apparently didn’t last too long. All that said, for me, it does color the way I look at political issues and has definitely moved me towards the left.