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The Trouble with Jesus
by Constance Hastings
A Tangled Love
May 24, 2021
The Trouble with Jesus is easy, facile understandings of God are not the answers he gives.
You’ve made your point before. Won’t let it go, will you? Repetition will kill your efforts. People get bored and move on with this kind of thing. Why can’t you just let it die?
Now, be fair. Yes, generally speaking, we’ve been around this block. You know what though? Each time there’s something new to see, to find, to bring into consideration. That means it’s rich, layered, deep. So take another dive.
It’s real late. Nicodemus sneaks in. He shouldn’t be there. He’s from the other side, the side that just saw how dangerous this troublemaker can be. But he has questions. His questions get slammed with answers that may later have made him think this guy is nuts, yeah, dangerous is right. But that talk Jesus had with him still has people thinking. It’ll keep you up late at night even now. Nicodemus has a lot of company.
Let’s get the big message out of the way. You must be born again. Everyone has a physical birth, of course, but there’s another way of looking at it. There’s another way of being alive only accomplished by making the choice to enter into God’s Love through accepting, knowing, and being known by God’s Son.
The 16th verse is direct, bluntly succinct.
God loves and God gives. God gives God’s self in a human form who lived and died and lived again, reversing trouble by reversing where trouble ends into what God and every created person wants, not death but life that fulfills Love.
So what if you don’t? If I refuse to get on board, what you going to do to me? Send me to that hot spot? That’s not so much like the “luuuve” you talk about. No wonder you people are such experts at being hypocrites. Look who you follow.
Not sure what kind of love you think there is out there. Love as in, “whatever you want, honey”? Love as in “if you really loved me, you’d….”? Love as in, “love me just the way I am, warts and all,” and don’t have any hope that I can be more than that? Those are low standards, really self-centered, just steps away from manipulation and abuse. God wants better than that. That’s why the standard is so high.
Still, there’s more. In this passage, Jesus fleshes out what God in all God’s fullness is like. He talks about being born of “water and the Spirit” and how “the Holy Spirit gives new life from heaven.” Life in its fullness has to be both a physical birth from a mother’s womb and a spiritual birth, each completed in a washing, pouring out of waters that have nurtured and cleansed one’s being. Like a wind that blows, the Spirit is felt as it swirls, pushes, drives without being controlled, explained, understood. As new-born babes must first fill their lungs with air to live, the Spirit-Wind is the breath of God filling the re-born with new life, eternal life not delayed until there is no more breath, but fully lived in the here and now.
God is active as well. Centered in God’s expression of Love, that of Creator-Father, God’s actions had been reported and will be known again by actions that raise up the created to new ways of seeing that Love. Jesus referenced the ancient Israelites needing to lift their gaze toward God by that of a serpent on a pole for healing. (Numbers 21:1-9) By making one’s focus on what is above, by turning to God beyond what one can do for oneself, God brings that healing hope.
Likewise, Jesus would be lifted up on a pole for that eternal life healing to be possible, his pole which would be a cross that saves. To save means to rescue, heal, restore. To only live for existence in a material, physical reality means an incompleteness in being. Rebirth completes and connects with the spiritual self, this reality connected again by the Spirit.
In all, though Nicodemus was getting more than he asked, Jesus reveals the God who sent him and how the God who is Spirit is the God of creation designed for relationship. This relational, loving God moves as linked circles, interconnected, tangled together in active commitment to lift the created world to more than it can be otherwise.
As God is not complete without these three facets of God, so God is not nearly sensed, approached, made real without this understanding, strange and difficult as it may seem on secret visits in the darkness of night and soul.
John 3:1-17
They had no idea what they were getting into when he had recruited them for his purposes. Some say they weren’t the brightest bulbs on the street. The only attribute which spoke most for them was they were teachable…
You Christians! If ever there a more divisive movement in history, it’s yours! You people just can’t stay together. You guys just keep fighting among yourselves and splitting up and moving off in different directions. If you don’t like what’s going on in your church, you take your money and walk. Sometimes, a whole group of you jump ship and make your own deal somewhere else. There’s enough of this kind of thing going on; why would we ever need religion to show us how it’s done? May your God help you.
No greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for friends, is to daily relinquish the right to one’s self in service for others.
The Trouble with Jesus: His words grow like a vine, thin trails of thought getting thicker with meaning.
Awww, so sweet. A story about a good shepherd and his sheep. I can see now the old, faded pictures of this Jesus-figure carrying his lambs. Like really, what does this have to do with today? We left this kind of thing in the nursery with Mary’s little lamb. Baa-baa to you.
Every single one of them did it. When they heard the news, they didn’t believe it. Don’t blame them. We are no different. To be honest, it helps. It helps a lot, for if the report was swallowed hook, line, and sinker as the fishermen they were, it’d be pretty evident this story was falsified with some ulterior purpose in mind, like fashioned to make themselves into some kind of holy heroes. Not how it happened. They didn’t believe it, plain and simple.
Could it be that faith is not actually a fully convinced mindset? Could it be that to truly have faith an element of doubt, perceptions that rest in possibly not as much as possibly so, is necessary? Do faith and doubt exist not as opposites but as integral parts of each other?
How do you get out of bed in the morning when the day is still shrouded in darkness? How do you rise when grief, anger, and anxious fear sink deep into your soul? Why should you open your eyes to a pain that pierces whatever faith that is left? Somehow, they did.
. Before Jesus even got into town, they lined the road, spreading a carpet of coats and shouting, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord.” Expectations were high. If only he had come to fulfill them....With too much popularity and too many attacks on the powers-that-be, Jesus wasn’t making it easy on himself. Sooner or later, someone was going to put a stop to this. As it was, it wasn’t just one.
It’s hard to allow the less attractive parts of ourselves be exposed, let alone the parts which stink, with warts, bunions, and fungus embedded in the nails. Equally difficult is to accept it from one of whom we think so highly, even worship.... Worse yet, maybe they know us better than we think, better than we know ourselves. Their goodness shouldn’t be sullied with our mean stuff, the secret knowledge of ourselves.
Why does God have to come so close?
