Jesus of Nazareth was, above all, what he insisted he was in the last words of which we have any record--a watchful shepherd. We are meant to do no less than he asked with each live man and woman and child in our reach--to tend them as Jesus tended the souls he met in the hamlets and towns and cities of Palestine, with patient healing and close attention to their all but endless needs (not our sense of their needs).Reynolds Price, in typical form, has startled me once again, by reducing Christianity to this: love your neighbor as yourself; feed my sheep; do not resist an evil person.
What God left to attentive creatures, when the risen Jesus vanished at the end of forty days, was an enormous but remarkably trim inheritance--the three sayings examined above (Love your neighbor as yourself, Feed my sheep, Do not resist an evil person: the command to Love God is implicit in each of those three).
Though Paul, and perhaps a few other New Testament authors, wrote down their arguments and exhortations earlier than the evangelists, surely the memory of Jesus would have survived only as a footnote in the history of the Mediterranean religions if the Gospel stories had not been recorded, as stories, and kept intact for our attention (a man went here and did that; then he went there and did another thing). Valuable as the quantity of sayings preserved in Matthew, Luke and John continues to be, it's Mark--with his utter faith in story and the narrative faith he taught to others--who lit the hearts of the later Jesus sect and spread its initially quiet flame beyond the eastern Roman empire and onward, for good and evil, into the world.
I have a friend who would quickly jump up to say, "Hey! Watch out! There's no Jesus here. Where is Jesus? Come on. I mean it. If you don't have Jesus, then you don't have this faith." But I think such statements are missing the Son of God by making him a name brand or a patent ingredient. First of all, inherent in all three of Price's sayings is the order: Love God. It's not hidden, it's right there: the only reason you would do any of these seemingly unsafe things is out of love for god. But we must continue: another important note is that it was Jesus, himself, who gave us these orders. I don't know exactly how much that brings Him into the conversation, but I believe it is not a little. And of course there is also this: to whom does the "my" in feed my sheep refer? To say that there is no Jesus in these statements because they don't use five English letters like an incantation is ridiculous. That my, is the "I" of Jesus which is to say, it's Him. Right there.
And so it comes down to this: Love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12). That we must respect ourselves as much as we respect others and be as considerate of others as we are of ourselves. Love your neighbor as yourself means that no one has a corner on the market of pain. As much as we are scared and hurt, we must never forget that others are just as, if not more, scared and hurt: especially others who scare and hurt us. Our neighbors are not only the Samaritans along the way, but also the poor, beaten and robbed in the ditch. These are those who we must love as ourselves.
Next then is this: Feed my sheep (John 21). Now, this also concerns the recognition of ugliness in everyone, even those who refuse to recognize it in themselves (by the way, these are usually those who appear beautiful on the outside). Feed my sheep means that God isn't going to do it; he may give us everything we need to do it, but he wants us to "give them some bread yourselves." He wants our faith that the few loaves and fish we have really are enough to be spread the whole world round. It's the act of feeding that makes them so. And also, we should not forget that it is His flock. They are His sheep. He is still the shepherd.
And finally this: Do not resist the evil person (Matthew 5). This truly is a hard teaching and I do not know what it means. Am I to not fight evil? Am I not to stand courageously against the darkness? Is the fire that burns in my heart an evil fire because it would strive against evil?
No comments:
Post a Comment