reader/response
today's herb of grace advent reading included the following provocative reflection:
"A good question to ask in this Christmas season would be, “why did those in authority want to kill Jesus, not only as a grown rebel but even as a small child? What was he doing to disturb their kind of peace?” Once we find out exactly what kind of threat Jesus was to the established order, then all we need to do is be that same kind of threat. Then we will be praying “come Lord Jesus” as something different than a sweet Sunday morning melody."
your response?
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3 comments:
Be a threat?
That would make it difficult to remain an upstanding member of my social-ordered Sunday morning social club.
difficult indeed.
i had two immediate responses when reading this post:
1) i'm not sure that i should try to replicate the threat of jesus because, well, i am not jesus.
2) if, because i am a part of christ's body and a participant of the second incarnation upon the earth, i am supposed to replicate the threat of jesus, i think that i should focus on threatening economic systems that transform people into commodities and the religious systems that are more focused on attaining power than on sacrificially serving the economically/spiritually/physically/socially impoverished.
couldn't one see the figure of jesus as written about as a threat to power structures? isn't that why he was threatened and threatening as a baby? because he was believed to be the new born king? and it isn't a stretch to say that, in the gospels, is killers were portrayed as fearing his threat to their power? his religious teachings appear to this reader as tangential to his crucifixion rather than the reason for it. if his religious teachings were not a threat to the powers that were - a power vested in them via religious doctrine certainly - i doubt we would have heard much of this jesus other than as little more than just another heretic. but he challenged the established order and its hierarchy (of both the empire and its little bitches in the Sanhedrin) and that is why they killed him. that is why people like MLK were killed for example.
so the imitation might take a revolutionary tone rather than a religious one.
the first order of "worship" for anyone wanting to seriously follow jesus might be to take a step back and ask "how invested in the current power structure am i" and "am i willing to divest myself from that structure and the system, or do i calculate that i have too much to loose?"
just my 3 cents. but what do i know, i'm going to hell. ha ha.
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