GENTLE JESUS, MEEK AND MILD
You
might remember in the Kevin Costner and Sean Connery version of The Untouchables that Costner (Eliot
Ness) approaches Connery (Jimmy Malone) and asks him for his help to wipe out
the Capone organization. Malone well knew that Ness hadn’t counted the cost so
he hisses at him at several critical moments during their enterprise, “What are
you prepared to do?” Malone is gunned down and as he dies, choking in his blood
he pushes important information into Ness’s hand, looks in strained intensity
into Ness’s face and hoarsely demands with his last breath, “What are you
prepared to do?”
It’s
right and proper to pay close attention to the qualities of Jesus Christ that
please us. The warm compassion, the generous open heart that welcomed the
outsiders and the pity that moved him to help so many. But for all his warmth
and gentleness there was inflexibility with him when it came to his Holy
Father’s will and human redemption so that more than once the stern character
of grace showed. “I came not to bring peace on earth but a sword,” he said
abruptly to his hearers (Matthew 10:34).
I
think it’s correct to say that we tend to swing between a flinty righteousness
and a weak-kneed indulgence. This is due not only to lack of wisdom and warmth
but also to the lack of gracious holy earnestness. God is more than willing to
bear with our sulks or resentment when we don’t see him to be soft and tender as
we’d like him to be. His holy earnestness and love, that purposes to redeem us
and the world, takes priority over whether we like him or not. We’re too weak
and ignorant in those areas to risk our popularity with one another and it
shows in subtle and not so subtle ways.
Without
the cross at the center of our own experience with Christ, life is reduced to
the merely ethical and the blessings that will come if we’re all nicer to each
other. In this way the focus on families becomes self-serving and the insistent
call for church unity (with dogmatic issues sidelined) is reduced to all of us
being tolerant with and nice to one another. That way we can all enjoy peace
and tranquillity in the loving arms of Jesus as we continue to lean upon his
breast. We call each other to bend over backwards to accommodate one another
rather than calling one another to bend over backwards to accommodate God in trust-filled
holy obedience. We tend to listen to the Word not do discover what God requires
of us but what he will tolerate in light of the agendas we like to pursue. His
agenda—world salvation by
redemption—that centers in the
cross is derailed while we make the church environment even crozier.
["Let's bring in some drums and guitars, or ballet interpretations of
texts or long and pleasing sections of the Andy Griffith Show or Walt
Disney movies. That'll draw people in and keep the church folk happy."]
Early
in the 1900’s P.T. Forsyth was pretty much a lone voice that blazed against
religion that had become little more than an advocate of moral evolution and
“Let’s all be neighborly.” There was nothing rude about the Principal of
Hackney College but he was prepared to speak the truth as he saw it. No one was
more concerned about ethics than Forsyth (he spoke of “holiness” rather than
moral or ethical uprightness) but he rightly saw that if we don’t have cruciform
vision, that ethics is severed from the gospel and that’s only another mask for
death.
“Disaster should end dainty and dreamy
religion, and give some rest to the winsome Christ and the wooing note” he said
at the outbreak of WWI. “It should discourage a religion more romantic than
classic, which sacrifices the institutional truth of faith entirely to its
intimate mood, a religion bland and brotherly, in which the ethical note
of justification is smothered in a spurious type of reconciliation…It is a
wickeder world than our good nature had come to imagine, or our prompt piety to
fathom. [In light of the war] We see more of the world Christ saw and it calls for
a vaster salvation and a diviner Christ than the one we were sinking to believe in. And it
must cast us back on resources in that Savior which the mental coziness of
comfortable religion, lying back for a warm bath in its pew, was coming to
stigmatize as gratuitous theology.”
He
was right and if you take a look and listen to what's being offered as
evangelical religion you'll know he's even more right today! Our popular
talk of forgiveness through the cross ends up being
little more than talk about forgiveness and God’s pity so that the cross
is
reduced to God’s finest expression of sweetness.
Faith in the crucified One becomes
nothing more than a confession that we can’t save ourselves and that confirms
our status as objects of sweet pity. Our ceaseless calls to better ethical
behavior [the kind of thing even atheists call for] fall short of the call to saving faith, which has its ethical base in
nothing less than the holy cross that alone satisfies the Holy Father. [Penal substitution is sick theology!] The
church’s message then becomes a call to gradual moral development rather than
radical redemption via the cross and it offers fine-tuning rather
than radical redemption. We begin to think that the kingdom of God is
established by niceness and tolerance. Christ didn’t seem to think that was so.
The disturbing and demanding Christ
Forsyth’s
views were based first on how he read scripture and those views were confirmed
in light of how we humans are. There was a day in the middle of all the hoopla,
when great crowds were streaming after him in the fever of band-wagon
excitement when the Master turned to them and said, “If any one comes to me and
hates not his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and
sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not
bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:25-27)
“Cannot be my disciple.” He says it three
times in nine verses so I presume he meant us to take it seriously. If you
don’t hate father and mother you can’t be my disciple. If you don’t take up
your own cross and follow me you can’t be my disciple. If you don’t renounce
all you have you can’t be my disciple (14:33). What’s he got against families
and parents? What’s he got against my wanting to live life with my own agenda?
None
of this has that soothing sound we’d expect from a “gentle Jesus meek and mild”
but it wasn’t the only time he said something like this. Earlier he spoke of
his own approaching violent death and immediately added (Luke 9:23-24), “If any
man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and
follow me. For whosoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses
his life for my sake, he will save it.” There’s that cross business again and
what’s worse he has thrown in a “daily” experience of it. It’s not very
soothing. On the whole (though I don’t think it’s any less demanding) I think
we prefer the sound of, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples
if you love one another.” There’s room to maneuver in those words, you can sort
of debate what “love” is and who’s included in “one another” (a la “who is my
neighbor?”). But there’s something flat and toneless, something uncompromising
about selecting a rough stake you to get yourself hung on. “You want to be
mine?” he asks, eyeing one of the big pre-prepared stakes lying around. “Grab
one of those and follow me.” I suppose there are some things you could never
say with a smile and that might be one of them.
It
was probably on that very occasion when he said he was to be die violently at
the hands of the religious leaders that Peter strenuously objected to that kind
of talk (Matthew 16:21-23). I might have said Peter’s, God forbid, Lord,
irritated Jesus except that I think that “irritated” wouldn’t be strong enough.
I think he was passionately angry with his friend. I wonder what made Jesus so
inflexible when it came to the cross issue? “Get behind me, Satan!” he says to
Peter. “You’re a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.”
What do you make of that?
Then
turning to the rest of the disciples he said abruptly, “If any man would come
after me let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” What’s all
this taking up crosses business? And “follow” him; follow him where? Where do
we think he was going dragging a cross? And, again, what does he have against
parents and families that would lead him to talk like this (Matthew 10:34-37):
Do not suppose that I have come to bring
peace to the earth. I didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come
to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law
against her mother-in-law—a man’s
enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves his father
or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or
daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his
cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
Whatever
else is true about all this, cross bearing must become personal to us for we’re
told to take up “our” cross. Luke has Christ speaking to “all” and speaking of
“any man” so the call to take up the cross is not confined to a particular
group of disciples or leaders. And we’re told that it is to be a “daily”
experience (Luke 9:23). It’s clear from this that the call is not just an
initial commitment but also something that is to be renewed as discipleship
develops.
The Christ of the
cross assaulted the world powers. Of course he was interested in
bringing forgiveness to individual sinners!!!!!!!! But to leave it there
is to distort the gospel message. He came to create a new humanity, he
came to bring about a new creation in which a new humanity would live—a humanity re-created in his image. A new
nation that would follow him to make war against the powers that have
become the instruments of the world-spirit; powers that enslave humans
who are created in the image of God and were created for better things
than what they're now wallowing in.
What's this "taking up the cross" business?
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.