The Rev James Fields (whom I know personally) has penned this response to my article published earlier today Jesus remembered: ‘ideological tinkering must have gone on from the start’

James writes: 

I find these thoughts have a powerful and timely resonance.  Frankly they are a statement of the obvious, or I’d hope so.

The Jesus of history, the child who got left behind in the temple by parents on pilgrimage, the carpenter, itinerant preacher (trouble-maker!) can be variously an inspiration or a torment.  Most of us who take our theology at least as seriously as our spirituality end up acclimatising to the idea that our Sunday school Jesus and the Christ of a more mature faith can be quite different…indeed must be.   The meek and mild Jesus I was taught at Sunday school had mostly to do with some vague idea that I have to live life according to his sense of what right and wrong was…only time revealed of course that the bargain was being driven by the church and parents who colluded very nicely thank you;  If you behave you’ll get what you want at Christmas!  Little wonder in our world we now have a Black Friday as a preface to Advent…the ultimate ignominy.

Of course Christmases come and go and now that message for children is barren and irrelevant, shorn as it was of any sense of political, social or indeed spiritual imperative. Or truth!  I guess we all have to grow up…even divinity students!

The wonder of the church, its shame also, is that it encourages us to remain childish in our hopes and expectations.  Imagine what would happen if we were to respond to the teachings or insights of Jesus with our adult senses firing on all cylinders.

Dale Alison talks of the temptation to bestow omniscience upon Moses and of course the Christian church has done much the same with Jesus.  The historicity of both men is at times impenetrable as a result.  No wonder Rudolph Bultmann encourages us to take seriously the quest to demythologise the gospels. I will be for ever grateful that I was introduced to his work at Edinburgh New College as a seminarian and then at Union Theological in New York as an ordinand of the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland.  So much for credentials!

I am comfortable in the knowledge that faith has to embrace both dimensions, the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith.  Indeed the more seriously I take the latter, the freer I feel to acknowledge that in truth we know precious little of the former.  I dispensed long ago with camels, inns that were full and virgin births…I mean seriously!  Empty tombs don’t really cut it for me either.  But the stories, the narrative can be compelling, beautiful and transformative.  But only if we take it beyond the Hallmark approach to faith..where the glitter eventually falls off the card. I hate glitter.

One of the great Christian insights is that God descends from the heavens, becomes involved in our human toil and endeavour.  It matters to me not whether other traditions or faiths accept the theology of incarnation.  But the incarnation speaks to many of a God is not remote and untouched by our failures or indeed by our capacity to yearn and to love.

At Christmas we sing of a God who comes down to earth.  And heavens…do we not need a God on earth?  A God who can pierce through our all too human contrivance and nonsense; our capacity to confuse Good Friday with Black Friday.

This it seems to me is the God who Jesus preached, yearned for and searched for…A God for too long held hostage by the temple authorities, a priesthood that excluded people form the temple on the basis that their physical blindness was a manifestation of their sinfulness.

It is an irony that for a fallen humanity to be saved God must fall to the earth, or at least be released from heavenly captivity, and if not that, then for our sometimes infantile faith.  God up there, us down here…seriously? Isn’t that just so last week, so …  medieval?

I hold in my mind the image of a father running down the driveway to welcome and embrace a lost child, falling to his knees, in joy, even as the cost of the pain of such loss can be finally acknowledged and expressed. In his story of  a prodigal son, Jesus imparts an insight that is wholly at odds with the sanitised story that we are too often expected to wheel out at Christmas.  God own his knees…the Christ who washes our feet.

The God of whom Jesus, Moses and Mohammed (peace be upon him) speaks is the God who raises up the valleys and brings the mountain low; the valleys and the mountains of our human hearts and souls. A God much greater than our ideological tinkering!

New heavens and new earth

Peace be with you this Advent

Categories: Bible, Christianity