That Jesus

We pause on a day almost certainly not his birthday to consider a strange carpenter-teacher who lived two millennia ago. He was always inconveniently good news. Long before germ theory, telescopes or electricity, Jesus lived a short life before dying as a political criminal. We know about his life through scraps of stories and vignettes no longer alive to us except through translations of translations. The stories of the birth that “magnify my soul” are all radical signals of protest and defiance against the oppressive cabal of religion and empire.

Jesus was not a member of any Christian group and would probably not recognize most of the religion that claims him. Paul, whose writings shaped much of that religion, villainized and persecuted Jesus’ earliest followers before converting, never met him. Although a student of the Jewish texts, Jesus was not a writer. No home, much less an office. No wife, apparently, or kids. We don’t know his sexuality. He apparently had a brother.

He healed people seven days a week with no business model. The only times he showed up at worship, he got thrown out. He never voted or sought political power. But he was regarded by Empire and its religious toadies as a threat to order. He had no school, but did accumulate disciples. Before his movement backslid into bishops, those following him were said to follow his “Way.”

That’s the clue. I want to move through life in that “Way” and with those on that Way.

He prayed some, mostly by himself, apparently to strengthen his capacity to stay on the Way.

He said that Way was narrow and difficult, which some think means we should go single file through life. I think it means we are to walk like the Reindeer we associate with Santa, but who are also symbols of radical resilience. The early Mediterranean Christians thought of Jesus as the Lamb of God, stressing the sacrificial metaphor. They didn’t know anything about Caribou and how the herd saves each other.

Caribou–they who move through impossibly difficult circumstances following many paths that weave together and then apart and together again. I have walked their narrow, braided paths on the tundra shelves flanking the frozen Alaska rivers beneath the Brooks Range. They are called Caribou in Alaska but have the same Way that they have followed for thousands of years, moving as a company of thousands, trusting each other to find the paths across and through to where the Spirit of life draws them.

The mesh of trails suggests a social complexity beyond our simplistic theory of networks.4 This helps me imagine the adaptive possibilities as Spirit sets us free while remaining social, safe while remaining kind.

I, too, pay attention to my trusted ones on the Way: Chris and Bobby, Enrique and Maria, TC, Jim, Tom, Fred, Jeremy, Jerry, Dora, Ron and a cloud of witnesses on the move. We trust each other to stay on the journey and in sight, sometimes protecting, sometimes finding safety. The world is a dangerous place. Safety only in motion, together, on the Way.

I wonder what Jesus would say about all this. I suspect he’d wonder about all the churches from which I was not thrown out. And all the clutter I’ve accumulated beyond his one cloak and borrowed mule. My offices. All the stuff I did not give away. All the healing kindnesses left for other obligations.

I hope for grace.

And pray for a Spirit to move me onto one of those narrow paths closer to the edge of the herd as we move together over tough land for another season of life.

//// adapted from my book, “For God and the People: Prayers for a Newer New Awakening.”