In the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world. Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions. Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which following Jesus would ultimately be replaced by worshiping Christ.
Ask almost any Christian on the street today what it means to have “faith,” and that person will surely recite a list of things that he or she believes about Christ. The longer the list, the more evidence has been offered that proves “faithfulness.” The more stubborn and resolute the level of certainty, the more implacable and obstinate, the more obvious it seems that the believer is a man or woman of “deep faith.” If the “believer” is not even willing to discuss his or her beliefs and resents any challenge to them, we call such a person a “true believer.” What does this have to do with being a follower of Jesus? According to the earliest Christian documents we have, including the gospels, it means almost nothing.
Yet this definition of faith dominates Western Christianity and requires those who would describe themselves as “faithful” to hold a set of “beliefs” that certain statements about the Bible, Jesus as the Christ, and church doctrine or dogma are true. We take this definition so much for granted that when people first learn that the early church had no creeds and followers referred to the early Christian movement as “The Way” or to its disciples as those following “the path,” they suspect that this is the fiction—a secular humanist plot to destroy “the faith.”
In Britain to this day, the word “believer” is synonymous with the word “Christian.” The question “Are you a believer?” means “Are you a Christian?”1 It is just as common today to assume that this definition of faith—faith as intellectual assent to propositional statements, or faith as a “head trip”—is as old as Christianity itself. To have “faith” is to believe the things that the church has taught us about the Christ, not the things that Jesus first taught his disciples about God. The only problem with this idea is that it’s false, and no amount of “faith” can make it true.
The word “faith” is crucial in the New Testament, of course, as a means of healing for Jesus (“Your faith has made you well,” Matt. 9:22), a means of justification for Paul (“by grace … through faith,” Eph. 2:8), and a defining mark of the people of God, beginning with Abel and ending with Jesus (“the pioneer and perfecter of our faith,” Heb. 12:2). The best-known single text in the New Testament is the same one that makes its omnipresent, albeit subversive, appearance at major sporting events—John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (KJV). The problem is that the original meaning of the word translated as “believeth” is lost.
Marcus Borg reminds us that there are four meanings of the word “faith” in the history of Christianity, and only one of them, assensus, has anything to do with intellectual assent, or faith as a “head trip.” This idea developed after the Reformation, when the meaning of “orthodoxy” shifted from “correct worship” to “right belief” and continued to grow in urgency after modern science challenged the biblical worldview. Only in the past two hundred years has faith come to mean believing things that are increasingly easy to disprove.
What have been lost in our time are the other three meanings of the word “faith.” They expand the idea of faith beyond believing things you may secretly doubt are true in order to get rewards you fear may be unavailable to more honest doubters! They are faith as fiducia (radical trust in God), as fidelitas (loyalty in one’s relationship to God), and as visio (a way of seeing creation as gracious).2
This is not to say that what one believes is entirely incidental, or that one can believe anything and still call oneself a Christian. It means that the idea of faith so narrowly defined has probably done more than anything else to drive thoughtful people out of the church. Sadly, the idea of faith as a way of “being” in the world, instead of a loyalty oath sworn to creeds and doctrines, remains largely unknown to those who have left the church and find no compelling reason to return. If the church does not succeed in restoring the idea of faith as “being,” and not “believing,” then the gospel story of Jesus as the heart of God in the flesh will wither and perish.
In the end, to say one “believes” something like the virgin birth as biological fact or the miracle stories as literal suspensions of natural law requires nothing in the way of a changed heart or a self-sacrificing spirit. For that matter, neither does saying that one does not believe in these things. Whether one assents to the implausible as a sign of faith or refuses to do so as a sign of the capacity to think critically, the world does not change. No one even breaks a sweat, much less takes up a cross to follow. Faith as assensus is “relatively impotent, relatively powerless. You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage.”3
In fact, faith as mere agreement or disagreement allows the “faithful” to reverse the message of the incarnation, which is that the love of God became flesh in the life of Jesus, not in a disembodied argument for God. It is the incarnation that forms the most compelling and distinctly Christian teaching of all, and it carries with it a verdict: when the doors to heaven open before you, walk through. Don’t form a committee to assess the identity of the doors, how long the doors will remain open, or who gets to close them to protect those on the inside from those on the outside.
The word became flesh, and the flesh became wisdom, and the wisdom became radical freedom in order to transform the world, not to correct it or put it to the test. The first word was an oral/aural event, between teacher and student, not a text, or a theological argument, or a school of thought on the blood atonement. It was enfleshed in the body of a Jewish man whose brief and tragic life was a metaparable and living proof that St. Irenaeus was right when he said, “The Glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
ON BEING JEWISH AND A DISCIPLE OF JOHN THE BAPTIST
My only daughter was recently married, and she enthusiastically agreed to be married by a rabbi who is a dear family friend. She requested that I be the father of the bride, not the minister in charge of the ceremony, and I happily complied. For one thing, I would never have made it through the ceremony. But some of my colleagues were a bit scandalized and, upon hearing the news, asked the first question that came to mind. Was my new son-in-law Jewish? “No,” I replied, “but Jesus was.”
This always brings nervous laughter, of course, but not much wisdom. The real point gets lost in the assumption that I am just trying to be iconoclastic or play the role of a typical liberal clergyman. The truth of the matter is that I had more confidence in the rabbi to perform a dignified and authentic marriage ceremony than I would have had in most of the Christian ministers I know. It was not the faith of the rabbi that mattered to us, but our relationship to him. He has been our family rabbi (every minister needs one) for twenty-five years and had watched all our children grow up.
My congregation had formed a covenant with the rabbi’s Reformed Jewish temple over two decades ago, and we have worked and worshiped together on behalf of progressive religious values. When he read Psalm 100 at my daughter’s wedding, originally thought to be composed for a wedding, he spoke each line in flawless Hebrew and then translated the blessings into English—moving back and forth in a kind of bilingual call and response. The sound of it was remarkable, as if the ancients were also present in the room. As the father of the bride, I had walked my daughter down the aisle to stand before a representative of my ancestors, my mothers and fathers in faith. Having a rabbi bless this sacred covenant struck me as preferable to taking a chance that some preacher might make a joke about the odds against a successful marriage or, worse, launch into a diatribe against the evils of fornication.
This fact remains both obvious and yet somehow scandalous: Jesus was a Jew. Born a Jew, he died a Jew, and his only scripture was the Hebrew Bible. He spoke as a Jew to fellow Jews and all his first followers were Jewish. So were all the authors of the New Testament, with the possible exception of the author of Luke-Acts. It is easy to forget how strange this sounds to Western Christians. A familiar bumper sticker says, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter.” Upon seeing it recently, a fundamentalist friend of mine objected, “Mine is a Christian king!”
It is not within the scope of this book to explore all of the ramifications of the Jewishness of Jesus, but a substantial and growing body of scholarly work should be on every minister’s reading list.4 As Amy-Jill Levine, author of The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, points out, the pervasive belief that Jesus was “against” the law, “against” the Temple (as opposed to its first-century leadership), and “against” the people of Israel but in favor of Gentiles has contributed much to the sad history of anti-Semitism—as has the deadly fiction that the Jews (rather than the Romans) killed Jesus.
Less obvious perhaps, but just as harmful, is the popular notion that, because Jesus practiced social justice, spoke to women, taught nonviolence, and cared for the “poor and the marginalized,” he was an exception to the Jewish rule. That is, he becomes a “negative foil: whatever Jesus stands for, Judaism isn’t it; whatever Jesus is against, Judaism epitomizes the category.”5 The divorce of Jesus from Judaism does a disservice to both. The claim of the church that Jesus of Nazareth (not Jesus of Cleveland, or Jesus of Mexico City) is the incarnation of God in the flesh means that the “scandal of particularity” requires an understanding of the way in which a Jewish man born into a time and place can be understood fully only “through first-century Jewish eyes and heard through first-century Jewish ears.”6
According to history’s best guess, Jesus of Nazareth was born just before 4 BCE to Joseph and Mary in a tiny hamlet. He was perhaps the firstborn, but more likely not, and had at least six siblings. The rest is etiology and myth, adapted to convey important interpretive responses by Matthew and Luke to his remarkable life, written fifty to sixty years after his death. A beautiful, but obviously contrived, tale is the virgin birth, which may have been used to cover a scandal. Matthew seeks to ground his story in the Hebrew scriptures and offers a Greek translation of Isaiah 7:14, which had nothing whatsoever to do with biological virginity. As Bishop John Shelby Spong put it, “Birth stories are always fanciful. They are never historical. No one waits outside a maternity ward for a great person to be born.”7
There are no reliable stories about Jesus before about age thirty, although legends abound.8 It is believed by many scholars that Joseph, if he is not a fictional character altogether, died before the public ministry of Jesus began, in part because he is not mentioned at all during that ministry, even though Jesus’ mother and siblings are. The idea that he was an old man when he married Mary is pure invention, created perhaps to add plausibility to a later tradition about her perpetual virginity.
It is reasonable to assume that Jesus went to school in the synagogue in Nazareth to study Torah and became a woodworker (in Greek, tekton), which is not exactly what we think of today as a carpenter, but rather one who made wood products like doors, roof beams, furniture, boxes, and so forth. More important, this places him at the lower end of the peasant class, among those who had lost their land. And in the Greco-Roman world, the great divide was between those who had to work with their hands and those who did not. There was no middle class, and peasants who lived at the subsistence level, barely able to support their own farming efforts, were required to send two-thirds of their annual crop to support the upper classes.
So long have we exalted Jesus as the Christ and robed him in purple prose, that we forget the simple fact that he was dirt poor, living just a notch above the degraded (outcasts) and the expendables (beggars, day laborers, and slaves). Likewise, so long have we studied the record of his remarkable teachings, especially the parables, that we assume he was literate. But 95 to 97 percent of the Jewish population was illiterate at the time of Jesus, so “it must be presumed that Jesus also was illiterate, that he knew, like the vast majority of his contemporaries in an oral culture, the foundational narratives, basic stories, and general expectations of his tradition but not the exact texts, precise citations, or intricate arguments of its scribal elites.”9
If his family was reasonably devout, Jesus would have been raised in the practices of “common Judaism.” Faithfulness for this young man would have consisted of learning the stories, singing the hymns, celebrating Jewish holidays, traveling to Jerusalem to observe the pilgrimage festivals (Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles), and, on a regular basis, observing the Sabbath and praying the Shema (Deut. 6:4–5) upon rising and before going to bed.
Like any child growing up in a religious tradition, he would have soaked it all up uncritically, never imagining a world outside his own or questioning the efficacy or authenticity of his own faith tradition. But as with most young visionaries, there must have come a time for differentiating, questioning, and answering the call to nonconformity and rebellion. One day, without question, Jesus left home to became a follower of the most famous, most eccentric, most apocalyptic wilderness preacher of his day—John the Baptist.
All four gospels attest to this. Luke’s account of the miraculous births of both Jesus and John against the odds connects Jesus to the most powerful and successful evangelist of the day; Luke then establishes the primacy of Jesus over John and thus all of his ancestors in one Jordan River “moment.” Luke’s message is clear. “John is the condensation of and consummation of his people’s past, but Jesus is far, far greater than John.”10
More fascinating to contemplate, however, is what effect John the Baptist must have had on Jesus when it came to his understanding of God and the meaning of faith. Author Frederick Buechner captures the essence of the Wild One:
John the Baptist didn’t fool around. He lived in the wilderness around the Dead Sea. He subsisted on a starvation diet, and so did his disciples. He wore clothes that even the rummage sale people wouldn’t have handled. When he preached, it was fire and brimstone every time. The Kingdom was coming all right, he said, but if you thought it was going to be a pink tea, you’d better think again. If you didn’t shape up, God would give you the axe like an elm with the blight or toss you into the incinerator like what’s left over when you’ve lambasted the good out of the wheat. He said being a Jew wouldn’t get you any more points than being a Hottentot, and one of his favorite ways of addressing his congregation was as a snake pit.11
Could it be that Jesus attached himself to this extraordinary firebrand for reasons analogous to those that caused some young African American men in the 1960s to be more attracted to Malcolm X than to Martin Luther King Jr.? John’s preaching must have seemed electric—religion stripped of its usual domestic impotence and rabbinical droning. Here was a real “turn or burn” man as stark and reckless as the desert is indifferent and deadly. After all, Jesus is reported to have said about him, “Among those born of women, no one has arisen greater than John” (Matt. 11:11; Luke 7:28).
Yet this is not unusual. Which one of us cannot name a teacher or a mentor who turned our lives in a new direction? In the biography of any notable human being, credit is invariably given to the influence of some other human being whose charisma and conviction at a formative moment made him or her into a role model. Which begs the question: What did the arrest and execution of John mean to Jesus? In Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ public ministry begins with John’s arrest. With his own teacher now in prison, did the Nazarene need to step in and start teaching the class?
What’s more, it is intriguing to wonder if John’s execution was traumatic and disorienting, leading Jesus to reconsider and rethink John’s message. Consider the differences. John worked out of town. Jesus took his gospel into the city. John preached grim justice and pictured God as a “steely-eyed thresher of grain.” Jesus preached a God of love and forgiveness and compared him to a father who throws a party for a prodigal son. John said the hour is growing late. Jesus said it is never too late. John baptized as a sign of conversion from darkness to light. Jesus moved in the shadows, healing the sick and restoring the broken as if faith is a compassionate verb, not an intimidating noun.
John Dominic Crossan speculates that the death of John caused a shift in the preaching of Jesus from an apocalyptic to a nonapocalyptic understanding of the kingdom of God. It is an educated guess to be sure, but commensurate with a later story in which two of John’s disciples are sent to ask on behalf of their imprisoned teacher, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Matt. 11:3).
ON BEING WISE
The ultimate defining characteristic of Christianity is the incarnation, the mystery of God’s presence in a person. When Christianity is “personal” (though not to be confused with “individual”), it is at its best. Other approaches to the life of faith have important prophets, of course, and the record of their teachings and the sacred canon of their scriptures. But what began as a fledgling movement in first-century Palestine occurred among people who responded to a human being. He seemed transparent to God and opened the heavens to reveal an approach to faith they had never known. The Word became flesh, as John put it (1:14), and lived among us.
The incarnation gives the faith its form and content, bringing God “nearer to us than our jugular vein,” to quote the Qur’an (50:16). But it also brings with it the risks of idolatry, in which the messenger becomes the message, and eventually a divine rescue mission trumps that wisdom, even destroys it. Yet peculiar to Christianity is that at the heart of everything there is not a text, or a single commandment, or even a new Torah—but rather flesh and bones and breath and the remarkable response of Jesus’ followers to both his brief public ministry and his brutal execution.
Our scriptures matter, of course, because they bear witness to this incarnation. And the mystery of God matters, because Jesus was a spirit person who lived in relation to that Mystery. But none of it ultimately matters more than the wisdom of Jesus himself. We work to recover a portrait of his life and essential message because our confession of faith is centered in the wisdom of his life and the new relationship it makes possible with God—not in the Bible’s inerrancy or in some definitive theological statement about the nature of God or salvation.
This means that when there is a conflict between what the scriptures say in particular and what we have come to expect from the wisdom of Jesus, his wisdom wins. We hold the Bible accountable to the message of Jesus, not Jesus accountable for everything in the Bible. When it comes to what the church decided much later to add to that message or to layer on top of the earliest voices (or by the fourth century to convert into creeds that deified him), we are all responsible for going back, as much as possible, to the earliest and most authentic record of his message. Even when we know that the words attributed to him have been altered by the gospel writers over time, there is still something remarkable about comparing the earliest voices of his followers to the later voices of Christendom.
One very helpful way to understand this is to pull down from your shelf, if you still have one, an old “red-letter” edition of the New Testament—so called because everything Jesus is reported to have said is set off in red type on the page. It will probably be a King James Version or the New International Version,12 but don’t let that stop you. Now read through all four gospels, saying aloud only those things in red, attributed to Jesus. By a process of omission, you will have given yourself a crash course in how a marginalized Jew became the Savior of the World.
First, you will notice that even those words attributed to Jesus change dramatically in character from the earliest gospel, Mark, where the Galilean sage says humbly, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (10:18), to the last gospel, John, where the preexistent Christ figure declares, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (14:6). You will also notice little things that chart his evolution from an enlightened teacher to a deity. In Mark, Jesus has to heal a blind man twice after the first effort falls short and the man sees people, but they look like trees (8:22–26). But by the time we get to John, this preexistent Christ heals a man blind since birth using the same mixture of mud and saliva, but only after announcing first, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (9:5). Now only one attempt is required.
When Mark tells the story of Jesus’ rejection in his hometown, which Matthew repeats (13:54), Mark’s explanation is that “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house” (6:4), and we are told that “he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief” (6:5–6). By the time John writes his gospel, these hometown failures have been contracted—from a rationalization by Jesus to a parenthetical aside from John (4:44), and the line about failing to heal many people is dropped altogether.
Jesus as the divine Savior, the preexistent, metaphysical Son of God sent to die for our sins will not pass even the “red-letter” test. From the earliest layers of the tradition, in which nothing is said that indicates messianic self-identity, to the later material, which includes Holy Week predictions of suffering and the emerging idea that his death was a “ransom” for many, there is still nothing that comes close to the fully formed doctrine of the blood atonement. The earliest record indicates that he was a means to an end, not an end in himself. His message was theocentric, not Christocentric—centered in God, not centered in messianic proclamations about himself.13
Ours is a time of astonishing biblical ignorance, yet we are constantly urged to read the Bible by people who ignore the heart of it or invent a message that is simply not there. What does the red-letter test tell us about the views of Jesus concerning homosexuality? Nothing. About gay marriage? Nothing. About being born again as a nonmetaphorical legal requirement for salvation? Nothing. About prosperity as a sign of God’s favor? Nothing (to the contrary, we are warned against it). About the need to believe in the bodily resurrection or the second coming? Nothing. About the proper manner of baptism? Nothing (Jesus baptizes no one we know of). About justification by faith or works? Nothing. In fact, the life of Jesus renders this distinction meaningless.
What the earliest layers of the gospel record reveal, and to some extent the later layers as well, when sifted through a higher Christology, is that Jesus was wise. He was charismatic, a gifted speaker, and a teacher of wisdom. He taught the “narrow way” as opposed to the broad way of convention and tradition. Both his life and his message were subversive and modeled the metaphor of death and resurrection as a way of life. Discipleship was not about knowing new things or subscribing to certain theological statements or positions, but about the never-ending process of dying to an old self and being reborn into a new one. The evidence for this rebirth was not a clever argument or allegiance to a certain rabbinical school. It was made obvious by a new way of being in the world. Good Friday and Easter are therefore not isolated events. They are the twin polarities of wisdom—as we constantly die to the bondage of blindness and are reborn to the light.
This way of “being” was open to the mystical, or the “sacred,” and was so grounded in pure compassion that Jesus could not be around the sick or the broken without attempting to heal them. Because such wisdom can make the scales fall from our eyes, it often produces what French philosopher Jacques Lacan calls la douleur de voir trop clair (“the pain of seeing too clearly”). Opening oneself to this disparity between the world as it is and the world as God intends it to be leads either to despair or to the calling of a prophet—a greatly misunderstood vocation in our time. There are many latter-day “prophets” who secretly enjoy the attention they get, decrying the mad hypocrisies of our time while sacrificing nothing. They make headlines, but they make no changes. The kingdom of God is not a press conference, or a resolution, or a short course in how to be eloquently indignant. It is a table, laden with grace, at which the social maps are all redrawn. The guest list comes straight out of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Indeed, to this day, we often mistake wisdom for a kind of sedimentary traditionalism, most apparent in the elderly. But in Jesus it seems to have been marked by a rather brash intimacy, as when he dared to address God as Abba (in English, “Papa”), in contrast to the rabbinical reverence that forbids even saying God’s name aloud and requires the omission of the vowels in the spelling of God’s name (YHWH)—lest we get too familiar with the “Holy One, Blessed be he.” Vowels, after all, are the soul of words.
What’s more, the wisdom of Jesus was an alternative wisdom, not a conventional one. Contrary to the path of practicality and prosperity that passes for wisdom in most cultures, what Jesus taught was subversive wisdom. Like Lao-Tzu and the Buddha, who were both teachers of a world-subverting wisdom, Jesus led followers away from convention and “grasping” to enlightenment and compassion. Socrates, like Jesus, was executed not for leading a rebellion but for an insurgency of ideas—“corrupting the youth of Athens.” Clearly some ideas are too dangerous to ignore, especially when they are fused with the life of the one who teaches them. Today, it is monks who threaten military governments most, because nonviolence is more dangerous to the principalities and powers than brute force.
Being wise for Jesus meant teaching subversive ideas in a subversive manner. It was not new information that he shared; instead, he used new ways to entrap listeners inside their own instincts for the truth—forcing them to appropriate it through a struggle to reduce what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.”14 His use of aphorisms, or short wisdom sayings, is one example, but the supreme example is the parable, which was his primary teaching device. Parables are also thought to be, by virtue of the way stories can hang together over time in the oral tradition, the most authentic material in the New Testament.
It should come as no surprise that Mark, the earliest gospel and the most “historical,” has an entire chapter of parables and includes a line indicating that Jesus did not even speak to his disciples “except in parables” (4:34). By the time we get to John’s gospel, however, and Jesus has become the preexistent Christ, there is not a single parable to be found. The teacher of alternative wisdom of the synoptic gospels has become the self-proclaimed messiah. The invitational rhetoric of the teacher (“Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight,” Luke 11:5) has been replaced by the self-declarative rhetoric of a Savior (“I am the light of the world,” John 8:12).
Although it is clear that the gospel writers adapted the parables to suit the needs of their particular community, and stories are always being adapted by storytellers to changing circumstances, it is this method of teaching that is so instructive. Wisdom is acquired only through personal struggle. It is not a spectator sport, any more than faith is a list of ideas about what to believe or how to behave. The parables of Jesus are confounding, sometimes even maddening. But they remind us that wisdom is a process of disassembling and reassembling. Before students can be reoriented, they must first be disoriented. Before the seeds of an alternative wisdom can germinate, the hardened soil of conventional wisdom must be broken up, so that those seeds can be dropped into fertile soil.
BEING FEARLESS
It should come as no surprise that some people thought Jesus was crazy. The best-known reference is in Mark 3:21, in which his family hears of his fame at casting out demons and the disruptive crowds who followed him and “went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’” It might be more accurate to say that, given what we now know about the resistance of conventional wisdom, or what one scholar calls “life under the superego,”15 Jesus only appeared to be mad. In fact, so does any human being who is both fully alive and radically free.
What is meant here by “radical freedom” is not the shedding of all social or personal responsibilities or living a life of reckless abandon because “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” as Janis Joplin put it. It is a life lived outside of the straitjacket of fear and anxiety that controls most of us. It is a way of being in the world that is so fully connected to another Source of wisdom and worthiness that the person appears to be “missing” something—and indeed he or she is.
What is missing is the despair that Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called the “sickness unto death,” that gnawing angst that shadows all our days. We try in vain to secure ourselves against our own insecurity, and thus we never become a “self.” We are finite, vain, and consumed with the fear that if we do not stay busy micromanaging the chaos of life, it will overwhelm us, which of course it does. Or to put it in the vernacular: no matter how clean and well organized our garage, we still die.
Henry David Thoreau put it best in Walden: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” It is the second half of that famous quote, less well known, that intrigues me with regard to teachers of alternative wisdom. They appear mad only because the conventional wisdom of their time is so fully and uncritically accepted by everyone that any challenge to it is what appears desperate; in fact, it is that mass resignation that is the true desperation, according to Thoreau.
Conventional wisdom is like the water of the culture in which we swim. It is the air of “common sense” that we breathe. It’s what “everyone just knows” to be true. In the time of Jesus, it was centered in the Torah and in the folk wisdom of Proverbs. It was both practical and based on a system of rewards and punishments. Hard work and righteousness will make you prosper. You reap what you sow, and good things happen to good people. The corollaries were just as obvious: laziness and immorality will prevent you from being prosperous, and bad things will happen to bad people.
What’s more, life itself is hierarchical by design, and people need to “know their place” and “stay in it.” Our tribal ways become our religious ways, and God is not just “man writ very large,” as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it, but the ultimate endorser of our tribal wisdom. God shares my definition of beauty, of worth, of the natural superiority of men over women and the need to preserve peace through strength. Such a God is “awesome,” because we have a penchant for mindless superlatives. This is the God of the warrior, thanked by football players in the end zone after catching a touchdown pass.
This God is also a kind of superparent, making rules, enforcing them, and handing out rewards and punishments appropriately. Life is a stage, said Shakespeare, and our lives are often reduced to a kind of “performance principle.”16 The reviews come in many forms: grades, wealth, social status, notoriety—and, ultimately for some, the assurance of personal salvation. But the focus is always the same. It’s all about me. We are encouraged, in a million ways, to leads lives of profound selfishness.
It is no wonder, then, that when Jesus began to teach and preach an alternative wisdom, he appeared to be insane. Samaritans were often the heroes of his stories, even though they were considered heretical and impure. Pharisees were often exposed for hypocrisy and empty faith, even though they were the keepers of the faith. Parties were given for prodigal sons who did not deserve them, and God heard the agonized prayer of a tax collector above the rote prayer of a religious professional.
The Beatitudes, or “blessings,” of the Sermon on the Mount turned the world upside down, and in the language and symbol of sacred paradox a true king rides a donkey to his coronation. At the dinner table, which was the ultimate social map in those days, if the invited guests made excuses and didn’t show up, then God would invite bums in off the street to sit at the messianic banquet. Mustard seeds and the weeds they produce are apparently tenacious enough to carry the hope of a redeemed future within them. Leaven in bread is a corrupting force, just like the reign of God. Those day laborers who don’t show up until the eleventh hour will be paid the same wage as those who have labored all day—proving that God is God, not the Chamber of Commerce.
Reversing the categories of pure and impure, Jesus lifted up women (impure), leaven (also impure), and children (neither pure nor impure, just invisible). Most disturbing of all, he ate with outcasts, criminals, and prostitutes—proving that if we are known by the company we keep, then it is no wonder they called him a drunkard and a glutton. Now we call him “precious Lord,” without even thinking.
He did this in an utterly brief public ministry (only a year according to Mark, perhaps three to four years according to Matthew and Luke) as if “possessed” by a desire to upend the very tradition in which he was raised and bring down the judgment of the very faith he sought to reform. He did it fearlessly and counseled his followers to “fear not.” Fear is the enemy of the moral life, and yet which one of us could imagine attacking the sacred cows of our time or challenging the conventional wisdom in American society?
If you think “family values” is a potent idea today, just imagine how fixed the centrality of the Jewish family was in the time of Jesus. It was the center of social, material, and spiritual identity. Yet consider that Jesus, who called people out of their families and into an itinerant existence, actually spoke of “hating” one’s own kin as the measure of an even higher loyalty.
Wealth was seen as a sign of God’s favor in those days (as it is today), and yet Jesus warned that it could be spiritually debilitating and that money was a primary object of idolatry. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25).17 He ridiculed the high and mighty and upended the purity system of his time with acts of pure provocation. He is reported to have gone ballistic in the Temple one day, turning over the tables and driving out the money changers with a whip. Today he would be arrested as a public nuisance and ordered to take anger-management classes.
In the wisdom of the Galilean, life is seen as a joyful return from the exile of law and judgment to the unconditional love of a recklessly gracious God. This love is a given, not something we earn, putting us on a par with the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. It also drove his critics to fear that the very foundations of society were being destroyed and the advantages of the righteous were being mocked. Is there no judgment at all?
There is perhaps nothing more frightening to fundamentalists than the idea that there is no final judgment. The very foundation of morality is tied up in rewards and punishments, and if sinners are allowed to sin without consequences, then what’s the point of being good? Doesn’t that mean that they “got away with it”? There are passages in the New Testament about a final judgment, of course, with eternal consequences. But they are believed to be largely the redactions of Matthew, who remained most tethered to Mosaic law, which Jesus would “complete” but not “destroy.” Ironically, when Jesus brings up such final judgments, it is to subvert commonly held assumptions about those judgments, such as how much better Gentiles will fare than the self-respecting crowd he is addressing.18
Make no mistake. Such subversive wisdom is always a threat to law and order, to the religious establishment, and to the social hierarchy that creates and preserves wealth. Jesus undercut the power and purpose of religious professionals, excited the poor and empowered the powerless, and quickly attracted large crowds in an occupied territory that was smoldering under Roman occupation. Then, as now, the solution to this problem was simple.