KNOWING JESUS

Frederica Mathewes-Green, in the book The Church in Emerging Culture, answers the question,

"Why do people continually want to revise the prevailing view of Jesus?"

She says,

"To relieve the pain of this dilemma by changing Jesus into something we can understand."

The next question is,

"What is Jesus' alternative plan?"

To which she answers,

"To change us into something that can understand him."

The dilemma she speaks of is the weariness and vanity of life. The malaise that most people find themselves in because of the emptiness of life. It is a chasing after the wind, with little hope of catching anything. This, according to her, is because although God knows us intimately, we don't know him very well. Either because we don't want to know him, or because we don't know how. To "relieve the pain" of hungering to know something we can't seem to know we turn him into something culturally relevant that can easily be known or understood. We fashion God in our own image. We build our own golden calf because Moses has been gone too long and we can't see God anymore. But is that really God? Is that really the Jesus that walked on water, raised the dead, and picked up his cross?

Fredericka would say, "No." And I agree with her. God is not an enigma that needs to be solved. God isn't waiting for us to find and understand him, like some great prize at the end of a treasure hunt. Jesus said, "I came to seek and save the lost." He does the seeking. He does the finding. He asks us to be available to him ... to be sensitive to his moving and working ... so that in his timing and purpose he can change us into something that CAN understand him.

That's not to say that we just sit around waiting. There is a work involved in being available to God. The work is called LIFE. It's waking up every morning and finding the joy in the midst of the pain. It's finding a single flower blooming in the middle of the garbage dump, and focusing on the beauty of the flower juxtaposed with the gargage. Is it a flower invading a garbage dump? OR is it garbage invading a flower garden?  It could be either. It depends on how hard you work at it. It depends on how much God has changed you into the kind of person that CAN see and understand him.

Comments

[Tom Weaver]

good stuff.