Lately, I’ve imagined that I overhear the grief of Jesus. I hear strains of bewilderment and anger, loneliness and longing, protest and prayer. No wonder his followers have often used words from Isaiah to describe him as: “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.”
Jesus lamented over Jerusalem: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34). The city that kills truthtellers. It’s important to recognize that this text is now about us, more than about Jerusalem. Violent reactions to truth can rise-up in any city—and any human heart— in any era, especially when truth demands justice and offers mercy for everyone.
In our day, there is a concerted effort to kill truth itself. While truth is, to oversimplify, an amalgam of both facts and wisdom, facts are irreducibly necessary to truth. Disregard for facts is all-too-common. There is growing mistrust of the stewards of facts: responsible scientists, non-partisan institutions, and conscientious journalists. Some people are unfazed by “fact-checking,” since their default assumption is that the fact-checkers aren’t reliable. Dishonest ads and faked images are like stones hurled at truth. Comedians and some social media memes are like court-jesters, lampooning the pretensions of the powerful, but some are like weapons aimed to take-down truth. To say the least, lying has damaging consequences for our shared life, as the recent threats to and attacks on Haitian people in Springfield, Ohio show. Encounters with truth expose deception, including self-deception, and we often prefer our illusion of self-righteousness to the liberating power of reality: “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
Prophetic truth insists that we include our neighbors and our enemies in a circle of ever-expanding love, but, when we fear that love is scarce, we defend tight circles with room for only our kind. Followers of Jesus can debate over how best to welcome immigrants and to care for those pushed to the margins, but the Hebrew-Christian Scriptures are clear that we must welcome and care. Jesus-followers can disagree about policies and politics, but our positions must reflect reverence for the sacred image of God in each person, respect for the God-granted equality of all, and responsibility to work for the God-intended flourishing of everyone and creation itself.
You were not willing. Like a mother hen, Jesus wanted and wants to gather all of us, fledglings in need of safety, under sheltering wings. To let ourselves be sheltered, though, is to admit that we lack the power— that we are not strong enough on our own and alone– to secure lives worth living. It is to give-up our pose of self-sufficiency. It is to yield, with honest humility and grateful dependence, to Jesus and his way of mutuality with him and with one another.
Near the end of his life, Jesus shed tears over Jerusalem again: “As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that made for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes” (Luke 19:41-42). Jesus was and is broken-hearted over human resistance to the ways of peace, ways which he described in his teachings and demonstrated with his actions.
The Sermon on the Mount and his parables startle us into the realization that divine abundance is truer than human-conjured scarcity; that love displaces and outlasts fear; that grace precedes repentance and makes it possible; that justice is good economics; that mercy heals and forgiveness repairs; and that those who yearn for God and God’s realm will find a fulfillment that stuff cannot provide. Because peacemaking is demanding and counter-cultural, even though joyful, we are prone to treat it as unrealistic. Then, over time, peace disappears from our awareness. Followers of Jesus can become indistinguishable from anyone else, except in the pieties we repeat in private life and in church. Peace within and among us remains distant and elusive.
No wonder Jesus weeps.
Soren Kierkegaard, in 19th-century Denmak, lamented how the church in his time and place had lost track of Jesus: “But one thing I will not do, not for anything in the world. I will not by suppression, or by performing tricks, try to produce the impression that the ordinary Christianity in the land and the Christianity of the New Testament are alike” [Robert Bretall, ed., A Kierkegaard Anthology, 439] Because I share Kierkegaard’s disappointment, I want his resolve. I suspect I will find it by joining Jesus in his tears, not simply hearing them but shedding them along with him—not merely witnessing his difficult and determined hope, but working along with him in the energy of it.
This reflection also appeared in the newsletter of the Jesus Worldview Initiative.
Recent Comments