I thought I was finally
well equipped to be the father I had always wanted to be with my youngest child
Nicole. I had already walked through many life challenges of my own and thought
to myself this time things will be different with this child. My other two
children were raised without any input from me as their father and they had
entered their young adult years with thanks to their wonderful mothers who
raised them without me. Now I had a chance to have input in my third child’s
life how hard could it be to raise one child with a wonderful wife that I loved
with all my heart. The one thing I didn’t anticipate was the level of anxiety
in “getting it right this time.” It created in me a fear that caused me to want
total control over this child driving me to a place of near desperation that
this little girl would become the person I envisioned her to be. I wanted to
mold her into the image in my mind and my heart. There was nothing wrong with
the image I had created for my daughter; it just wasn’t an image that I had
allowed her to mold through a personal relationship with Christ. I was not very
open to her individuality; an expression of God’s working in her life. I wanted
her to be polite, caring, compassionate, but it was my perception of those
qualities that I wanted her to conform to rather than allowing her to discover
her own character and allow God to shape that through the ups and downs of her life.
Most importantly, I wanted to “domesticate” her so my life would be
comfortable.
Unfortunately,
the more I struggled to mold her to my image of the ideal daughter, the more
challenges I faced in truly building a loving, caring relationship where we
both could reach out and draw closer to one another. In order for her to become
her own person, she felt the need to break away because she felt threatened by
the walls I built. Those walls discouraged her from becoming too connected to
me as her father because of my need to control, mold, and shape her life. I
finally came to the realization that I did not have ownership over my child
that God had so graciously brought into my life. She was a gift, and my
responsibility was to care for that gift in a way that allowed her to grow and
find Christ in her own life, allowing God to mold her into his image. I needed
to see her as someone formed by God. I haven’t by any stretch of the
imagination reached that place of perfection in my relationship with my now young
adult daughter. I have, however, begun the process, and our conversations have
taken on a new direction that has brought us into a much better relationship
where we have much more open communication and respect. I am allowing myself to
see my daughter for who she is and to appreciate the woman she is becoming.
Do we have the tendency of creating an
image of Jesus in the same way? Is it our desire to shape Jesus into our own
image? Do we try to domesticate Jesus to avoid seeing the real God-Man the real
“Wild Messiah”? I believe we do, and in the attempt to domesticate him, we are
tempted to understand him in light of what we already believe about the world
through the lens of culture, race, and ethnicity. We try to place him in
familiar categories; we want to have some natural, comfortable understanding of
who he is. The tendency is to make him into something we might expect, what he
would be like if he were our creation. In that process of re-imaging Jesus so
he makes sense to us, we reduce him to the commonplace. Once we have finished
our re-imaging, we can be comfortable with our lives because he will pose no
threat to our complacency. “The benign images of gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
have comforted and encouraged many believers” (p. 87).
In order
to domesticate Jesus we also take his sayings and reconstruct them to fit our
image of who he is. When Jesus says “Anyone who does not give up all that he
has cannot be my disciple,” or when he says “When you give a feast, do not
invite your friends and relatives, lest they repay you. Instead invite the
poor, the lame, the blind, the maimed,” or “do not lay up for yourselves
treasure on earth,” we find it difficult to believe that we are asked to accept
these sayings literally. So our tendency is to reconstruct his sayings in a way
that feels more comfortable. What we have left is not true revelation. We
remove ourselves from the necessity of allowing the Holy Spirit to speak into
our lives in providing for us an understanding of the hard sayings of Jesus. We
are easily persuaded that the life Jesus calls us to does not require our total
surrender.
Our focus
has been on Jesus calling us to a change in behavior, when in reality Jesus is
calling us to character transformation and a changing of our hearts. We have attempted
to domesticate Jesus in a way that allows us to simply express love in good
deeds, but often that love doesn’t automatically come from a heart that’s
focused on Christ. We have changed our behavior, but not our heart condition.
Jesus didn’t die on the cross to provide self-improvement tips for better living
he died on the cross to provide a way for us to be reconciled to God, and in
that reconciliation, to be transformed to God’s image. We don’t always fully
understand what Jesus meant when he spoke of peace, love, and doing good. It
isn’t about feelings, or being nice, or tolerating others, although those are
good and honorable things. It is about conforming our will to God’s will that
is the only way the Church will become the “Living Body of Christ” we are
called to transform the world and to present the real Jesus the “Wild Messiah”
Jesus!
As I read
this book I realized that I have re-imagined Jesus to be friendly and caring
the kind of person I feel comfortable in befriending. Just as the Roman soldiers
stripped Jesus of his clothing and placed on him one of their own military
cloaks, I too have had the tendency to put on Jesus my own kind of clothes.
“One of the best ways to expose our co-option of Jesus to our own personal,
religious, and cultural agendas is to interpret the many images of him that we
entertain” (p. 92). Can you see how our understanding of Jesus can be so easily
shaped by who we are? We shape Jesus into our image through our personal
reality our own needs, wants and desires. “One of the best ways to expose our
co-option of Jesus to our own personal, religious, and cultural agendas is to
interpret the many images of him that we entertain.” (p. 92).
“Our
point is that to reJesus the church, we need to go back to the daring, radical,
strange, wonderful, inexplicable, unstoppable, marvelous, unsettling,
disturbing, caring, powerful God-Man. The communities around us are crying out
for him” (p. 111). Without a true understanding of Christ’s character can we find
a way to really be the Church? When we distort Jesus in order to re-imagine him
to fit our needs and desires, we effectively deny ourselves the opportunity to
be bold proclaimers of the Gospel we claim to love so much. Our re-imagining of
Jesus may provide us some comfort in the world, but we have robbed ourselves of
the transforming power that can only be found in a “Wild Messiah”. It is when
we see Jesus truly as he is that we receive the power to be all God calls us to
be. “The church needs to find itself in league with this Jesus, staring at him
in amazement and saying, as Peter did, with trembling voice, ‘What kind of man
is this?’ Even the wind and waves obey him. Even wild demons obey him. Even the
Pharisees quake at the thought of what he might unleash if left to his own
devices’ (p.111). We need to go back to the
authentic Jesus of the New Testament, whether or not that fits our
re-structured image of his character and mission. For we are told in 1
Corinthians 8:6 that there is only “one Lord, Jesus Christ.” When we take Jesus
out of his original context we begin to manipulate and domesticate him in such
a way that what we present to the world is a caricature of him rather than a
true portrait.
Questions
for reflection: What is it about
your Jesus that you are trying to imitate? In what ways have we framed Jesus
according to the parts of Him that appeal to us? What would our witness as the
church be like if we stopped trying to shape Jesus into to our image?
Rev. Gary
Bernard Williams is the pastor at Faith UMC and Hamilton UMC
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