In the hallway outside the Sunday school rooms in the church that I serve as pastor there is a painting of Jesus. It depicts the Jesus saying from Matthew 19:14 (also Mark 10:14 and Luke 18:16) where Jesus says “Let the little children come to me and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” (Let me hasten to add that this picture has been in my church many, many years longer than I have. I had nothing to do with putting it there.) Here’s it is:
The depiction of the children is telling as well. They are 1950s vintage white American children. They look like illustrations out of the Dick and Jane readers I had in grade school in the 1950s. One of the children, the only boy, is holding what appears to be a model of a World War II vintage military airplane. (Really! A military airplane in a picture that is supposed to teach children about Jesus! It boggles the mind.) The children are white, healthy, well-dressed. They are stereotypes. They don’t look remotely like first century CE Jewish children from Galilee or Judea. They are the image of America the way we wanted it to be in the 1950s. They are the children of establishment America, for whom Jesus is just one of us who saves without challenging, without demanding anything at all.
That image of Jesus and the children would be of no particular concern if it were limited to a picture in a hallway outside some Sunday school rooms. Jesus did say let the little children come to me, and that’s what the picture shows, albeit very stereotypically. The thing of it is, however, that this image of Jesus is not limited to a picture in a hallway outside some Sunday school rooms. My years in the church have convinced me that this image of a serene, welcoming, nonthreatening Jesus is the image that many, perhaps most, of the people in the church have of him. It is the image the Christian church, at least in its western forms, has inculcated in people for centuries. (There are problems with the image of Jesus that the eastern Orthodox churches have inculcated in people too, especially the image of Jesus Pantocrator; but that is not my concern here.) This picture outside my church’s Sunday school rooms shows the image of the Constantinian Jesus (and of the American version of the Constintinian Jesus in particular), the Jesus of the established church whose primary role is to make people feel good and to get them to heaven, not to say anything to them about the kingdom of God on earth. To comfort not to confront. To legitimate the status quo not to challenge it. To reflect the values of the culture, not to stand them on their heads at every turn. In other words, to be a tame Jesus, safe for the established powers of the world (including the military powers symbolized by the model warplane in the boy’s hand in our picture), the servant of the kingdoms of the earth not the herald of the radically different kingdom of God.
The simple and undeniable truth is that ever since it became the established religion of empire the Christian church has distorted, even denied, the image of Jesus that anyone reading the Gospels with an open mind can (and should) get, the image we get from reading the Gospels without the Constantinian glasses that the church has so effectively put on us over the centuries. Time and time again Jesus took the conventional wisdom of his day, and ours, and turned it completely on its head. The instances of his doing so are too numerous to mention all of them here. Virtually everything Jesus said and did was and is radical; and you don’t have to be a Bible scholar to see how radical he was, and is (although we do lose some of his radicalism when we don’t understand his historical context well enough). Jesus is radical in the true meaning of the word. Everything he said and did went to the root (radix, Latin for root, is the source of our word radical) of the beliefs and practices of his society, his culture, his religion—and ours. Here are just a few examples taken from the Gospel of Matthew. It’s one of the Gospels with the saying about the children that our Sunday school picture portrays, and it is the Gospel that most people read first because it comes first in the traditional order of the New Testament even though it isn't the first of our Gospels to have been written.
Let’s start with a few examples from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Mt. 5:5 In Jesus’ day it was the Romans with their legions that were anything but meek who were inheriting the earth. The most common Jewish vision of the Messiah was of a new King David, a military ruler who would inherit the earth through anything but meekness. Today it seems to be mostly we Americans who are inheriting the earth, and we do it through economic, political, and military power, not through meekness. Jesus has completely upended the expectations of his world and ours.
He says “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” Mt. 5:9 The Roman legions, who perhaps made peace but who did it through brutal violence, were the metaphorical children of the god Caesar. The United States is today’s Rome, also seeking to make peace through a liberal application of violence. For Jesus the children of the one true God are the ones who truly make peace through justice. He has again turned the expectations of his world, and ours, on their head. He says “Do not resist an evildoer,” meaning do not resist violently, then gives examples of the oppressed turning the tables on their oppressors. (Walter Wink) Mt. 5:38-41 In that world where violence was the norm, and in ours where violence is still the norm, Jesus has yet again turned everything upside down.
He said: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven….For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Mt. 6:19-21 It’s a truly radical, revolutionary statement in his world—and in ours—where most everyone works as hard as they can precisely to build up treasure on earth and where the policies of the ruling powers are aimed most of all at building up the earthly treasure of the wealthy. He called a tax collector to be one of his disciples. Mt. 8:9 Jesus’ Jewish people and followers despised tax collectors, for they worked for the Romans and oppressed their own people; but Jesus made one of them a disciple, again a truly radical prophetic demonstration of God’s universal grace that defied the deep religious and political convictions of his time. It defies the deep religious and political convictions of our time too. How many of us would call Bernie Madoff to be a disciple? It’s not a perfect parallel I know, but I think it makes the point. Jesus made, and makes, disciples of the ones the world despises.
In Jesus’ day women were forbidden to touch men to whom they were not married in public. Blood was considered unclean, and touching blood rendered a person unclean. A woman who had suffered from hemorrhages for twelve years violated these taboos when she reached out and touched the fringe of Jesus’ cloak. Jesus should have been outraged. He should have condemned the woman and then gone through a purification ritual to cleanse himself. He didn’t. He said “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well;” and the woman was healed. Mt. 9:20-22 We probably hear this story as a tale of Jesus’ compassion for a suffering human being, and so it is; but we probably don’t see how radical it is. We don’t see how it flies in the face of the religious and social conventions of Jesus’ time, and we don’t see in it a call for us to question--and reject--the religious and social conventions of our time too; but so it is.
I suppose I could go on and on with examples of how radical Jesus is. How he healed on the Sabbath in violation of the religious law and approved of hated Samaritans. How he told parables of God’s unfailing grace for the lost—the woman searching for her lost coin, the shepherd searching for his one lost sheep, the father welcoming home his prodigal son even before the son has had a chance to beg forgiveness. How he went not to the wealthy, the respectable, the righteous but to the poor, the excluded, the sinners. How he symbolically overthrew the temple and condemned the temple authorities for “devouring widows' houses” with their temple tax. Mark 12:38-44 There are lots and lots of examples.
Yet there is one passage that perhaps more than anything else shows how radical the demands are that Jesus makes on us. Jesus said: “If any want to become my followers let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Mt. 16:24-25 “Take up their cross.” We want to minimize that line, or even romanticize it. We want it to mean to bear whatever difficulties come our way in life with faith and endurance. The problem is that Jesus doesn’t say “bear whatever difficulties come your way in life with faith and endurance.” He says take up your cross. What’s a cross? A brutal, inhumane instrument of torture and death. He means of course not take up your cross to inflict torture and death on another but rather to bear torture and death yourself for Jesus’ sake and for the sake of the Kingdom of God. It is a demand for our whole lives, our entire being, everything that we have and everything that we are. Nothing could be more radical. Nothing could be a more radical call to follow the way of the Kingdom of God that Jesus showed us, the way of nonviolence and the way of justice for the poor, the excluded, and the vulnerable. The way of intimate personal relationship with God, not the way of established religious authority. The way of spurning the world’s norms and mores for the sake of mercy and compassion. The way of self-denial for the sake of all of God’s people and all of God’s creation.
How did the man who overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the temple and drove out the sellers of sacrificial animals there ever get to be the Jesus meek and mild of so much of Christianity? How did the Jesus who said love your enemies and do not resist an evildoer with violence, who wouldn’t even let his followers use violence to save his own life, become the Jesus of earthly armies, the Jesus of a picture with a child holding a model of an instrument of death and destruction? How did the Jesus whom the authorities of his time, both religious and secular, saw as such a threat to their power that they had to kill him ever get to be respectable? How did the Jesus who subverted the beliefs and conventions of his time at every turn ever get to be the guardian of the status quo that the Christian tradition has made him?
There are of course historical, anthropological, and sociological answers to those questions. It all began with establishment in the fourth century of course, but it certainly didn’t end there. There is, however, a question that is more important for us than the “how did it happen” questions. The more important question for us is: What are we going to do about it? Are we ever going to get what the dominant forms of Christianity have for so long not gotten about Jesus? Are we ever going to get how radical he was, and is? More importantly: Are we ever going to let him radicalize us?
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