From my journal: Bill Donahue has written a wonderful book, In the Company of Jesus (InterVarsity Press, 2005), which does a great job of reminding the reader that, in all of our busyness in doing good stuff, Jesus (his mission and character) is still the front-and-center issue. Early in the book he quotes novelist Andrew Greeley: “Much of the history of Christianity has been devoted to domesticating Jesus, to reducing that elusive, enigmatic, paradoxical person to dimensions we can comprehend, understand and convert to our own purposes. So far it hasn’t worked.”
Well, that comment certainly stopped me in my tracks. I said “Whoa!” (my new expletive) when I read it. Immediately, I smelled an idea for a sermon and began to think of all the people in the Gospels who tried to maneuver Jesus on to their agenda: the crowd, for example, that wanted to make him an instant king; Simon Peter who offered “better” ideas about how he could achieve his redemptive mission; his own flesh-and-blood family who, thinking that he may have lost it, wanted to get him off the streets and back home where they could care for him; and the Pharisees who tried to tighten the screws on his thoughts about such things as Sabbath and ritual eating procedures.
I really had a good outline going. I could already taste the blessing my sermon was going to be to people. And then—can you imagine!—it occurred to me that I am regularly doing the same thing: re-engineering Jesus to fit my world. My default view of Jesus is that he was American, white, about my age, lived in economic conditions similar to mine, and prone to engage the same kind of people with whom I am comfortable. Silly, silly me! (To all my non-American friends: forgive my defective perspective. I know you would never think like this.)
Now I have to rewrite the sermon and insert myself at the beginning of the list of those who are regularly on Jesus’ back to adapt to them.
Perhaps there are better examples of people who finally got it right, but the one that speaks to me today is Thomas, the original doubter among the Twelve, who, when he got past his own silliness, simply said, “My Lord and my God.” Which is exactly what Jesus is: the Lord and God. I hear a whisper saying, “Get used to it!”
So that’s how I’m going to try to start out the new year—by reminding myself each morning when I engage in devotional disciplines that I am being conformed to him and not the other way around. I’ve been hearing this point made for about 60 years now; you’d think I’d finally master it.
It was a dark and stormy night (don’t you love the originality) here in New England. My wife, Gail, and I sat near each other in front of the fireplace, and she looked at me in a very special way. I felt warmed and loved. And as I mused on the moment I was reminded of Albert Camus’ comment in “The Plague,” the story of a North African city where all the people were quarantined. A doctor studies the face of a despairing old man, and Camus writes, “He knew what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed and he thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work and devotion to duty, and all one craves is a loving face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”
And that was what I received at the fireplace the other night.
Looking back at Christmas: I attended three Christmas programs this last month. The first was an updated rendition of Irving Berlin’s classic musical White Christmas. I literally had tears of nostalgia over the musical golden oldies that permeated the show. And the artists were incredibly good, consummate professionals with stage voices that hardly needed a sound system.
The other two Christmas presentations were children’s programs in our church. These were small bunches of children singing traditional carols (some in Spanish). They had scrubbed faces adorned with enthusiasm and wonder, and some were singing horribly off-key. White Christmas was really good, but the children were better.
And I thought about where church music has gone in the last years. As much as I appreciate the sincerity of Christian musicians who lead our worship today with their thousands of dollars of equipment, I think I love the children better. Their worship reveals an innocence, a sincere assumption that the things they sing about are really true, a raw excitement that too often gets lost as we get older and more professional.
Author and pastor Gordon MacDonald is chair of World Relief and editor at large of Leadership.
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