Setting the world on fire.

Radical Change

“People who heard these stories were moved to exclaim, “This man speaks with authority…Never spoke man thus!”

“If we are not (astonished) it is because we have heard Jesus’ teachings so often that their edges have been worn smooth, dulling their subversiveness…Their beauty would not cover the fact that they are “hard sayings” for presenting a scheme of values so counter to the usual as to rock us like an earthquake.”

                                                                        Houston Smith

                                                                        The World’s Religions

            We have finally made it to Christianity in my adult Sunday school class---last chapter in the book.  We have waded through Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam and Judaism to get there.  It is a ponderous book, first published in 1958, and filled with information that is relevant to our times.  If we are ever to arrive at a place of peaceful acceptance, we must learn the true beliefs of other religions and realize how much alike we are.

            Today, when we think of Jesus, we think of the compassionate Christ, who loved children, laid hands on the sick and possessed, healed the blind, and spoke kindly to women.   Soon we will recreate the parade of Palm Sunday when the humble Jesus rode into Jerusalem, not on a white war-horse, but on a lowly donkey.  Somehow, we’ve watered his message down to be only about love and sweetness. 

But Jesus was a firebrand in his day.  He encouraged his followers to break the Jewish laws of cleanliness and animal sacrifice.  He called the rich and powerful snakes and hypocrites.  He ate with tax collectors, foreigners and prostitutes.  He broke the Sabbath laws.  He preached radical change in which the last would be first and those considered to be the elite would be last to enter God’s kingdom.  He taught his people that God was more concerned with one lost sheep than the ninety-nine who were in the fold; more impressed with the penny of a widow than with the gold of the wealthy.  He preached freedom from laws that bound people.

Today, when I see the massive street protests in the Middle East, I think, “That must be what it was like in Jesus’ day---all those rowdy, chanting people filling the streets with their exuberant cries for change.”  Now their rulers, just as those in Jesus’ time, are turning weapons on them to stop the disorder and put out the fire of their freedom lust.  H. G. Wells once said of Jesus, “Either there was something mad about this man, or our hearts are still too small for his message.”  I wonder whether our hearts are bigger today.

                                                Keeping the faith;  Jane