Jesus as Role Model

From the beginning, Jesus’s ministry modeled the interplay between prophetic utterance, public theology, and intense spiritual renewal.*

Someone I love sent me a link to a youtube video.  The video was a patchwork of clips of evangelicalistic preachers, pop psychologists, and journalistic senationalists.  

I don't they were trying to enrage me or trigger some extreme response.  I think they were looking for a way to make sense without more absolutistic flailing and Facebook-ish anger.  They were seeking advice.  They were seeking peace. 

It is a constant now in ways I've not seen before.  How do we make sense, how do we make a way, how do we live in THIS world?

I've been writing about how Jesus is presented in scripture and how we can relate to his abiding presence in the 21st century.  Jesus as Invitation, Resting in Jesus, Jesus as Jewish mystic, social prophet, as wisdom teacher and more. 

It's important to understand that each of these views takes the risk of fragmenting the whole that in its fullness is beyond our understanding.  The language of our creeds avoids this parceling out of the fully divine - fully human reality that it claims from God in Jesus, the Christ.  

I think is is intentional.  It helps.  Otherwise, with more than "conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary" we'd be claiming to know more of how God did what God did than we can know.  Going beyond this core belief is the slippery slope of most early church heresies.  

So it appealed to me when I read the quote above.  Jesus modeled the interplay -- and I added in my mind -- between all our fragments of him.  His modeling was just as much in a world clamoring for absolutistic righteousness as is ours.  

We will always be the ones who break it down, who pick apart, who clamor and cry for final answers, for absolutes we cannot hold, much less hold against each other.  

Our following will be part prophetic utterance, part public theology, and part intense spiritual renewal and more.  It will not do for us to deny or avoid the interplay.  

Because ours is the hard work of following the one who died and was raised.  

*Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, second edition (Fortress Press: 2017), 9-10.