+Z’ev

Today’s assigned readings:

1 Samuel 19:1-18, Acts 12:1-17, Mark 2:1-12

The text in the NRSV says that Jesus was “at home”. The KJV says only that it was “noised about that he was in the house.” A number of things leap to my mind. The tradition in the west, very strong at least since the 1960s (of course, common enough prior to that!) was that Jesus was poor. The traditional image of the little homeless family at Christmas is often used as a preaching instrument when touching on virgin births or angels might seem too alien to the audience. In Eastern Orthodoxy, however, and in some non-Franciscan parts of the Roman Ecclesial Community, is the tradition that Jesus’ family was rather well off. This tradition is tied to a number of other ones that all weave together into a rather pious but unneeded picture of the Holy Family. But it paints for us a picture that calls into question a lot of our rather modern assumptions. That’s what I want.

The reading from the NRSV does the same. For the image of the itinerant preacher, rather like one of our urban street people, or the otherwise domestically challenged, is often used to, again, raise talking points when talk of miracles might raise only eyebrows. But here he is in Capernaum, “at home.” What might that mean? Well, apart from possibly owning a home (not too unlikely since his father owned a business) we can know nothing about the sort of house it was although I’m inclined to imagine the basic house available to most of the populace, perhaps with a gate and a wall creating a sort of courtyard up to the front door. Again, of course we can know nothing about what sort of a house it was. But the reason is to point out the many different ways we can see Jesus.

When I was in 6th Grade, my cousin Greg came to visit us. Greg was a Roman Catholic Franciscan. For what ever reason he was not wearing a full habit, but he was wearing a tau-style cross showing the hand of Jesus and the hand of St Francis on the front. From Greg’s description of St Francis I was intrigued: I spent much time in the library at our Middle School and this gave me a “project”. I began to read up on St Francis. At that time, reading about saints was pretty adventurous for an Evangelical sort of Methodist! Eventually I even got a statue of St Francis for my bedroom. 6 years later I would take Francis as my confirmation name, kneeling before the Episcopal Bishop of New York. Even coming into Orthodoxy I brought a fascination for Francis and his idea of holy poverty. But over and over again this fascination drove home the idea that I was never poor enough to be really Christian. I never really entertained the idea of Jesus wanting me to be poor. But how could I ever be like him since I always owned something: books, electronics, clothes…

Let’s call this middle-class American guilt and laugh. Let’s also be sure to laugh at it for another reason: we are not called duplicate Jesus life else we’d be speaking Aramaic and wearing bed-sheets. We are called to emulate Jesus who emulated us. This can transcend culture, race, language and class. For some culture, race, language and class are very important (along with gender identity, sex and political affiliation). But if a teaching can not move beyond the walls created by ALL of these things, it’s not the Gospel.

So here’s Jesus, “at home”. And suddenly Jesus is rather like us: neither rich nor poor, just a member of the community. That’s an important image to offer: a Jesus who’s not an “alien invader”, something from outside, but rather more native. The Bible - indeed all the other parts of the conversation humanity is having with God - is filled with people like us. Today’s reading from 1 Samuel will paint a picture of a really dysfunctional family. Today’s reading from Acts - and indeed much of the NT - shows a rather functional family. Nearly everyone is related.

From my own experience of imagining Jesus to be different from me (dirt poor and extroverted) I wonder, sometimes, if we don’t want to imagine an “Alien” Jesus just to avoid having to listen to what he has to say. We want, rather, to listen to interpretations of him; to Jesus through a filter. It is as if we want to say he is so alien that we need a middleman. We then need middle men to explain the alien to us (we inherit this from our Jewish forebears who read the need for two sets of plates and no cheese burgers into the verse about boiling a calf in its mother’s milk). If we get hung up on homoousis vrs homoiousis, or begotten vrs created, do we have the time or the energy or the need to worry about healing the sick or feeding the poor? Or even forgiving one another?