Believing the Absurd
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The house he grew up in was made of stones roughly stacked
on top of one another. The floor was of packed earth; the roof was thatched,
built over beams of wood and held together with mud. Two or three of these
shacks were clustered together around an open courtyard where much of the
cooking was done. There was a common cistern and a millstone for grinding
grain. Garbage and sewage was tossed outside the house into alleyways between
the groups of houses.
Conditions were filthy, malodorous and unhealthy. He and
most residents had iron and protein deficiencies, and most had severe
arthritis. Life expectancy was somewhere in the 30s.
Some of you may have guessed that this describes Jesus and,
according to archaeologists, the circumstances in which he lived. Odd, isn’t it,
that many people think of him as a sanitized, middle-class-like, pious guy, who
was movie-star handsome? It’s easy to get comfortable with that kind of guy. He’s far enough away from us in time, way of life
– and relevancy.
I’m currently reading “Jesus, A Pilgrimage” by James Martin,
S.J. It has some fascinating descriptions of what archaeologists have discovered
about life in Nazareth at the time of Jesus. It’s likely that
Jesus lived much like the poorest people still live in many parts of Asia,
Africa and Latin America. He had little privacy, probably wore dirty and worn
clothes, and until he became an itinerant preacher, was a common laborer.
(We think of him as a “carpenter,” but according to Martin’s
book, that’s a bit romantic. He and others with that title had to do any jobs
that brought income, including heavy lifting under the thumb of upper class
employers.)
I find this fascinating for a couple of reasons. The first,
as mentioned, is how much it contrasts with the common perception of the
plastic Jesus. The second is the unlikelihood that someone born and raised in
such an insignificant place and such pitiful circumstances could be “God’s
son.”
I believe he is because as I’ve mentioned in these blogs,
once I get beyond the idea that God exists, the rest – the Christ story and the
religion that resulted – is a walk in the park. But I believe many Christians
have lost the sense of its incredulity, its weirdness, of how radically
counter-cultural it is.
Barbara Ehrenreich Google Image |
She was evidently referring to Catholics’ belief in Jesus’
presence in the bread and wine at Mass and its reception in communion. At least
she has an appreciation for how incredible this ritual is. It would do wonders
for the manner in which we Catholics blandly receive communion if more of us
appreciated how bizarre it is. Instead, many of us are “ho-hum” about it,
having received communion hundreds of times.
St. Paul had a good notion of the absurdity of our faith. In
his first letter to his Christian converts in Corinth, he mentioned that if
what we believe isn’t true – speaking specifically of Jesus’ resurrection –
we’re to be pitied.
“If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a
few short years,” Paul writes in The Message translation of the New Testament,
“we’re a pretty sorry lot.”
Earlier in the same letter, he writes, “The message that
points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hell-bent on
destruction….”
Why should believers always be aware, as I believe they
should, of the absurdity of faith? Because it makes us conscious that any
degree of faith we may have does not entirely result from our own cleverness, but is
a gift, often delivered through generations of believers. If it were entirely
our doing, would be unwilling to buck the popular culture about faith and
religion?
And if we intend to help others in a search for God, we have
to present faith as it is. Despite the common view that faith is a comfortable,
risk-free, no-cost way of life, we have to acknowledge to people searching for
God that there’s a cost to discipleship, including the cost of being
counter-cultural. I use the word “entirely” above because besides being a gift,
faith requires on our part openness, honesty with self, resolve, patience with
God and self, and the willingness to accept uncertainty.
The incredibly unlikely choices God made in choosing the circumstances
of Jesus’ life gives us a glimpse of God’s otherness. Isaiah, the great Hebrew
prophet, saw this thousands of years ago when he wrote, “For my thoughts are
not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.”
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