A couple years ago I heard a short story on the radio that made me weep. If you don't have 4 spare minutes to listen to the audio in the link above, here's the gist. A father starts telling his daughter about Jesus and she becomes very interested. They read the Bible together most every night and she loves the part where it says, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." One day as they are driving by a church they see a cross and she asks, "What's that?"The father re...
A couple years ago I heard a short story on the radio that made me weep.
If you don't have 4 spare minutes to listen to the audio in the link above, here's the gist. A father starts telling his daughter about Jesus and she becomes very interested. They read the Bible together most every night and she loves the part where it says, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." One day as they are driving by a church they see a cross and she asks, "What's that?"
The father realizes that he never quite got to that part of he Jesus story. He tried to explain the fact that they killed Jesus because of his message, but that's a hard concept for anyone to fathom, much less a 4 year old.
As time goes on the young girl has the day off from school because of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. She's interested in who this man was and why they are celebrating him with a holiday. The father explains who MLK was and what his work was to help people not judge others by the color of their skin. The daughter makes the connection that this man is a preacher for Jesus and his message sounds a lot like "do unto others." The father agrees and says that he never really thought of it that way before.
At the end she asks, "Did they kill him too?"
We're tracking this message series in John all the way until Easter. The road we are walking with the life of Jesus will end with him suffering a political enemies death on a cross. We can try and explain it away by talking about the barbaric nature of the Romans and how they couldn't deal with any kind of disruption, but that's a version of Jesus life that is far too sanitized.
Jesus was a radical. Jesus made people that were comfortable in their religious system very uncomfortable. To truly experience these stories as they were told, written and lived, we need to feel the discomfort too. Jesus is breaking social and religious norms on purpose to cause us to ask why they are there in the first place. Life has a way of creating these pillars in our heart and mind that were never meant to be load-bearing, and the disruption of Jesus calls that into question. While it can be confusing and at times violent, the space that is created afterwards is always better, clearer and more able to engage with the complexities of the world.
So, let's get disrupted towards peace together.
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