A Reflection for Friday of the Twenty-sixth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s reading here.
“Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!” (Lk 10:14)
Many of us of a certain age grew up with an image of Jesus in our homes, regarding us dreamily, softly illumined, pointing to his Sacred Heart. It’s an anachronistic perception of Our Savior that nonetheless evokes a soft nostalgia for a kind of reverent, controversy-free church we imagine typified the past.
The Aryan visage of this Jesus was completely wrong, of course, but at least this Jesus seemed to call us to a softer, merciful faith. Contemporary depictions, of course, run a gamut from that awful laughing Jesus to thumbs-up-dude Jesus to sporadic attempts to capture a more ethnographically accurate Jesus (and how telling is it how some Christians violently resist reimagining their savior in this persona). But the contemporary Jesus images that trouble me the most are the increasing parade of weirdly nationalistic Jesuses, you have probably seen them; he’s the buff dude, biceps straining off the cross, aggressively masculine, unapologetically Caucasian, at times even brandishing an American flag or worse an AR-15—sometimes accompanying, in an odd solidarity, a contemporary American political figure who could really use a come-to-Jesus moment or two.
I want to grab the people who brandish these images and shake them a little sometimes. “That’s not Jesus,” I want to tell them, “and what you are following is not Christianity; that is not the faith that teaches mercy over retribution and peace over conflict, humility before arrogance, not a faith that can be easily accommodated to a modern politics of domination, exploitation or violence.”
Christianity is hard; it asks difficult things of us; it calls for relentless mercy, the loving of our enemies, the stripping away of everything to liberate ourselves to serve the poor and marginalized.
But I get it. Christianity is hard; it asks difficult things of us, sacrifices; it calls for relentless mercy, the loving of our enemies and those who hate us or have contempt for us, the stripping away of everything to liberate ourselves to serve the poor and marginalized. How many times have I walked away, sorrowful, from the teaching I have read and been taught and claimed to accept all my life?
“Woe” indeed, “to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!” You have heard, you have listened, you have seen all the good works and miracles and graces of God, and you have declined to accept the real Jesus and accept as your own this challenging faith. You seek instead to create one that is compliant to your desires or insecurities, a servant to your selfishness and vulnerable to the latest flim-flam offered up by the world.
I have done my share of rejecting the hard demands of this Christianity. Since I cannot change myself to the faith, I am tempted to change the faith to me. But the face of Jesus, however he really looked, remains the same. I imagine it searching and sorrowful, not because of his own suffering but because he suffers with us as we seek, in our own broken and craggy ways, to follow him.
We claim to have embraced this hard road at Baptism; it is up to us to walk it, remembering: “Whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”
