Day 36

I had a professor who used to say: "We don’t read the Bible, the Bible reads us."

I always wondered what the heck that means.

Let me attempt an explanation:

I think what my old proffie meant was that the stories of the Bible play out in the lives of ordinary people all over the world.

The Spirit inspired truths that carry with them the potential to shape lives, change paths and cultivate good moral characters, need to be lived.

For most of us, that’s like third base.

Modern Religion got stuck at first.

The church I grew up in taught me that a clever Christian is a good Christian. The end in mind of the faith journey is to know everything there is to know about Christianity. The goal is knowledge that we can test, measure and evaluate.

Obviously, it is good to know what the Bible says and to have that knowledge we need to read it again and again and again, because humans tend to forget.

But the “knowledge” found in the Ancient Hebrew Faith that inspired and shaped the theology of Jesus, is way different from our modern understanding of “knowing stuff”.

The Hebrew word for knowledge is called “Yada”. Sometimes they used it to describe the knowledge about some or other subject. Other times they used it to when people really got to know each other, like friends. Most of the times “yada” was used to describe the intimate relationship between God and humans. But then there’s also the odd now and then when they used it to describe sex between two lovers.

Huh?

Sex?

Bet I got your attention now...

Relax.

For the Old Believers to have knowledge of something were always a spiritual and intimate affair. It concerned your brain and your heart, your spirit, body and your soul.

To know the Bible in a modernistic sense will only score big in the eyes of the Sunday school teacher, but to let the stories, told by the ancient prophets, poets, dreamers and writers shape your soul, lift your heart and move your feet in the direction of The Big Story Guru, until your whole life is so enmeshed in his massive story that it becomes difficult to see where the stories of the Bible end and where your story starts, that’s the kind of knowledge “Yada” is all about.

Happy reading.

Day 30

The world expected a king, but what they got was a humble man riding on a donkey towards his death. As time went by, people began to understand the deeper truth behind this irony. Some even believed it to be Good News.

Kings come to rule and dictate. People are either subjects and servants or slaves. They will hope for a righteous Ruler, but history tells of a different reality.

Then comes Jesus and instead of being the king the world was hoping for, he chose a different route, one of serving, giving and loving. A Way of Life where significance is measured, not in terms of fame, status, family tree, sex, wealth of power, but rather by the value of one’s identity as a Human Being (re)created in the image of the Great Creator. He did come to make people subjects or slaves, instead he called them to be friends on a journey towards a different way of being human.

In the end this truth was too much to ask of the people of his day. It’s easier to be a subject of a king, even a bad king, because all you got to do is follow orders. You don’t have to love, you just have to obey.

Through centuries people choose to keep on living under the rule of Power, instead of following a friend beyond the boundaries of the powerful status quo towards a new Way where Love is the great criteria for life. The world saw it in France under the rule of Napoleon, in Germany under the rule of Hitler, in the USA under the rule of Bush, in South-Africa under the rule of Verwoerd and we see it in Zimbabwe under the current rule of Mugabe.

We also see it in religious systems where God is portrayed as an all Powerful King and where the leadership, popes, bishops, priests, clergy, preachers and pastors act as if they have special privileges that the rest of his subjects and slaves don’t have.

But still people choose to stay in this reality, because it is so much easier to obey than to think, act and take responsibility.

The Good News call of Jesus is sometimes just too subversive to bear.

The call to be friends with a humble man on a donkey towards certain death versus a life of obedience under a Rich and Powerful Ruler...

You make the choice.

Day 29

A few months ago a tree was declared dead outside our house. They cut it off, took it out and left it on the pile of rubbish. Later during the day a friend showed me the tree. The people who took it out forgot to check its pulse. There was still life hidden inside the tree. A fresh shoot was growing out of the decaying, dying tree. There was still some energy, some life source and some potential left deep inside its roots. With a little bit of nurturing, a handful of bone meal and compost and a whole lot of grace from Mother Nature, the tree might survive the winter. So I took the tree and planted it in my back garden.

The little bugger is still growing.

More than two millennia’s ago a rebel prophet spoke of the coming kingdom of God as a new shoot growing out of a dead tree trunk. Just when you thought hope was lost, faith a waste of time and God declared dead by the woes of the world, something fresh and new springs to life.
A few centuries later the friends of Jesus thought of him as this new form of Hope. They called him “God Incarnated”.

There is an irony to this. Humans through the ages spoke of God as being big, powerful, strong and steady. This is hopefully all true. But then the friends of Jesus, in the light of the old prophet embraced a new way of thinking about God. The new sprig can easily brake. The death of the tree is a moment away. The hope they had was vulnerable and fragile. It was easy to miss and quick to disappear. It had to be nurtured, cared for and loved. It needed time to heal before it could grow.

And here we are, the modern versions of the friends of Jesus, living in a society (secular and religious) obsessed with money, sex and power. Everything needs to be fast, strong, big and over the top and before we know it, the same applies to our God. So we build our churches either like castles or shopping malls. We plan our faith future with big budgets and measure the success and failure of our religious outcomes in terms of power, status, wealth and monetary growth.

But still the counter cultural images of the old prophets and the friends of Jesus echo in time, cut like a sword and scream like a woman in labour:

Faith takes time
Hope is fragile
Love is vulnerable

and God is somewhere in all of the above.