Loving Jesus, the Prince and the Pauper

An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Matthew 1:1

Jesus was one of the poor kids. His immediate family could not have been very high in the socioeconomic hierarchy of their world. For one thing, they lived in a scrappy little backwater village in a scrappy little backwater province of the Roman Empire. For another thing, Jesus' presumed father, Joseph, was a "carpenter" - a word which in the original language could also mean essentially a construction worker, someone who worked with wood and stone and things of that sort. Nothing glamorous. Jesus probably looked like a construction worker's son. Wouldn't have made much of an impression at a cocktail party. His hands were probably calloused. His feet were probably dirty. His clothes were probably rough and plain. But in his veins flowed the blood of kings - and not just any kings. His country's most famous kings. Some of the most powerful, prestigious rulers from ancient Israel's golden days... people like David, and Solomon.

I love Jesus for choosing to come as pauper to this planet that needs so desperately to learn to value the poor, to elevate humility, to believe in something great beyond the outwardly unimpressive exterior of economic deprivation... because there is always something powerful pulsing through the hearts of the unnoticed, the unwanted, the unloved, the unesteemed.

In this case, for instance, the blood of kings. Jesus was a prince.

Loving Jesus, the Only One Who Truly Understands

Our enemies in the spiritual realm want us to believe that we human beings are on our own with our problems; that God is indifferent to such purely human issues as a heartache or a paper cut, that the monologue of thoughts we call silly and sinful and stupid and strange are better off remaining a monologue, that if we bothered to attempt a two-way conversation God would turn away in embarrassment at our shallowness.

The secret of life is that our Maker understands us more deeply than anyone else ever could, including ourselves.When you think about it, it actually makes sense. Of course we should let God in on our inner world. He's already there anyway. Of course God wants us to talk to him about our troubles. He has to listen to our mumblings minds whether or not we mumble in his direction.

Lately I have been recycling the same set of random sorrows and joys almost compulsively. At prayer time they come swimming into my head in hoardes, and I get so lost in the mess that I end up telling God, "I'll be back once I get this sorted out." The problem is, I can't get it sorted out on my own, so if I intend to avoid God until it's all solved, I'll be avoiding him forever. And that's exactly the point.

Avoiding Jesus, I have to say, is the craziest piece of work you'll ever do. I mean, he's always just around the corner of your soul, so in the end the only way to shake him off is to lose your soul, which is a feasible thing, in fact I do it almost every other day. Now I'm telling myself - no, I'm telling him... I've been talking to myself long enough.

Now I'm telling you, Jesus, that you understand me. Of course you understand me. Of course you want to hear about what's on my mind. It's better than simply overhearing it. Of course you care about my stupid problems. Of course ultimately it's me that thinks they're stupid, not you. You see the whole picture from God's perspective, and you know the old saying: Nothing is stupid with God.

All of that to say this: I love you, Jesus... the only one who truly understands.

Loving Jesus... the Cry of My Heart

Every morning the first sound I hear is my own heart crying for love. In the dead calm its pulses shudder, convulsing the core of my being, desperate, desolate. Then beyond its grieving murmurs a chorus of voices, promising me the love I long for. I feel them pushing needles in the veins of my soul, digging deep but never reaching me, never engaging the depths of my sorrow, never answering the questions I was really asking. Soon I am unable to contact myself, lost in the fog of my hopeless addictions. Before I am out of my bed I am buried alive.

Jesus watches and waits in the cloud with his hand on my wrist to steady me, guiding my footsteps, and never a word demanding attention or anything else for himself; just to be by my side is enough. Sometimes I cough something dismissive at him through the haze, not expecting an answer, so he doesn't give me one... just smiles, often through tears. He is furiously in love with me and he hates this mist, hates the way the pushers zero in on my bed at dawn, hates them hooking me up to their equipment almost before I nod my lethargic consent. He will not let these needles puncture through to my soul.

Every morning Jesus spent on earth the first sound he heard was his own heart roaring for love. Unlike me he would not silence the voice of his longing because the denial of the deepest ache of the soul is sin. A thousand plugs injecting temporary fulfillment for temporary needs, all conveniently invented as distractions from the permanent need, this is idolatry.

Jesus isn't afraid to expose the God-shaped abyss in the human core because he knows God's heart has a similar space inside for every human. While I hasten to stifle the sound of my sobbing and spend my existence in a tedium of hypnotic denial, he lives non-stop in the place of deep desire, because only here can one experience true love. Jesus, I am tired of pretending I don't hear myself crying for you. As the sun sets I step off into the canyon of my neediness and freefall through its infinite depths until I feel your arms around me and then I am flying.

Loving Jesus, Son of Abraham

 

An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Matthew 1:1

I love how Jesus is immediately identified with Abraham. To reach back into the ages and touch the weathered hand of Abraham is to contact the heartbeat of humanity. It could have been any old man in any desert who heard what Abraham heard that night. Through you all nations will be blessed. Why Abraham? Why anyone? We are all part of Abraham’s story, for in Abraham, the story of God intersects the story of us. Eternity steps into time, into the flapping tents of a homeless nomad on a lonely desert night, one of those nights when the stars are spilled like sand across the vastness of the firmament and as he stares, he hears the whisper, So shall your descendants be.

The brightest star, the Morning Star, in that overwhelming sky, must have been Jesus. Looking down into the wondering eyes of the man outside the tent in the middle of the wasteland, he must have smiled. Hi, Father Abraham.

But oh, the years between the dreaming and the coming true… the tragedies, the children dying in the wilderness.

 

Today the sons of Abraham are at war.

Eyes that gazed in wonder at God’s promises now glare hatefully at the fulfillment in each other.

And in our midst stands Jesus, son of Abraham, saying, Before Abraham was, I AM. Before you would even recognize the story, I was telling it. How many lonely nights had I stood alone weeping in that desert before you shuffled over the horizon and chanced to hear my voice?

Jesus, I hear you. May all of us hear you, beyond the gunfire, beyond the rhetoric. May all of us see you, still weeping in the desert, still staring through the eyes of your heartbroken brothers, the sons of Abraham.

REMEMBER TO PRAY FOR THE MODERN-DAY DESCENDANTS OF ABRAHAM,

THE PEOPLES OF THE MIDDLES EAST,

THAT THEY MAY RECOGNIZE JESUS IN THEIR MIDST.

 
 

Loving Jesus within the Great Story

An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Matthew 1:1

So for some reason this intractable fellow named Matthew decided it would be best to kick off his written account of the life of Jesus with a highly exciting list of unpronounceable names. "...and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat..." I used to hate him for it, to be honest. A genealogy seemed to me to be a pretty faulty method for capturing an audience's attention at the top end of a narrative. Nowadays, though, I know better than to yawn.

Matthew, the author traditionally linked to the first book in the Christian Scriptures and also a disciple of Jesus, understood that before he could dive into the action of this story he had to establish the identity of his main character. His audience, incidentally, was primarily Jewish, and at that time in history a person's lineage was of supreme interest to the Jewish community. More than anything, your ancestry defined who you were and determined who you could be. Matthew's goal was to make sure that his readers knew that Jesus' family tree more than qualified him to be exactly who his followers claimed he was: no less than the promised Messiah, a prophesied deliverer of the people, who was expected to abolish oppression and ungodliness while permanently establishing righteousness, justice, and peace.

This is why my opinion of Matthew's wordy prologue to the story of Jesus has changed for the better. The point he's making essentially is that Jesus hasn't just dropped out of nowhere, another faddish miracle man with a cult following among the peasants. No, says Matthew, the man I shadowed at close range for a period of three years is part of a much bigger story, one that began long before any of us were born and that is also destined to outlive every one of us. See, in the eyes of Matthew and his readership, the names in this list were anything but ordinary. They represented people whose identities were charged with significance for the entire human race. Their lives, like most human lives, were full of imperfections and disappointments, but running through them all a powerful thread of divine presence linked them to a transcendent saga that had been going since before the dawn of time. The power behind all existence had touched down in these particular lives in a big way, Matthew believed; and I believe it, too.

This breathtaking legacy of encounters with ultimate truth culminates gloriously in Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Watching him stand there on the threshold of time with the eternal story burning brightly in his being, I experience the thrill of the endless ages crashing down around me when I realize: I know him personally.

And he loves me.

I love you, too, Jesus, choosing to enter humanity's story and intertwine our life with God's. I love how you came not to nullify all that came before you, but to complete it, to make sense of it. And I love the fact that because of you my story no longer has to be limited to the confines of my fragile, fleeting little lifespan in this fragile, fleeting age, but instead I can enter the Great Story - your story. Our story.

The Beginning of Loving Jesus

Why do I love Jesus?

For starters, I don't really know.

Even if I had lived in the correct time and place to manage a face-to-face encounter with Jesus, chances are he wouldn't exactly have been my type... and I think it's safe to say I wouldn't have been his. Most sources agree that Jesus, whatever else he may have been, was something of a holy man, a Jewish sage who travelled his native region teaching wisdom and, allegedly, performing miracles. In other words, he and I wouldn't have had much in common. Since I myself am about as far from sagely as anyone could ever get, it's hard to imagine a holy man who could look at me with anything but a politely dismissive glance.

And, of course, it takes more than polite dismissal to earn my affection.

Perhaps more to the point, though, Jesus lived over two thousand years ago, in a remote part of the world that also just happens to be across the globe from where I have always lived. Plainly, history has denied me the chance to sit down across a room from this man and engage him as a fellow human being. What this means is that my "encounters" with Jesus should have amounted to no more than the encounters of a reader with a character in a book, or a student with a historical figure, because this is ostensibly the stature to which Jesus has been reduced by the elapsing cycles of time. Now, there have been cases in which a reader feels an odd kind of connectedness to a character in a book, almost to the point of loving that (perhaps even fictional) person; the same sort of thing has happened to many a history fanatic as they admire a historical figure of particular appeal. The sane among us, however, are generally aware that these sorts of at-a-distance infatuations cannot compare with the experience of loving a contemporary individual who plays some manner of role in our daily lives. If I had only known Jesus as a name in a book, he would still not have earned what could properly be called my love. Our exploration leads us elsewhere.


Of course, I have thus far failed to mention that I was raised in that particular community of faith that most intimately associates itself with the person and message of Jesus, that is, the Christian Church. As many of you may know from firsthand experience, Christians have an interesting way of thinking and talking about Jesus that renders him more than just a historical figure, more than a name in a book. To the faith community of my upbringing, Jesus was the lens through which we viewed the world. We were constantly reminded of his words and actions; they were supposed to have an immediate bearing on how we lived out our days, and thus for many of us Jesus became an almost personal presence in our homes, our gatherings, our daily doings. Notice, though, that I still say only almost. Being the founder of my religion and the guide of my moral compass wouldn't automatically make Jesus personal to me, wouldn't mean he was my best friend or anything. For quite a few people who rightly qualify as practicing Christians, Jesus has not reached this level, and that's because, obviously, it's not necessary. Such a phenomenon shouldn't have to occur.

But with me... it did.

Why? We still haven't gotten much closer to an answer here. And I don't know that I can bring us any closer myself. Suffice it to say that I think it began in my early childhood, and I know it has continued to develop throughout my life into something deeper and richer than I would ever have predicted. Make no mistake: my regard for this man Jesus is more like the very pungent and personal variety of love that can develop between two people who truly know each other from daily life than it is like any other kind of love I know.

The Christians say that Jesus is more than a historical figure, more than a guy in story or a name in a book. They tell me that Jesus is alive today, the same way I am alive, except perhaps more so. The Christians claim that Jesus is really present; that he is watching me as I go about my daily life, and that kind of like Santa Claus he sees me when I'm sleeping and knows when I'm awake. Which actually sounds creepy and bizarre, not like something I would normally believe, and yet I do. I can't explain my experiences any other way, and weird as it sounds, as I sit here today in twenty-first century America, I am strangely comfortable saying along with the Christians that Jesus really must be alive and present with me. Right here. Right now.


I may as well quit beating around the bush and tell you what I believe, since you have a right to know. I believe that my strong sense of friendship and fellowship with Jesus is a result not of an especially intense infatuation with a historically, culturally, and geographically distant figure, nor of an especially intense admiration for the founder of my religion, nor even of an especially intense form of kookiness, but the result of the preexistent reality of Jesus' love for me. I believe that Jesus is alive, yes, and present, and that Jesus knows my heart, knows more about me than I know. And yet in spite of my quite evident lack of religiosity or spiritual impressiveness, my blatant identity as anything but a first-century Jewish sage, I believe that Jesus loves me. And that, frankly, is the underlying reason why I love him. So unlikely, so preposterous, this love; culture, and time, and distance, they all should have made it impossible, and yet here it is. I feel it underneath me, reverberating below the surface of my twenty-first century American existence with a resonance and a depth that transcends time.

I want to show you other reasons for this crazy love of mine. Want to show you the Jesus I know so well, the one I grew up with, treading patiently and passionately through stories made familiar to me by repetition, stories from the four books in the Christian Scriptures known as the Gospels. I also want you to discover Jesus with me in the patterns of my daily life, among friends, family, strangers, trees, skies, wind. He is everywhere and in everything if you look. My hope is that, as this collection of reflections unfolds, my love for this person will evolve before your eyes in some way: maybe it will gradually seem more ridiculous, maybe gradually less, or maybe I will just seem especially creative and visionary and eccentric in my passion for this mysterious character from the annals of time and space. Think whatever you want of me and of Jesus, but I am inviting you to just come along on this journey, encountering the same incredible person over and over again in different forms - in word, in flesh, in blood, in nature, in story, in song, in situation after situation, emotion after emotion. I'm excited to begin, but I guess I really felt that before we got started, I should explain where I was coming from, so here it is:

I love him because he first loved me.

Prologue

I don't want an imaginary Jesus who tolerates and accepts and excepts

and I don't want an imaginary Jesus who condemns and rebukes and rejects

I want a real Jesus, and there is only one of those

and I want him on his terms alone, not mine, not theirs - his own

I want the real Jesus who loves and hates and cries

I want the real Jesus who laughs and lives and dies

I don't want make-believe and I'm tired of lies

I want the real Jesus with real feet, real hands, real eyes