Meeting Jesus Where We Need Him Most
Meeting Jesus Where We Need Him Most
Just as there were three key passages in which we saw where we have lost the real Jesus, let me move to three passages in which we find him in the most unexpected places.
The first is early in the Gospels when Jesus is on a journey and he passes through Samaria. To call a person a Samaritan was the meanest racial slur one could have cast in that day. The Samaritans were considered an impure race of an impure religion and were despised by the puritanical. The disciples had left Jesus and gone to fetch some food; it was lunchtime. Jesus saw a Samaritan woman coming to draw water and did a most extraordinary thing. He asked her for a drink. Quite taken aback, she asked him why he, a Jew, would bother to ask a Samaritan for a drink of water, especially a woman. She was shocked. And when his disciples returned to find him talking to her, they experienced their own dose of shock.
Jesus’ answer to the woman has become a historic passage of Scripture, preached from for centuries. He told her that if she only knew who she was talking to, she would have asked him for a drink, because the water he offered was of a spiritual nature and would satisfy every hunger. Her immediate response was to deflect attention from herself and her hungers and focus on the divisions between the religious sects of her day in their methods of worship and debates over the appropriate holy places. But Jesus was a master at disclosing a person’s heart, and he told her that her real problem was not the divisions between religious sects, but her own torn heart. “You have had five husbands,” he said, “and the man you now have is not your husband” (John 4:18 NIV).
I ask you this question: Which religion in the world today would have chosen this woman as their first evangelist? Think about it. Not Islam, not a typical Hindu man, not even Christendom, the way religious power brokers have distorted it. But Jesus rescued her from herself, not from the wars within religion but from the war and rejection within herself. She ran back to her village and said, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” (4:29 NIV). The fascinating unstated line is, “And he didn’t reject me!”
No one in that day would have expected Jesus to converse with this Samaritan woman of five shattered marriages. There are several surprising elements here. Christianity is often portrayed as being anti-woman. The gender wars that have raged over the years are not without reason. This painful subject of gender inequalities, often aided and abetted by institutions of power, has sent many thinking women into a gold mine of rescue in the Gnostic writings of feminine deities and worship. I often wonder if they are really aware of what some of those sources even contain.
Take again, for example, the so-called Gospel of Thomas, which is neither a Gospel nor written by Thomas, as I have already said. Gnostic writings are not Scripture but the writings of some spiritual sect that rejected the historic Christ in order to create their own privatized spirituality. Readers will remember the Jesus Seminar some years ago that attempted to debunk the gospel of Jesus, using the text called the Gospel of Thomas. Supposedly, that shed new light on Jesus’ teaching and showed a better way. I would like to quote from the definitive Gnostic text about women, the Gospel of Thomas, Saying 114:
Simon Peter said to all the other disciples, “Let Mary Magdalene go out from among us because women are not worthy of life.”
Jesus said, “See, behold, I will lead her so that I can make her a male; so that she, too, by becoming a male can become a living spirit resembling you males. For every women who makes herself a male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Is this the Gnosticism that is supposed to rescue women? I would suggest just one counterperspective to this, but there are many more I could discuss. The most important moment for Christianity came at the resurrection scene of Jesus Christ. To whom did Jesus first reveal himself? In that society, the most important people would have been the high priest and his entourage. In fact, Jesus himself sent the lepers he had healed to the priests in Luke 17:14. The next would have been the disciples who followed him, most of whom were men. It is an incredible thing in that culture that he revealed himself first to the women, whose testimony at a court in that day would not even have been taken as reliable. And that is precisely the counterperspective of the gospel. To those who think Christianity has done a disservice to women, it is critical that they understand from whom the gospel first came. The standards of institutions, even those that claim to represent Jesus, ought not to be made synonymous with the person of Jesus.
There’s another point to be made here. The apostle Paul is often made the scapegoat for a male-dominated church. In one of his final letters to his son in the faith, Timothy, Paul reminds Timothy that the Scriptures that were able to make him wise to salvation were taught to Timothy by his mother and his grandmother. That hardly smacks of chauvinism. A particular teaching is often taken out of its larger context and made into a pretext for attacking a system of truth. It is ironic that as humanism has come to the fore, life has been reduced to the essence of a game, and games have been elevated to become the essence of life.
Racial prejudice and gender discrimination are still strong realities in this world, yet race and gender are the only things one does not choose for oneself. In contrast, the opportunity to decide moral imperatives is being taken from us, while in fact, these are the things we do choose. That alone ought to tell us what happens when we choose to redefine good and evil, and morality is buried in spiritual or political talk with no transcendent source of authority. We victimize people for no culpable reason and exonerate people in spite of their culpability.
We end up with theories that put Hitler in heaven and consider the disciples fools for being willing to die for the truths of the gospel. But there will come a moment in which we will all stand before the ultimate Judge of the universe, a God who loves us and gave us the beautiful offer of salvation, and he will do that which is ultimately right. The Jesus who was lost where he should have been found, and who is found where we might not expect him to be, is the Jesus who is wantonly misplaced by the New Spirituality. As Alexander Pope suggested:
Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod;
Rejudge his justice, be the god of God!