Who hates Jesus? The answer may surprise you

I usually like "Coffee with Jesus," but today's strip is one that I feel misses the mark and misunderstands the essential appeal of Jesus.

Produced by Radio Free Babylon, "Coffee with Jesus" is a webcomic about prayer that appears on the Facebook page of its creators. The strip features a regular cast of characters as they talk with Jesus over a cup of coffee. The strips aren't funny as much as they are thoughtful, occasionally poignant, and more often thought-provoking.

Today's strip features Kevin, who until recently was the strip's skeptic, a fellow who spoke with Jesus honestly and pointed out the problems he had with Christians, with the church and with belief. His prayer brings up a topic I've noticed a lot in the churches I've attended: that people are okay with spirituality and spiritualism, but intolerant of any mention of Jesus.

I've always found this complaint a little odd. People don't appreciate being prosyletized, but that's true whether you're pushing them to accept Jesus, to become a vegetarian, or to pull up their roots and move to Alaska with you because there's supposed to be good fishing in Skagway.

But once it's clear that you're not pushing, people are by and large fine with hearing about what you've found in Jesus, Buddha or Shintoism; they're generally impressed that you decided to become a pescetarian, a vegetarian or a raw vegan; and they're downright excited to hear your plans to move to Skagway, Sitka or Haines -- just as long as you're not going to Kake.

It's a popular theme in evangelical circles especially that people hate Christians and that everyone had it in for Jesus, but that's not what the Bible shows. The gospel account is that Jesus was arrested and tried in secret, and then crucified, not because he was unpopular but because he was insanely popular with the people and the priests feared a riot.

And why wouldn't they? Jesus' message of justice and renewal is one that should and does resonate with many people. When it doesn't, I think it says more about the audience (too comfortable) or the messenger (the church) than it does about the message.

The crowd that picked the release of Barabbas over Jesus on Good Friday wasn't doing this because they hated Jesus. They were demanding the release of a popular hero against Roman rule, one whose followers knew he had been arrested and who had time to organize a group to petition Pilate for his release. Jesus was arrested late at night in secrecy and sentenced that morning. In other words, the crowd was stacked, and not the fickle, flip-flopping capricious mob of Good Friday sermons.

But doesn't the Bible say that the world hated Jesus? Doesn't Jesus himself warn his disciples and the church that they will be hated on his account? Well, yes, it does. It's right there in John 15: “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you."

But let's make sure we understand what Jesus is saying. The Bible was written in Greek, not in English; and as anyone who speaks more than language will attest, not everything translates perfectly. In this case, the Greek word we translate as "world" in John 15:18 is kosmos. Kosmos doesn't mean "everyone," it means "everything"; more specifically, the way everything is arranged.

A man like Jesus, someone who disregards social conventions for who is in and who is out; whose presence ends disease and the finality of death, and who threatens social hierarchy by treating outcasts with the utmost respect, is someone the kosmos will hate. He's a threat to the way things are, now just as much as then.

How individual people respond to him often depends on where they stand in the structure of the kosmos. The powerful feared Jesus would lead a popular uprising, and doubtless some zealots and others thought he would as well, but for all the emphasis we place on that view, it was hardly the only one at work. There were many others with different understandings of who Jesus was and what he was about, including prophet, teacher and holy man, and not political revolutionary.

It's pretty evident that the people loved Jesus because of the kind of guy he was. He healed the sick, talked to outcasts, and treated the poor with the same respect he afforded the wealthy. The common people approached him with appeals to his compassion for healing, not from an anti-Roman bent asking him to drive out the local garrison.

Jesus isn't trendy the way the latest pop artist is, or in the same way as the hot new show on Netflix. But his message of radical acceptance, and apocalyptic restructuring so that justice breaks forth right now, is a message that billions have responded to in faith since it was first proclaimed in the desert of Galilee.

It's a message with universal relevance and appeal to the weary and the discarded, and it doesn't get cooler than that.


Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The fading wonder of Christmas

I remember when Christmas was an easy holiday to believe.

It was easy to believe as a child, but that's no surprise. The world is already wondrous and strange when you're a child. I once told my youngest daughter that a mermaid named Bathilda lives on the nearby college campus and gets her mail from a turtle, and she believed me. Compared to that, it's a piece of cake to believe story about angels, a newborn baby and three wise men who found him by following a star.

When I turned 18 and awakened to faith in a way that I never had before, Christmas became even more wonderful. For the first time I understood properly what the holiday was about. I started to grasp the mystery of the Incarnation, that the Almighty God too vast to be measured had somehow become a baby who weighed about 6 pounds.

A being who had spoken the universe into existence, whose very word had set the stars spinning through the heavens; brought forth fish in the sea, animals on the ground, and birds in the air; had become helpless, with no way of caring for himself. He had to cry when he was hungry, or sick, or tired; and he had to rely on two confused parents to sort out what he needed and to take care of him.

A God who had dug up the earth with his hand, sculpted a man from the clay, and breathed life into him, now had become a man.

It was amazing. It was inspiring. It filled me with awe. It gave me chills.

Some time in the past twenty-eight years, some of that has slipped away.

I know what some will say: that one day Faith walked down a road she should not have, and there she met Doubt. She fled the highwayman, but not before he had attacked and injured her. If Faith returns to friendlier quarters she is sure to recover, but if she stays where she is, then it's only a matter of time until Faith dies.

Or as someone once put it, “When I was a child, I thought like a child, I spoke like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”

The Christmas story is no longer as easy to believe as it once was, because the story of Jesus no longer seems as unique as it once did. There are stories from all over the ancient world about dying gods and god-men, miracle workers and would-be saviors, with similarities to the Christ story.

In one story, widely told and widely believed in the Roman Empire, there was a god who was born in a cave on Dec. 25. Born of no human father, he came to save the people from death and sin. His name was Mithras.

The ancient Greeks worshiped a different god, whose father was the almighty king of heaven. He was killed unjustly, but raised to life again; and ever afterward his worshipers commemorated his death and resurrection by eating bread and drinking wine. He was Dionysus, although the Romans called him Bacchus.

And on it goes.

None of the stories is an exact match for Jesus. Mithras was never crucified, for instance; and Dionysus, while born of a human mother and Zeus, was no virgin birth. Still, for all that, it's easy to see how one story could pick up elements of another, or how religious holidays celebrated around the same time of year or around similar themes would affect each other.

This is a process called syncretism, and it happens all the time. It's how Christmas gained traditions like lighting the Yule log, it's why Santa Claus for a while looked like Odin and still lives up North and hands out presents like Odin did, and it's why Hanukkah has become such a big thing in the United States. Syncretism was one of the things the biblical prophets saw as a tremendous danger to the proto-Judaic religion.

Aside from syncretism, some questions come from the Christmas story itself. The virgin birth is so foundational to Christmas that Tim Keller recently asserted in an interview with Nicholas Kristoff that it's as essential as the Resurrection. You can't be a Christian, he argues, without believing in it.

But while Matthew and Luke both mention the virgin birth, the gospels of Mark and John give it a pass. Luke has an angelic visitor tell Mary what's coming, while Matthew claims there was a prophecy in the book of Isaiah that the virgin would conceive and bear a son.

A 750-year-old prophecy about the virgin birth of Jesus has got to count as a slam dunk, except for one problem. The prophecy wasn't originally about Jesus, and it never specifies a virgin birth. The Hebrew word is almah, which means “young woman.” It could mean virgin, but that's a stretch. There's not a serious linguistic scholar without a doctrinal dog in the fight who considers such a translation responsible. It's not the primary, secondary or even tertiary definition of the word.

The only way Isaiah prophesied that virgin would give birth is if he prophesied in Greek. I say that because the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, uses the word parthenos, and that unmistakably does mean virgin.

So yes, there's a virgin birth promised here, but only if you're relying on a questionable translation, as apparently the writers of both Matthew and Luke's gospels did.

And on it goes. In our imaginations and devotions we often like to blend the canonical gospels together into one seamless whole, but in doing so we overlook important and telling differences among them. Matthew wrote for a Jewish audience, so his gospel is filled with passages that he cites as fulfilled prophecies. Some of them are quite a stretch, one to the point that no one is entirely sure what he was talking about.

Meanwhile, Luke wrote for a Greek audience accustomed to affirmations from the heavens that presaged important events. His gospel includes an angelic visitor to Mary to declare her pregnancy, and a host of angels appearing over Bethlehem to announce the birth.

Enough of this and the Christmas story not only loses a bit of its luster, it becomes the Christmas stories. They're beautifully told, full of unquestionable literary value, and containing a message of supreme value -- but they're very much stories.

And yet. And yet …

In “Down Among the Dead Men,” writer Alan Moore once observed: “There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.”

The story I tell is this: “One day Faith walked down an unfamiliar road, and there she met Doubt. At first she mistook him for a highwayman, and she fled and hid.

“But Doubt was persistent and found her, and after they had spoken a while she realized that he was not an enemy, but a friend who wanted what she did. And she knew at once that if they continued the journey together, then not only would she make it to the end, but it would be a far more rewarding and satisfying journey than if she had tried it alone.

“So Faith quieted her fears and took Doubt's hand, and together the two pilgrims set out on the road to find their destination. They've had their problems, but they've always faced them together, and they've always overcome them.”

Christmas is the season when we believe that the unchanging Tao changed forever. At the first Christmas in Bethlehem, the eternal Tao became mortal, with a fixed beginning point and an endpoint, even as the line of its existence continues infinitely beyond those points.

The Tao that cannot be understood assumed dimensions, senses, affections and passions. It subjected itself to the same diseases that we suffer, and allowed itself to be warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as us.

Even after all these years, that message still fills me with wonder and it still gives me chills.



Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The church's biggest failing is irrelevance

It's no secret that churches in America are getting older. As children grow up and get older, they decide it's not for them, and they don't come back.

Over at Ron Edmondson's web site, he shares some reflections by Jordan, a millennial who grew up in a church and still attends one. Her take: Church is fake. People don't talk about their problems, own up to their weaknesses or admit to their struggles. Everything is happy in Jesusland, and as phony as a three-dollar bill.

I'm not a Millennial, so perhaps my perspective is going to be off-kilter, but I don't know that authenticity is really the issue here, as much as relevance.

The evangelical church has done its best to drive away both myself and my fellow Gen X-ers from the time we came of age to the present. It attacked our gay friends and our commitment to women's equality. It ignored the sins of accumulating wealth and power. And it did it by retreating into behind cloistered walls with its own culture, entertainment, language.

A lot of people in my generation asked, "What's the point of that?" and I think Millennials are simply following suit.

We can argue whether this is fair, but today the church in America is known for hating gay people, and for being an angry electorate.

Jesus, meanwhile, was known for hugging lepers, partying with drunks, and befriending prostitutes.

Jesus also healed the sick, and came to restore the relationships humanity has with God, and that humans have with one another. My daughters' youth group does gross games with Jell-O and marshmallows, and gets talked to every week about stuff that my girls find of no practical interest.

So really, what's the point of church?

The church could do things like Jesus did, things that matter. We could make it a point of building homes for the homeless; feeding the hungry; protecting the rights of women, gays and minorities; reducing waste and trying to mend broken ecosystems. Church youth groups could do this too.

We could, and if we did, I think we could answer that question "What's the point?" by showing it. But while some churches do things that, and while some organizations do things like that, it's not what the church as a whole is known for.

Jesus came to mend a broken world. If we followed his lead, we'd find a lot more people willing to hear what we have to say.


Copyright © 2014 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The kind of Bible study I'd like to lead

I'm hosting a weekly Bible study on the book of Judges starting this Wednesday, but it's anyone's guess whether anyone besides me actually will attend.

I'm trying to do mine a little differently from how I've usually found Bible studies to be done in the American church. Specifically, I want to set aside many of the preconceptions we bring to the Bible when we read it.

Some of them are Golden Book assumptions; for example: "Why did God save Daniel from the lions? Because Daniel was faithful."

Others have to do with our assumptions about the morality of the Bible heroes. We assume that Joseph was a virtuous man whom God honored because he was faithful to him the whole time, or that Samson killed all the Philistines as an act of devotion to God.

Neither of those is a particularly deep reading. The Genesis account is clear that Joseph wanted nothing more than to make his brothers suffer for all that they had done to him once he had them at his mercy. As for Samson, he killed the Philistines he did mostly because his pride had been hurt and he wanted to get even. Neither of them is much of a role model in those stories.

Beyond that, I can see plenty of exploration of the character of God himself. If we question and explore the motivations of the characters in the Bible, at some point we have to remember that God himself is a character in the Bible, with motivations stated and unstated, goals and conflicts that he must face and overcome.

And if we're giving the Bible an honest reading, we have to admit that there are some shocking things in there: the genocide of the Canaanites, the near total destruction of the human race in a global flood, and even young men getting mauled by bears for making fun of a prophet's baldness. We need to recognize problem passages when they come up, and face their problems honestly.

Even without getting into the odd passages like "Zipporah at the Inn," where God plans to kill Moses until Zipporah circumcises their son, there are times we have to stop and ask "Is this really God we're talking about, the same God we sing those nice songs to on Sunday morning?"

These are questions that make us stop and reassess what we mean when we say that Scripture is divinely inspired, infallible and inerrant. They even make us stop and ask whether God really is good, or if he just has good publicity agents.

I've found over the years that raising those questions is an important part of growth and of faith. Proverbs cautions us, "Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him." Doubts drive us into deeper faith because questions make us seek meaningful answers.

That sort of exploration is something I've seen to be largely absent in Bible studies I've attended, not just at the church I now attend, but elsewhere as well. What I have seen instead is a lot of contentment to repeat things we've heard before and to pass them off as deep insights, or to get sidetracked into discussions that have nothing to do with the passage at hand.

The truth is, the Bible is one of the most widely misunderstood books in Western literature, probably because it's actually a piece of Eastern literature. It's misunderstood by non-Christians who react to it based on unpleasant experiences with Christians, and it's misunderstood by Christians themselves.

That's a shame, because it really is a phenomenal piece of literature, and like all phenomenal pieces of literature, there are some deep currents that flow through its pages. If we're willing to pull up our oars, stop rowing our way, and just let those currents carry us where they go, we'll all find it to be a much more fascinating and spiritually insightful book than we've ever realized before.

This sort of honest search is something that I think will engage people who consider themselves to be spiritual but not Christians, and it should engage Christians as well. One attitude I consistently have encountered is contempt for Christians who swear unswerving allegiance to the Bible yet have no idea what it actually says or make no attempt to deal with issues like Paul's apparent sexism, the appallingly strict penal code in the Mosaic law, and so on.

I'd like to lead a study that does those things. Naturally, I can't get the church to promote it along with the other Bible studies.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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