Getting over Jesus

Waylon and I were having one of our theological brainstorming sessions the other day in advance of some sermon work that we were both about to embark upon when an interesting question came up: are we as a church getting over Jesus? It seems like a bold and terrifying thought when it’s vocalized – but does the seriousness of the accusation make it any less true?

A few years ago there was a book by a guy named Francis Chan that went through many churches (including ours) like wildfire – it was called Crazy Love, and it painted a very radical portrait of what Christian discipleship should look like. People were falling over themselves to ask me if I’d read it and how we should change what we do as a church to emulate Chan’s model of discipleship in our church. Young people were reading it, seniors were reading it, and I led our Guatemala missions group through the book while we were on the field a couple of years ago. It was a good book – not perfect by any means, but this blog is not about pointing out theological fault in Crazy Love – it spoke of a revolutionary type of experience with Christ and then called the reader to follow the model espoused by the author to respond to that crazy love through an equally radical shift in lifestyle. For a while it seemed that a groundswell of radical Christian living was going to overtake our church and that the world would be completely turned upside down by our obedience to the Gospel. But we got over it.

Within a few months, the hype and excitement of Chan’s challenge was lost to the realities of life in Estevan: responsibilities, relationships, recreation and maintaining the status quo.

On a smaller scale, in the last four years a bunch of people in our congregation have had life-changing cross-cultural experiences through short-term missions trips. They have seen the Sprit of God at work in other parts of the world, they have experienced the Church expressed in ways that seem completely foreign to us yet at the same time seem so ‘right’ and ‘natural’, they have had the opportunity to evaluate our culture (both secular and sacred) from the outside – both coming to appreciate the strengths of our culture and being made painfully aware of our blindness to our own sinfulness and shortcomings. People routinely come back from those experiences (as I have) committed to living life in this culture differently as a result of what God showed them from another perspective – and for a short time we witness exactly that happening. People make radical life decisions, change the way they do things, get involved in different ministries, become more generous and more aware of the trappings of our upper-middle class North American culture and Christianity... for a while. And then inevitably life once again intervenes and what was at one point world changing, becomes only a guilt and regret inducing memory of what once was and what could have been. And before too long, even the guilt goes away and we simply get over it and go back to life as usual.

Corporately we’ve been journeying for the last year through the Gospel of Mark in our worship services, and along the way we’ve encountered a Jesus that would be very uncomfortable with our brand of westernized Christianity that has tamed Jesus and made him into our image rather than perusing a path of discipleship that eschews the cultural norms of our culture (again both secular and sacred) leading us into conformity with Christ’s image.  And once again we find ourselves challenged to live a life less ordinary, to pursue Jesus more radically than we have before and see the world changed through the risen and exalted Christ at work in and through his Church as they surrender their lives to his lordship. Along the way we’ve talked about countercultural issues like the primacy of the Family of God in the Kingdom over and above the nuclear family; the fact that Jesus calls people to relationship before he calls them to life transformation; how to Jesus, people are more important than protocol; the radical cost of true discipleship; the inefficacy of tradition, ritual and legalism for defining disciples; and most recently we've looked at a series of stories from the Gospel that reflect on our own desires to be special, to be in authority and to be exclusive in direct contradiction of the teachings of Jesus about servanthood, submission and radical inclusivity as we've watched the disciples continually miss the point on the road to Jerusalem (examples here and here). At every point the message of the Gospel beckons us to live our lives differently than what is culturally expected, than what is culturally normal, than even what passes for ‘normal’ in most Evangelical Christianity – and for a brief moment every week it seems like we’re getting that – for that fleeting season in the foyer after the service we are all in agreement that we need to change, that we need to commit ourselves to a radically new expression of discipleship and obedience – but by Monday (or sometimes even earlier) we've gotten over it and life returns to normal.

Every time we read a book about discipleship, listen to a sermon about following Jesus, experience God in a new way (be it cross-cultural or otherwise), and especially when we see, hear, and are challenged by the words of Scripture itself we are called to a more radical expression of our faith than we are used to. Every time we allow that challenge to change the way we live, relate, shop, worship or serve we become a little more like Jesus and our witness to the world becomes a little more credible – but when we hear the call of discipleship and subsequently get over it, it’s like we become inoculated to the Gospel. Like a virus, every spiritual infection (in the good sense) that we catch and then get over makes us a little more resistant to the next. Every time we fight off the advances of the Holy Spirit in our lives, every time we resist the call of the Gospel and we return to living life exactly as we did before the infection we make ourselves less prone to infection the next time. The Bible calls this phenomenon the hardening of the heart – and we are warned against letting it happen to us:

So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed. That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

Ephesians 4:17-24 (TNIV)

We are encouraged, exhorted – commanded in scripture to work against this hardening of the heart, this spiritual inoculation that seems to beset us at every turn. We are called to be a people who are irredeemably redeemed, irreversibly infected with the virus of the Kingdom of God. We are called to be a people who get Jesus and then don’t get over him. We are called to be a people who encounter the Gospel and are forever changed by what Christ does to us and in us and for us! Just as Christ bears the scars of his sacrifice eternally we are called to bear the marks of our transformation – a transformation that affects every function of our life – from our religion to our relationships, from our work to our play, from our morality to our money and everything in between. We desperately need to get over, getting over things – this is an instance where the sickness (Jesus) is the cure.

My hope for you in reading this is that you will once again feel the symptoms of the infection of the Gospel becoming manifested in your life. That in reminding you of these things that we have learned and experienced together that you will feel the fever of the Gospel making you uncomfortable in your own skin; that you will experience fatigue with the status quo and a desire to rest in God’s perfect will; that you will experience an ache in your spirit for people who are living lives apart from God; that you will feel the vertigo that comes from recognizing that this world is not as it should be and that this infection that comes from exposure to Jesus is something that you, and I, will not get better from.

May we never get over Jesus.