re-positioned

The gospel spreads best not through force but through fascination. Jesus doesn't insist on who he is or isn't. When people asked Jesus, ‘Are you the Messiah?’ he would answer by asking. ‘Tell me what you see, what you hear.’

I can’t remember where I read that...but it has been percolating for a while....

Jesus never answered a whole lot of questions in the gospels. Jesus was asked 183 direct questions in the New Testament.

Do you know how many he directly answered? 3.

What a frustrating insight to ‘we’ who have grown up assuming that the very job description of a ‘Christian’ is to give people answers and to resolve peoples' dilemmas. Apparently this is not Jesus' understanding of the function of a ‘follower’.

I think Jesus' parables were designed to be re-positioners. As he illustrates, and probes, and articulates...He corners us and makes us own our unconscious biases, breaks us out of our dualistic mindsets, challenges our image of who we are, who He is in God and who the world is, ..and all the while He presents new creative possibilities.

I think, as I sift through the life of Jesus...even Jesus doesn’t usually wait for or expect specific answers.

His reality is an awakening of redemptive imagination.
His heart is relationship.
He fascinates us with the beauty and reality of the Kingdom; a reality that is captured by infinite hope and new possibilities.

For me, the parables of Jesus are a microcosm of His passion interacting with the truth of who we are. They reveal Jesus’ priorities in ‘evangelizing’. I think a better way to describe these ‘interactions’ would be conversations of fascination.

Jesus’ conversations were filled with purpose. It seems He constantly asks questions.
Good questions.
Unnerving questions.
Re-aligning questions.
Transforming questions.

He leads us into a liminal reality; a space that has the potential for deep transformation.
He leaves us betwixt and between, where God and grace can get at us, and where we are not at all in control.

Have we shaped Jesus into simply a systematic theologian who walked around teaching dogmas...and in the process lost some of the essence of the journey of the Great Pilgrim?
Have we forgotten that He is the engaging transformer of the soul? That it is His divine imagination excites and produces the flame of passion?

Could it be that the conundrum of the church began when we started looking for easy answers...instead of asking hard questions?

How many of us are laying in the ditch beside the tracks because we have pursued others in order to save them...rather than submitting to the journey of brokenness that allows Him to change us and in the process redeem the world?