March 24, 2013

Glynn Cardy

Palm Sunday

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Joy Cowley wrote the following Psalm:

No donkey this time

But a borrowed Honda 550.

Jesus riding into town

With a black leather jacket,

Jeans frayed at the knees,

And L-O-V-E tattooed

On the knuckles of his right hand.

Those who say him

Said his smile was like the sun,

Warming shadowed corners

And causing the way to blossom

Unexpectedly.

Those who saw him told

Of all the light left over

To be taken home and set

In eyes, in hearts

And at windows for strangers.

It was like a miracle,

They said.

The rest of us missed it.

We were in another part of the city,

Waiting for the Messiah.[i]

This reflection, similar to those of James K. Baxter’s, depicts Jesus as an outsider. He upsets our expectations of what a saviour or messiah should be. He doesn’t dress right, talk right, and act right. We want someone different. Someone who is more like us. Someone we would recognize in a church maybe. Someone who is known as a good and upstanding member of the community. A bit like someone the Letter of Timothy has in mind for a bishop: blameless, vigilant, sober, a family man, etc.[ii]

There is a long history in the church of making Jesus into our image, making him into a reflection of our expectations. Most obviously he was made into a pale-skinned European. Gone were any Semitic [read Jewish] features. Then he was made into a robed and crowned king – elevated into stained glass, statues, and hierarchical theology. It was as if Cowley’s bikie was taken in by the church, scrubbed up, fitted up in a suit, and sworn in as Governor-General. As if you had to be a Governor-General to reflect the light of God.

Jesus the outsider was good news to those relegated to the outside. He disregarded the boundaries that set the respectable and the rejects apart. He ate with the rejected, touched and was touched by the rejected, taught and was taught by the rejected, and healed and was healed by the rejected.[iii] He also suggested that this was how God too would be.

Which is really the nub of the matter. For bikies and Baxters can be largely tolerated by mainstream society. We all like oddities. But when someone comes along and says God is more like the bikie and the Baxter than the bishops and Governor-Generals we pause. When someone says God is more on the outside than the inside, and God is not our in-house God, but more like in the out-house or over the fence entirely. Then eccentricity becomes heresy. Then any hosannas morph into cries of crucify.

Heresy is any belief, opinion, or doctrine that is held at variance with the beliefs and doctrines deemed as correct or orthodox by an established authority within that faith. Jesus was crucified not because he was kind to poor people, or healed sick people, or promoted generosity. Jesus was crucified because he dared to imagine God beyond the boundaries of the established religious authorities. Jesus was crucified because he was a heretic.

[i] Cowley, J. Aotearoa Psalms: Prayers of a New People, Catholic Supplies Ltd, 1998.

[ii] I Timothy 3:2-4

[iii] ‘Healed by the rejected’ is how I would interpret the encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman Mark 7:25-30.