[A callback, updated from the Christian season of Advent, December 2015]
It’s not yet Christmas … perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself … still, the season of Advent has long been preoccupied by considering and expressing our longings….
My friend wrote, lamenting the taking down of 10 Commandments displays in public spaces — as if most, or even many, of us care the tiniest bit about keeping those commandments, personally or collectively.
I wrote, “I think, if you care about the 10 Commandments, then live them out. Be the public display, carved in flesh and bone." I didn't mean to be glib... at least not entirely. I suppose my friend complaining about canceling the 10 Commandments struck me as virtue-signaling without virtue.
If we were talking about taking down public displays of The Sermon on the Mount, I might have to think a little harder. But there's no danger of that, because there are no public displays to take down.
Nobody wants to be reminded of what Jesus said about how we are to conduct ourselves — the behavior and motives of those who learn his way. Jesus is an embarrassment to the white American Evangelical Christian movement in which I was raised and lived so many years. Jesus prohibits exactly what most of seem to relish, and demands exactly the sorts of things almost no one likes or wants to do. He forbids retaliation and revenge, commands us to love our enemies and persecutors, and make peace with them or die trying. He calls us to be merciful, to forgive those who wrong us, to give up anger, to negotiate and reconcile, to settle out of court. Jesus commands us to love God as if nothing else matters, and he commands us to treat everyone we encounter with the loving kindness we want for ourselves. Most people who self-identify as Christians hate this so much we try to make it disappear by never talking about it … or by talking about it only to explain it away because we will not believe Jesus meant what his first followers say he said. Appropriating a line from G.K. Chesterton, the way of Jesus has not been tried and found wanting, it’s been found disagreeable and left untried.
What I long for this Christmas looks something like becoming the sort of person — and living in the company of people — who might be willing to love Jesus as Jesus is … however vexing he may be to our “natural” inclinations … and not as we have attempted to remake him in our own image. I say "attempted" because the effort is failing so spectacularly that even a child - perhaps especially a child - can spot the fake a mile away —which is about as close as many of our neighbors want to get to anything like "church."
I swiped from Chesterton; I’ll steal even more flagrantly from Shakespeare: This year, I long to celebrate the annoying, embarrassing Jesus, and the rabble he brings with him, at the feast of Christmas … the rest of it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
