Among the many things that I have learned as a student of the Holy Scriptures, first as a young seminarian and now as a seasoned teacher of God’s Word, is that we Christians have become so accustomed to hearing the Scriptures that our eyes glaze when we read for ourselves and our ears become dull when we hear someone else read. We may hear words but much of what we hear fails to register. Apart from attentiveness, daily routines tend to dull our senses so that day-to-day rituals become ritualism, a mere passing through activities with little engagement of our minds.
Each portion of Scripture entails its own challenges for us to hear properly. For example, consider how we understand the Gospels. Throughout my years of university teaching, with increasing sorrow, I observed that by the time students sat in Gospel courses which I teach, many had already become bored with the Jesus of the Gospels. They presume to know the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels but in fact, they have constructed for themselves a domesticated Jesus that they shape after their own image. The collusion of several factors promotes this tedium with and detachment from the Jesus of the Four Gospels. One is the realization that the Jesus they embrace is merely a better version of themselves, one who is at their beck and call, but their satisfaction with such a Jesus prevents them from seriously contemplating the authentic Jesus of the Scriptures. Regularly, as I taught the various Gospel courses in recent years, I was anguished to realize that the boredom I observed was due to the person whom I presented not my manner of teaching. The Jesus of the Gospels, before their very eyes whom I clearly and passionately portrayed, was of little relevance to church-reared students saturated in our postmodern culture, students who prefer their sterile, banal Jesus, more than the Lord Christ presented by the Four Evangelists.
Another factor that dulls one’s senses concerning the real Jesus is the default tendency to receive the Scriptures and the Jesus they portray by accommodating them to our own cultural placement rather than entering the authentic world, the one portrayed throughout the Bible that invariably entails two dimensions, the heavenly and its earthly shadow. The consequence is that ideas and concepts that tend to dominate the current ephemeral culture shape one’s conceptualization of Jesus. Among these cultural influences is the calculated feminization of males during recent generations that yields an epicene, even effeminate Jesus. Inadequate cultural criticism by pastors and teachers predisposes Christians to airbrush the Jesus of the Gospels with pastel colors to soften the severity of his sayings, to temper the harshness of his actions, and to mollify his purposeful provocations of the religious authorities as he moves ever closer to the fulfillment of his mission of being exalted upon the cross as our sacrificed regal Passover Lamb. Instead, the Jesus of the Gospels is regularly identified as the abused victim of first-century intolerant religious and patriarchal bigots. Invariably, the resultant Jesus is docile, tame, convenient, and manageable. Among other contributing factors is a penchant for passively receiving literature in an audio-visual form rather than actively and acutely engaging texts by reading for ourselves. Consequently, it is commonplace for Christians to filter their reading or hearing of the Gospels through their own conceptualization of Jesus.
In the 1980s Kellogg understood how the routines of life tend to dull our senses. They launched an advertising campaign for Corn Flakes that cleverly used the tagline, “Taste them again for the first time.” I invite you to read and to hear the Jesus of the Gospel again for the first time. To prepare for the remainder of this blog entry, I request that you read the Gospel of John 7:1-8:30.
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What will follow in the next blog entry is a rehearsal concerning aspects of what I taught this past Sunday, January 10, 2021, in Mosaic Class at Bethlehem Baptist Church North (Minneapolis, MN). What I feature, here, are the dynamics of Jesus’ engagement with the crowds and with the religious authorities during the Festival of Tabernacles.
Hear The Scriptures Again, for the First Time: Introduction.
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