The yoke is a powerful image in scripture, used almost always in the same way as it is most commonly used in contemporary English: metaphorically, namely, in reference to domination and subjugation. The Old Testament writers bewail the yoke of oppression and the yoke of slavery, and the Lord these prophets write of frequently threatens the yokes of slavery and oppression as punishment for disobedience and just as frequently promises to break the yokes of those who obey. The Law warns against unequal yoking, and later the Apostle Paul echoes this warning. There should be no pairing of an ox with a donkey—presumably because the variance in their strength and shoulder heights would make the sharing of work more difficult—and likewise no pairing of believers with unbelievers, who are, according to Paul, as antithetical to one another as light and darkness, virtue and sin, God and idols. In the biblical perspective, the yoke is the metaphorical antonym of freedom. So, while Paul counsels “All who are under the yoke of slavery”—that is, actual slaves—to accept their lot and “consider their masters worthy of full respect” (1 Timothy 6:1), he elsewhere declares, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1), by which he means our slavish devotion to evil.
Scriptural yokes are intriguing in any discussion of God’s work since the real world purpose of a yoke in the farming culture of biblical times was to make it possible for two or more draft animals to join their efforts on the same task, thus rendering the work easier for each of them than it would be if one were doing the work alone. In other words, yokes benefit both farmer and farm animal by spreading, or equalizing, work, rendering it possible to get more done while reducing the toil and stress of those yoked. This understanding of the word yoke is seen in cultures today where water is still carried, balanced from a yoke in two manageable buckets rather than lurched along in one unwieldy one. Yokes make work easier, and yet, semantically, they suggest anything but ease. The yoke has thus evolved from biblical times onward from a means of sharing labor with another and lightening one’s load to become the quintessential symbol of enforced labor—and, by extension, of resistance to enforced labor. No one wants to wear a yoke.
All of which serves as a paradoxical back story to Jesus’ invitation, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” The One God Sent is not our taskmaster or subjugator, and the yoke he speaks of is not the yoke of oppression or slavery or even toil. Indeed, we are invited to take this yoke upon ourselves not for work at all, but for rest from work.
The yoke of the One God Sent—metaphorically, the work of God—is thus unlike anything we might normally think of as "work." It is not a burden. It does not make us weary. It does not enslave or oppress. Rather, it is the antidote to stress and toil: a source of relaxation and pleasure. What God wants of us in the way of work is more akin to what we think of when we hang up the “Gone Fishin’” sign on the door: something fun, an escape from the unpleasantness of our jobs, rest.
~excerpted from my current writing project, tentatively titled Easy Burdens: Doing the Stress-Free, Guilt-Free Work of God
31 May 2010
28 February 2010
Grant the Glad Surprising!
I've been doing radio interviews about my new book this week—three back to back on my days off from teaching—and the discussions I've had have reignited my enthusiasm for the scriptural passage that forms the center of A Field Guide to God. In it, Paul summarizes all of scripture to a crowd of Athenian philosophers gathered to discuss the newest ideas: "From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:26-27 NRSV).
I just can't get over the promises so efficiently offered here. That all of human history, that everything that seems to divide us, that everything that happens to us, however perplexing or upsetting, is part of a divine plan to make us seek God. That God greatest desire of us is to be sought. That God is always near us, waiting to be found. Inherent in the promises is also a clear plan for what God expects of us: namely, we should not merely seek but grope for God.
In remeditating on this passage anew, it occurred to me how much God's desire for us is like the desires imbedded in any relationship. I thought of how I have gone through days, weeks even, waiting for one of my daughters to get over some perceived injustice on my part, how I long the whole time for her, how I nudge opportunity after opportunity for reconciliation into every encounter.
I thought, too, of how, when my husband Kris is depressed or when he and I have had one of our rare fights (usually these occur sequentially: he gets distant and down, and I flip out and try to fight it out of him), afterwards I get in bed next to him and feel about as far away from him as it's possible to be. Far away in my frustration and hurt, in my inability to solve his stress and dread. Far away in my inevitable anger. Far away in my regret. Far away, even, in my underlying desire to repair what I have damaged and make things right again, which I know to be impossible.
Simultaneously, I know that it is possible for us to restore our usual love, that we will get okay with each other again. We always have, after all. I know that we could even now be on the road back to each other if I would just reach across the great chasm of sheets and blankets and coldness between us, reach up across his back and pull him toward me.
But I can't do it. Can't force myself. But he..., I lie there thinking. It's his ... He should.... And so it goes until one of us gropes past anger or hurt or self-righteousness for the other. Maybe not that night. Maybe not the next day even. Each of us wants and waits and just about makes that move, while the other is never far away, wanting, waiting, just about to move, too. And eventually, in a moment of "glad surprising" I sang about in a hymn this morning at church, love is restored.
It seems to me there is no greater thing in my life than those moments of restored love. Toward a husband. Or a daughter. Or a relative or a friend or a colleague or even a stranger who happens to displease me. What a joy it is to rediscover in myself the capacity to get beyond my own meanness, if only momentarily.
From one ancestor God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth and allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for and perhaps grope for and find God—though indeed God is not far from each one of us. What delightful promises from our creator and father and lover. What a call to action.
I just can't get over the promises so efficiently offered here. That all of human history, that everything that seems to divide us, that everything that happens to us, however perplexing or upsetting, is part of a divine plan to make us seek God. That God greatest desire of us is to be sought. That God is always near us, waiting to be found. Inherent in the promises is also a clear plan for what God expects of us: namely, we should not merely seek but grope for God.
In remeditating on this passage anew, it occurred to me how much God's desire for us is like the desires imbedded in any relationship. I thought of how I have gone through days, weeks even, waiting for one of my daughters to get over some perceived injustice on my part, how I long the whole time for her, how I nudge opportunity after opportunity for reconciliation into every encounter.
I thought, too, of how, when my husband Kris is depressed or when he and I have had one of our rare fights (usually these occur sequentially: he gets distant and down, and I flip out and try to fight it out of him), afterwards I get in bed next to him and feel about as far away from him as it's possible to be. Far away in my frustration and hurt, in my inability to solve his stress and dread. Far away in my inevitable anger. Far away in my regret. Far away, even, in my underlying desire to repair what I have damaged and make things right again, which I know to be impossible.
Simultaneously, I know that it is possible for us to restore our usual love, that we will get okay with each other again. We always have, after all. I know that we could even now be on the road back to each other if I would just reach across the great chasm of sheets and blankets and coldness between us, reach up across his back and pull him toward me.
But I can't do it. Can't force myself. But he..., I lie there thinking. It's his ... He should.... And so it goes until one of us gropes past anger or hurt or self-righteousness for the other. Maybe not that night. Maybe not the next day even. Each of us wants and waits and just about makes that move, while the other is never far away, wanting, waiting, just about to move, too. And eventually, in a moment of "glad surprising" I sang about in a hymn this morning at church, love is restored.
It seems to me there is no greater thing in my life than those moments of restored love. Toward a husband. Or a daughter. Or a relative or a friend or a colleague or even a stranger who happens to displease me. What a joy it is to rediscover in myself the capacity to get beyond my own meanness, if only momentarily.
From one ancestor God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth and allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for and perhaps grope for and find God—though indeed God is not far from each one of us. What delightful promises from our creator and father and lover. What a call to action.
19 February 2010
Spring, Birds, Lent, Tiger Woods, etc.
"We saw a red bird," one of my students told me in class yesterday.
"It was a cardinal," I told her.
"No it wasn't. I know what a cardinal looks like, but this one was different. Its body was orange. And it sang this amazing song."
She commanded another student, the other half of the "we" who saw and heard this bird, to "do the song." He had a good memory for bird voices and made a convincing twiddle that ended in a falling whistle.
"Cardinal," I said. I knew for certain now. But the students were skeptical. "First off, there's no other red bird around here this time of year. Also, the immature ones range from brown to orange. Plus, that was the cardinal's breeding song you just heard."
Spring approaches, although it's still cold. The cardinals have quit their feckless cheeps of winter and are singing with purpose now—as, indeed, everything seems to be doing this time of year. Students linger before class in pairs, leaning toward each other. Despite the yellow ratty grass, despite the chill yet in the air, they yearn to go outside, as my girls used to when they were little: I'd look up and there they'd both be—having stripped naked when I wasn't looking and escaped—sitting in the mud puddle at the end of the drive with our dogs.
It always impresses me how spring motivates people. Suddenly, they're touching, dieting, exercising, cleaning, noticing birds, whistling, attending church services they've neglected for a long time, practicing disciplines—fasting, sacrificing, setting spiritual goals for themselves—that would never occur to them the rest of the year. It is as though the desire for renewal is built into us, just as it is in the color-tipped branches of the trees, in the surprising downpours of spring, in the woodpeckers I see chipping away at the trees to make their nests this time of year. Somehow, in spring, we all want to be new.
Charlotte called me from school on Ash Wednesday to lament that she had already failed, ten hours into the first day of Lent, in this year's goal of no texting.
"I got a text from one of my teachers, and I had to answer it. So it's not going to work. You have to help me think of something else!" she whisper-wailed. I tried to envision where she was at that moment. In the hallway between classes with her friends? In some class where the teacher let them use their *&#^^%!! cell phones? In a bathroom stall?
I suggested adding, rather than subtracting, something from her life, and she said she was already planning that, too. She had counted up the chapters of the four gospels and decided she could read it all during Lent at a rate of two chapters a day.
"I can't give up rich foods," she confided, "because I know I'd be doing it for the wrong reason—to get in shape. But what else is there?" After some more whispering—I felt as though we were planning a murder—she decided to scale down the no texting plan to the hours between 7 and 9 at night, during which time she'd read her two chapters.
I just now listened to Tiger Woods' speech of remorse to his friends and fans. Generally speaking, I have little interest in sports or celebrities and their flashy troubles, and, without a television in our house, my only way of even knowing what's going on is in the summaries of our weekly news magazines. I'm interested in apologies, though. So, when Woods' apology headlined in the Google news as I turned on my computer, I clicked on it and cried my way through the whole sad speech, his halting words doubly halting because of our slow dial up connection.
For the record, despite what the experts in matters public seemed to think, it sounded like genuine remorse to me. And, more movingly, genuine desire to be a new person. As I listened, I heard the voices of others I think about this time of year: Peter, Judas, Pilate. I savored, through this golfplayer's regret and hope, the sweet regret and hope of us all, as we grasp at new selves in the springtime.
"It was a cardinal," I told her.
"No it wasn't. I know what a cardinal looks like, but this one was different. Its body was orange. And it sang this amazing song."
She commanded another student, the other half of the "we" who saw and heard this bird, to "do the song." He had a good memory for bird voices and made a convincing twiddle that ended in a falling whistle.
"Cardinal," I said. I knew for certain now. But the students were skeptical. "First off, there's no other red bird around here this time of year. Also, the immature ones range from brown to orange. Plus, that was the cardinal's breeding song you just heard."
Spring approaches, although it's still cold. The cardinals have quit their feckless cheeps of winter and are singing with purpose now—as, indeed, everything seems to be doing this time of year. Students linger before class in pairs, leaning toward each other. Despite the yellow ratty grass, despite the chill yet in the air, they yearn to go outside, as my girls used to when they were little: I'd look up and there they'd both be—having stripped naked when I wasn't looking and escaped—sitting in the mud puddle at the end of the drive with our dogs.
It always impresses me how spring motivates people. Suddenly, they're touching, dieting, exercising, cleaning, noticing birds, whistling, attending church services they've neglected for a long time, practicing disciplines—fasting, sacrificing, setting spiritual goals for themselves—that would never occur to them the rest of the year. It is as though the desire for renewal is built into us, just as it is in the color-tipped branches of the trees, in the surprising downpours of spring, in the woodpeckers I see chipping away at the trees to make their nests this time of year. Somehow, in spring, we all want to be new.
Charlotte called me from school on Ash Wednesday to lament that she had already failed, ten hours into the first day of Lent, in this year's goal of no texting.
"I got a text from one of my teachers, and I had to answer it. So it's not going to work. You have to help me think of something else!" she whisper-wailed. I tried to envision where she was at that moment. In the hallway between classes with her friends? In some class where the teacher let them use their *&#^^%!! cell phones? In a bathroom stall?
I suggested adding, rather than subtracting, something from her life, and she said she was already planning that, too. She had counted up the chapters of the four gospels and decided she could read it all during Lent at a rate of two chapters a day.
"I can't give up rich foods," she confided, "because I know I'd be doing it for the wrong reason—to get in shape. But what else is there?" After some more whispering—I felt as though we were planning a murder—she decided to scale down the no texting plan to the hours between 7 and 9 at night, during which time she'd read her two chapters.
I just now listened to Tiger Woods' speech of remorse to his friends and fans. Generally speaking, I have little interest in sports or celebrities and their flashy troubles, and, without a television in our house, my only way of even knowing what's going on is in the summaries of our weekly news magazines. I'm interested in apologies, though. So, when Woods' apology headlined in the Google news as I turned on my computer, I clicked on it and cried my way through the whole sad speech, his halting words doubly halting because of our slow dial up connection.
For the record, despite what the experts in matters public seemed to think, it sounded like genuine remorse to me. And, more movingly, genuine desire to be a new person. As I listened, I heard the voices of others I think about this time of year: Peter, Judas, Pilate. I savored, through this golfplayer's regret and hope, the sweet regret and hope of us all, as we grasp at new selves in the springtime.
31 January 2010
A Recommendation for Lent (coming up in mid-February)
I'm snowed in. Eight inches of snow, uncommon in our area, have shut everything down, and there's a deep freezing fog. I can hardly see the birds at the feeder beyond my window. My family has abandoned me. Kris has risked icy highways to travel to faraway Oklahoma City to help Lulu with her calculus, mechanics, electromagnetics, and chemistry homework, (I'm no help there!), and Charlotte and friend, who'd been snowed in with me, finally got sick of the entertainments of this house (and me, probably) and were fetched away from here yesterday by the friend's dad, who has four wheel drive and knew not to drive into our hockey rink of a driveway, where his daughter's car was moored.
Alone. An uncommon pleasure, although not without its boredoms. For lack of anything else to do, and because Charlotte and her friend baked cookies and left behind all kinds of teenager food, I've been stuffing myself, just like the birds at my feeders and all the rest of the animals around here, who have gone into reckless food foraging mode, apparently expecting weeks of frozenness ahead will prevent them from getting food. The yard last night was full of deer, brazenly sniffing at the ice-glazed bedding plants, and, returning through the woods from my mother-in-law's house yesterday afternoon, I came upon a fresh pile—still steaming and rank smelling!—mountain lion scat.
Just before the beginning of the storm I started listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber's rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. I hadn't listened to it in many years, not since I returned to faith in the story it narrates after many years of atheism, so it has been a revelation. Not surprisingly, the work's overwhelming focus, the stress and hectic and desires and terrors and confusion surrounding Jesus' teaching for everyone involved—for Judas and the other apostles, for Mary Magdalene (seemingly a composite character of a number of women in the gospels), for Pilate and Herod, for Jesus himself, and for the crowds that followed him everywhere—has been impressing itself upon me from a number of other sources. I've been writing about John 6, where Jesus keeps trying to escape the crowds, into the mountains and out onto the roiling waters of the Sea of Galilee, and chastises them for just wanting things from him—food, healings, magic tricks—and not really believing in who he is. Not one of them believed he was who he said. Their collective refusal to believe him seems to make him doubt himself in an interesting reading of his begging, in Gethsemane, that God take the cup from him. The turmoil and misery of Jesus' human situation is so overwhelming and convincing in Jesus Christ Superstar, I keep finding myself sobbing at different parts of it.
I told Kris on the phone that I thought I'd assign it in my English 102 (Intro to lit.) classes as a drama, since we had only short plays in the syllabus. I want them to hear it. Kris seemed to think my mostly Christian students will be offended that Jesus doesn't rise from the dead in Jesus Christ Superstar, which I thought was an interesting. Of course, I would want them to be offended by something, the better to have something to say or write about the piece. But the fact that Kris is probably right—indeed, since he hasn't himself listened to Jesus Christ Superstar in eons, I'm guessing he remembers that this was the actual Bible Belt response to it back in the seventies when it was being performed—makes me think of it as the perfect literary experience for Lent: to coexperience the rejection Jesus must have suffered from, the abandonment and aloneness he must have felt even as he was surrounded by hectic crowds of people.
I'm entering Lent early this year, I realize. It begins 17 February this year. I got all off schedule as a result of working on a Lent article for Guideposts during my Christmas break, before I was even properly in the Christmas mood. I was working through Jesus' death even as I was trying to fold my mind around his birth as one of us.
One of us. Born like us. Being loved by parents, growing up, learning, having friends, disappointing parents, hoping like us, worrying like us (It says nowhere in the gospels that Jesus never worried, and I'm certain Andrew Lloyd Webber is right that he did!), surrounded by turmoil and stress like us, alone like us. Suffering and being misunderstood like us—surely worse than most of us. Confronting death as we all will. Dying.
How I came to listen to Webber's masterpiece is this: Kris has been reading Paul's letters to me in the morning, and the word apostle keeps coming up. Paul repeatedly claims to be an apostle himself, just like Peter and the rest of the twelve. He warns against false apostles—who apparently lurked about the early church believers, trying to get them to return to their Jewish obeyance of the Law or else believe something else entirely—and even seems to disparage what the NIV Kris reads from translates as "those 'super-apostles'" ("the very chiefest apostles" KJV; "these super-apostles" NRSV), which I take to be, contrary to what the notes in my NIV Study Bible say, the big churchy names of the times: Peter, James, John, etc.
Certainly Paul puts a lot of effort into locating himself among the real apostles, I have been thinking, but he also conflicts with them on several occasions. In any case, as always with me, it was a word, apostle, that baffled me. Why were the twelve referred to as "apostles"? It's used more frequently in the post-Resurrection narrative than in the gospels, where the twelve are often presumably lumped in with the rest of the disciples.
Judging from what my American Heritage dictionary and NIV Exhaustive Concordance have to reveal, the word appears to derive from the Greek word for send and means messenger. The twelve were Jesus' messengers, sent out to tell the world the wonderful news of the Messiah's arrival and departure from this world, and the false apostles were probably also sent by someone—Satan? Herod? the Romans who persecuted the early Christians?—to deliver a different message.
As I speculated about the word, a song from my teenage years sailed into my consciousness and remained there for days. Always hoped that I'd be an apostle. Knew that I could make it if I tried. Then when we retired we could write the gospels, and they still talk about us when we died. I don't remember attending a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar in those days or listening to the song (was it on the radio then, along with Mary Magdalene's haunting "I Don't Know How to Love Him"?) or ever speculating about it. Certainly it's not one of the more memorable pieces in Jesus Christ Superstar. Nevertheless, I woke up with the wistful melody in my mind, those fame-obsessed words on my lips as I drove to work and home again. So I rummaged around until I found a copy of the CD (here it is on Amazon.com, with previews and MP3s available, in case you want to hear precisely the version I've been listening to) that I vaguely remembered someone had brought into the house some years ago.
In Jesus Christ Superstar, the senders of the different messages are some of the main voices we hear, and they are convincing and articulate and heartbreaking. They are Judas, distraught that Jesus isn't more of a people's hero for the Jews. They are Mary Magdalene, wanting Jesus to be "just a man." They are Pilate, perplexed and impressed by Jesus but too smug and afraid and angry to acknowledge his own assessment. They are the crowds of poor and sick and unhappy, shrieking out their miseries and expectations of him. They are us, confused one-time or would-be or current God-followers, each one of us determined to discover in Jesus not who he is/was/will be but whatever it is we are looking for. To be fed or healed. To be loved in whatever way we understand that difficult word. To be confirmed in our craziness. Jesus Christ Superstar is a caution to me, to us all.
So, it's my recommendation for Lent. Go out and buy it and let me know what you think. It's a great investment in a Lenten rethinking of what all was and still is involved in what Jesus identifies as the God-follower's work: believing in the One God Sent.
Alone. An uncommon pleasure, although not without its boredoms. For lack of anything else to do, and because Charlotte and her friend baked cookies and left behind all kinds of teenager food, I've been stuffing myself, just like the birds at my feeders and all the rest of the animals around here, who have gone into reckless food foraging mode, apparently expecting weeks of frozenness ahead will prevent them from getting food. The yard last night was full of deer, brazenly sniffing at the ice-glazed bedding plants, and, returning through the woods from my mother-in-law's house yesterday afternoon, I came upon a fresh pile—still steaming and rank smelling!—mountain lion scat.
Just before the beginning of the storm I started listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber's rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. I hadn't listened to it in many years, not since I returned to faith in the story it narrates after many years of atheism, so it has been a revelation. Not surprisingly, the work's overwhelming focus, the stress and hectic and desires and terrors and confusion surrounding Jesus' teaching for everyone involved—for Judas and the other apostles, for Mary Magdalene (seemingly a composite character of a number of women in the gospels), for Pilate and Herod, for Jesus himself, and for the crowds that followed him everywhere—has been impressing itself upon me from a number of other sources. I've been writing about John 6, where Jesus keeps trying to escape the crowds, into the mountains and out onto the roiling waters of the Sea of Galilee, and chastises them for just wanting things from him—food, healings, magic tricks—and not really believing in who he is. Not one of them believed he was who he said. Their collective refusal to believe him seems to make him doubt himself in an interesting reading of his begging, in Gethsemane, that God take the cup from him. The turmoil and misery of Jesus' human situation is so overwhelming and convincing in Jesus Christ Superstar, I keep finding myself sobbing at different parts of it.
I told Kris on the phone that I thought I'd assign it in my English 102 (Intro to lit.) classes as a drama, since we had only short plays in the syllabus. I want them to hear it. Kris seemed to think my mostly Christian students will be offended that Jesus doesn't rise from the dead in Jesus Christ Superstar, which I thought was an interesting. Of course, I would want them to be offended by something, the better to have something to say or write about the piece. But the fact that Kris is probably right—indeed, since he hasn't himself listened to Jesus Christ Superstar in eons, I'm guessing he remembers that this was the actual Bible Belt response to it back in the seventies when it was being performed—makes me think of it as the perfect literary experience for Lent: to coexperience the rejection Jesus must have suffered from, the abandonment and aloneness he must have felt even as he was surrounded by hectic crowds of people.
I'm entering Lent early this year, I realize. It begins 17 February this year. I got all off schedule as a result of working on a Lent article for Guideposts during my Christmas break, before I was even properly in the Christmas mood. I was working through Jesus' death even as I was trying to fold my mind around his birth as one of us.
One of us. Born like us. Being loved by parents, growing up, learning, having friends, disappointing parents, hoping like us, worrying like us (It says nowhere in the gospels that Jesus never worried, and I'm certain Andrew Lloyd Webber is right that he did!), surrounded by turmoil and stress like us, alone like us. Suffering and being misunderstood like us—surely worse than most of us. Confronting death as we all will. Dying.
How I came to listen to Webber's masterpiece is this: Kris has been reading Paul's letters to me in the morning, and the word apostle keeps coming up. Paul repeatedly claims to be an apostle himself, just like Peter and the rest of the twelve. He warns against false apostles—who apparently lurked about the early church believers, trying to get them to return to their Jewish obeyance of the Law or else believe something else entirely—and even seems to disparage what the NIV Kris reads from translates as "those 'super-apostles'" ("the very chiefest apostles" KJV; "these super-apostles" NRSV), which I take to be, contrary to what the notes in my NIV Study Bible say, the big churchy names of the times: Peter, James, John, etc.
Certainly Paul puts a lot of effort into locating himself among the real apostles, I have been thinking, but he also conflicts with them on several occasions. In any case, as always with me, it was a word, apostle, that baffled me. Why were the twelve referred to as "apostles"? It's used more frequently in the post-Resurrection narrative than in the gospels, where the twelve are often presumably lumped in with the rest of the disciples.
Judging from what my American Heritage dictionary and NIV Exhaustive Concordance have to reveal, the word appears to derive from the Greek word for send and means messenger. The twelve were Jesus' messengers, sent out to tell the world the wonderful news of the Messiah's arrival and departure from this world, and the false apostles were probably also sent by someone—Satan? Herod? the Romans who persecuted the early Christians?—to deliver a different message.
As I speculated about the word, a song from my teenage years sailed into my consciousness and remained there for days. Always hoped that I'd be an apostle. Knew that I could make it if I tried. Then when we retired we could write the gospels, and they still talk about us when we died. I don't remember attending a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar in those days or listening to the song (was it on the radio then, along with Mary Magdalene's haunting "I Don't Know How to Love Him"?) or ever speculating about it. Certainly it's not one of the more memorable pieces in Jesus Christ Superstar. Nevertheless, I woke up with the wistful melody in my mind, those fame-obsessed words on my lips as I drove to work and home again. So I rummaged around until I found a copy of the CD (here it is on Amazon.com, with previews and MP3s available, in case you want to hear precisely the version I've been listening to) that I vaguely remembered someone had brought into the house some years ago.
In Jesus Christ Superstar, the senders of the different messages are some of the main voices we hear, and they are convincing and articulate and heartbreaking. They are Judas, distraught that Jesus isn't more of a people's hero for the Jews. They are Mary Magdalene, wanting Jesus to be "just a man." They are Pilate, perplexed and impressed by Jesus but too smug and afraid and angry to acknowledge his own assessment. They are the crowds of poor and sick and unhappy, shrieking out their miseries and expectations of him. They are us, confused one-time or would-be or current God-followers, each one of us determined to discover in Jesus not who he is/was/will be but whatever it is we are looking for. To be fed or healed. To be loved in whatever way we understand that difficult word. To be confirmed in our craziness. Jesus Christ Superstar is a caution to me, to us all.
So, it's my recommendation for Lent. Go out and buy it and let me know what you think. It's a great investment in a Lenten rethinking of what all was and still is involved in what Jesus identifies as the God-follower's work: believing in the One God Sent.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)