Still Not Poetry

but sets up for it nicely, m'thinks

This is one of four posts (#3) that are theologically Christian and idiosyncratic, as well as politically opinionated. This is the one that feels riskiest.

Many practicing Christians leapfrog the life, teaching, and resurrection of Jesus and glory in his death and the need for us to be “washed in his blood.” This way of thinking builds from an apostolic metaphor (yes), comparing Jesus to the Old Testament sacrificial lamb, but then weirdly mixes in language that’s clearly Mithraic: blood bathing. Yuck! These Christians have fixated on a perfectly fine biblical figure of speech but from it have fashioned a powerful, repent or perish, death-centered soteriology (gotta love a six-syllable word for the eight-syllable phrase, theology of salvation).

True, the image of the sacrificial lamb appears in the teaching of John the Baptizer when he refers to Jesus as “the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” but it is not found in the teaching of Jesus or in the Book of Acts (except in Acts 8 where a portion of Isaiah 53 is being read by a Jewish eunuch from Ethiopia). Later, it becomes a figure of speech deployed by the early church to provide Jewish believers in Jesus with an Old Testament handle for understanding the necessity of Jesus’ death and to identify Jesus as the Passover lamb’s antitype (another technical word): “Christ our passover has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7).

But such a figure—of an atoning sacrificial lamb that has thematic ties to the Jewish Passover—would not have connected with gentile believers (such as I) who had no grounding in or curiosity about or existential need to know the sacred scriptures of the Jews. Sure, the Jewish scriptures were God-breathed and useful for general instruction in doing good (2 Timothy 3:16). But for gentile believers, their “religion” was the resurrected Jesus, his teachings and spiritual presence, he being superior to any angel, any prophet, any Old Order religious structure or practice. They were listening to and learning from One whose wisdom was superior even to that of the great Jewish scholar, sage, and collector of wisdom sayings, King Solomon (Matthew 12:42).

And so I return to the observation with which I began this little series and that had recently startled me: that Jesus’ call to repent was not about demonstrating remorse over one’s wretchedness. Rather his call had everything to do with turning away from whatever had previously guided one’s life and turning to him and living into his idea of a New Order, one that is now and is to come.

Am I misinterpreting what’s there in the biblical text? I’m sure some would say that I am, and they may be right. Or maybe I’m simply building on an idea that I didn’t have when I started out. The dark, fearsome beast on the bike path (repent or perish) turned out to be a friendly (come to me, learn from me) shadow on a rock. [If this is your first stop in my four-part series, that last sentence refers back to my opening gambit in part one.] And speaking of “one,” one thing remains to be seen: whether and, if so, how all this idiosyncratic theologizing influences my poetizing.

[to be continued]