“What is the Christ, the Jesus that you are referring to?”
Dear Wayne,
This is the question you asked me last week. It was too deep and too important to answer in a just a few lines in a group chat.
To answer your question, I am referring to what I call the “Quotidian Jesus.” The Quotidian Jesus is the Savior that preaches the Gospel of “the now.” He is not a relic of past times and experiences, nor is He purely a prognostic Savior of the future, but He and His Gospel serve to direct us in the present. Through Him we can see current events through His eyes and act on what we see impactfully.
The Quotidian Jesus is ever-present, and He does not change, but the events of the world that are shone through the prism of His life and His wisdom are refracted to reveal different "colors" of life at different times. The Quotidian Jesus solves real people’s real problems and answers real people’s real questions. We see this in the Gospels of the New Testament. In the Gospels, real people had real health problems - leprosy, blindness, paralysis, dysfunctional uterine bleeding. congestive heart failure, epilepsy, psychosis, and others. People in the Gospels were facing capital punishment (the adulterous woman in the Book of John), taxation questions, the loss of loved ones, questions concerning religious law, as well as corruption in the house of faith. Jesus solved these problems and answered these questions, and He did so in a way that transcended the power of the person or the situation itself. The key word here, Wayne, is “transcendence” - getting above this “Trump vs. the World”, Democrat vs. Republican, Liberal god vs. Conservative god mess and see what is really going on.
For example, looking through the prism of the Quotidian Jesus from higher ground at our present national crisis will reveal to us that we are NOT in a political crisis, but in a SPIRITUAL crisis with political implications. The manifestations of this crisis are too severe, absurd, and pervasive to simply be a merely political event. God is up to something, and you ask yourself , “what?”
It would be arrogant (and most likely, errant) for me to opine confidently what it is exactly God is up to. But the Quotidian Gospel has reveals clearly WHY all this has come to be, because when we interpose Jesus and His Word between us and the events of our lives, and look at the world through that prism, we get a sense of what is taking place. Check out Chapter 8 of 1 Samuel. All of us brought in or around the Christian or Jewish faith know who Samuel (the judge and prophet of God) and Saul (the first king of Israel) are, but few of us can probably rattle off who Joel and Abijah were. I know I couldn’t.
Joel and Abijah were the sons of Samuel, the judge and prophet of God. As such, and as descendants of Levi, they were supposed to take over the spiritual leadership of the Israelites in Samuel’s dotage. The high priests were not just religious figures then; they were the main arbiters of governmental activity, serving as public health officers, addressing all manner of disease and public health, including leprosy and STDs. Finally, they also resolved and adjudicated legal disputes among God’s people.
But unfortunately, Joel and Abijah took bribes. They were corrupt and everybody knew it, just like everybody knows about these church child abuse scandals, preachers at Diddy parties, preachers stepping out on their wives and being on “the DL,” false prophets, and preachers being money-hungry for big houses and private airplanes in the present. As a result, as they have now, the people lost faith in the men of God, and they rejected God’s leadership in large part because they rejected the leaders who represented God. Instead, they wanted “a king like other men." Isn’t that what we are hearing now?
The problem then, Wayne, isn't merely the leaders we have, but the leaders we have chosen, and the reasons we have chosen them. Throughout the political landscape, on both the left and right, we are choosing leaders who are corrupt, perverse, self-serving, foolish, hypocritical, and possessing disorders of personality, thought, and mood. But we will always have leaders who lack character when the people who chose them lack faith in God. The Quotidian Gospel makes it clear that there is no long-term (and maybe not even a short-term) solution to the problems of the world and its people, absent a plan of engagement that has the redeeming, healing, and restoring power of Jesus Christ at its center, and it heralds the primacy of faith in Christ in all things transformatively good.
This solution is not about theocracy; instead, it is about a spiritually powered, broadly spread Gospel being preached, in one way or another, in every corner of the nation, and preached in a way that rings true to the White and the Black, the man and the woman, and the rich and the poor alike. It is not a siloed Gospel (one for Blacks, one for Whites, another for liberals and another for conservatives), but a broad and powerful truth that anyone possessing any measure of the Spirit of God is hard-pressed to refute or ignore. This Gospel directly confronts the four key enemies of the peace of man and the will of God in our time – pride, greed, lies and hate.
Pride – we cannot continue to wallow in sin, injustice, and wrongdoing against our God, ourselves, and our neighbor and expect to live in a blessed nation. We can’t hurt people with delight and passion and make no amends or restitution for those we have treated this way in the past and enjoy the continued favor of the Lord. Pride deludes us into thinking that God owes us something for being American – but He doesn’t. In truth, we are “filthy rags” like everyone else on this planet, and perhaps “filthier” by virtue of our power and our abuse of the Lord’s blessings.
Greed – our leaders are slathered in greed. But so are our church leaders, and our business leaders, and in too many cases – so are we. We need a Quotidian Gospel, that in every way imaginable, hammers home an understanding not only of the harm greed inflicts upon our citizens, but the eternally damning consequences to individuals who live lives fueled by greed.
Lies – The book of Revelation says “all liars shall be cast into the Lake of Fire reserved for the devil and his angels.” We know who is lying, and if we don’t, it is because we wish to be lied to. We may not think it matters if they are lying on behalf of our interest or if we like or feel good about the lies they tell, but it does – their destiny (and ours if we embrace these lies) is the same, and it isn’t good. But “how shall they (our leaders) hear without a preacher?” How will we know without the Quotidian Gospel? I don’t really think we can. This is why the preacher is so much more important than the politician, the scientist, the businessman, or the artist. We can’t find our way home without them.
Hate – the Quotidian Jesus teaches us that when we hate a man, we have murdered him. Many of our political and social leaders now are “murderers.” They hate Jews or Palestinians (or both). They hate Mexicans or Blacks (or both). They hate gay or trans people (not have issues with their lifestyles or politics, but straight-up hate them.) They hate women. They hate the poor and the imprisoned. Disagreement is one thing, but hate is another. They have no investment in these people’s lives, or for that matter, their humanity. But that posture toward people “kills” them – if not spiritually, then literally. And murderers don’t just go to jail, lest they repent, they go to Hell. Our legislative and executive branches of government are filled with men and women “teed up” for Hell. The Quotidian Gospel preached is duty-bound to let folks know.
The Quotidian Jesus has no interest and is a non-participant in “special interest groups.” His sole “special interest group” is mankind. The Body of Christ has to draw away from the gyrations and posturing of politics and inform it instead with a bold and unapologetic Gospel that compels every citizen to take account of their sin and faith-lacking contribution to our current state of affairs, pledging to our God and our Savior to “pour contempt” on our pride, back away from personal greed and confront it in our leaders, abide no lying, and gaining a healthy nausea and disgust for hate. This, is the transcendent Jesus, dynamic and enlightening in "the now" that I am referring to.
That is the Jesus I am referring to. Thanks for asking.
留言