Many of us know the work of Kahlil Gibran. His lyrical
words have been recited in our weddings and his mystical poetry and writings
such as The Prophet make him a perennial
favorite of the spiritually and literarily inclined.
While many presume Gibran to be Muslim, he was actually a
lifelong Maronite Roman Catholic. One of his more famous writings was his 1928
work on Jesus, Son of Man. In it,
Gibran narrates the life of Jesus through more than 60 monologues from the
perspectives of those who claim to have directly known or heard of Jesus. They
include a philosopher, an apothecary, a Greek poet, a high priestess, a
Jerusalem cobbler, an innkeeper, a Lebanese shepherd and a scribe.
While each gets their own short chapter, it is Mary
Magdalene who receives three full chapters in Gibran’s work. In these chapters,
the dialogue is offered from the perspective of the Magdalene. It is sensual at
the same time it is highly mystical. Gibran makes Mary and Jesus come alive in
these exchanges. A friend of mine who has been hard at work on an icon
portraying Jesus and the Magdalene provided me with a copy of these three
chapters. She said it inspired her.
I can see why.
They Love You for Themselves….
As I sat in my car at church Tuesday waiting for an adult
education meeting to begin, I began to read through these chapters only to be
stopped dead in my tracks by this statement near the end of the first chapter:
[Mary] I cried to him and I said, “Master, come to my house. I have incense to
burn for you and a silver basin for your feet. You are a strange and yet not a
stranger. I entreat you, come to my house.” Then He stood up and looked at me
even as the seasons might look down upon a field, and He smiled. And He said,
“All men love you for themselves. I love you for yourself.”
And
then He walked away.
I felt explosions in my head. My heart was racing and my
face tingled. Gibran had drawn a bead on an issue I have struggled with for
several decades now with these two sentences:
All
men love you for themselves. I love you for yourself.
Gibran’s Jesus recognized the instrumental way that men
sought out Mary to use her for their own purposes but always at her personal expense.
It was the common, expected way that they would see her in a patriarchal
culture like their own and, sadly, like our own as well. But Jesus expresses a love
for Mary that is personal and all encompassing. He does not see the degradation
imposed on Mary and the sin thus projected onto her. He simply sees Mary and
loves her for herself.
All of her.
It’s important to note here that there is absolutely no historical
evidence that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. She was constructed as such by
some of the early church fathers perhaps because it was clear Mary was indeed
beloved by Jesus and was clearly a leader in the early Jesus movement. G-d
forbid that a woman lead the early church much less the current one! How better
to dismiss that threat to patriarchy than to paint her as the whore in the church’s
perennial virgin or whore motif.
But Jesus sees through these self-serving, deprecatory
constructions in Gibran’s paean to her. Jesus only sees Mary. And loves her. All of her. His love does not demand she
repent as a condition for loving her, either from the degradation projected
onto her by others or from her own self-deprecation. Jesus does not demand she buy
into a given set of ideas as a condition of loving her or engage in a set of
behaviors in order for him to forgive her before he loves her. Jesus simply
loves her for herself.
As she is. All of
her.
Period.
DKJN (Don’t Know Jesus of Nazareth)
Gibran’s narrative has helped me draw into focus one of
my ongoing concerns about much of Christian theology that dates back to my very
first encounters with it. Truth be told, very few of us know, understand or
appreciate Jesus on his own terms, much less love Jesus for Jesus’ sake.
We mostly could care less about his humanity or his
extraordinary life. We could care less about his intense awareness of those who
suffered in the world around him and the vibrant compassion for them that he
exemplified in his ministry, a page right out of the Hebrew Prophetic Tradition.
We could care less about his teachings from the Hebrew Wisdom Tradition, much
of which draws our conventional “wisdom” into question. Indeed, most of us only
care about his suffering at all in so far as it instrumentally serves our
purposes, as a silver bullet for original sin and thereby the abatement of our
existential insecurities about death and the afterlife. By that equation, Jesus
becomes the ultimate means of terror management for Christians.
In the process we Christians have completely written
Jesus out of the Creeds we say every week, relegating his entire life to a
punctuation mark: “born of the Virgin Mary [COMMA] suffered death and was
buried….” We conflate Jesus with one of many possible constructions of the
Christ in our references to him - Jesus Christ - as if his description (the Greek christos
means the anointed one) was his last name.
And we caricaturize him in films like The Passion in which Jesus becomes the celestial Road Warrior, a
superhero enduring what biblical scholar Jon Dominic Crossan rightly called “an
orgy of violence” – and all “for us and our salvation…”
We love Jesus for ourselves.
But we don’t love Jesus for himself.
As I read these words from Gibran yesterday and thought
about Jesus, I felt my eyes welling with tears. It breaks my heart to think
that we have been so casual and so self-serving about Jesus. We Christians do
very well with one or more versions of the Christ that had begun to be
constructed using Jesus as one of the raw materials even in his lifetime and
then took off once he was no longer around to object to that construction
process. But we don’t really talk much about Jesus. Indeed, in the Protestant half of Christianity
we alternatively sanitize his ignominious execution by making him disappear
from the cross entirely under the rubric of “the risen Christ” or we fetishize
the crucifixion, egotistically reveling in our own sinfulness and obsessing
over how much Jesus had to suffer - and
all just to save me.
In short, we’re great Docetists not to mention
instrumentalists. But we’re lousy friends of Jesus, much less followers of his
Way or builders of his Kingdom.
Jesus Deserves Better
The truth is, Jesus probably wouldn’t recognize himself
in most of our constructions to begin with. And this spirit intoxicated teacher
and compassion-driven healer would decidedly not recognize the punitive,
judging G-d our atonement theologies have constructed in his name. The G-d whom Jesus intimately referred to as
Abba, Daddy, is not even in the same moral universe with the blood thirsty
deity of atonement theology which demands human sacrifice as the condition for even
entering into a process Jesus’ Abba had gladly engaged with no strings attached
from the beginning of time: the
forgiveness of human sin.
I honestly think Jesus deserves better than this. He
deserves to be understood on his own terms and loved for himself, not what we
have required him to become for us. I am
personally indebted to the iconoclastic Jesus Seminar for bringing these issues
to consciousness for me over the past two decades. But the Seminar has met much
resistance from the guardians of the institutional church which I serve as
priest and it has endured much derision and dismissal from many in the pews who
generally know very little about their work.
Perhaps that is why it is a mystic poet from Lebanon with
an Arabic name who is required to point this out to us on a very warm, muggy
day in a church parking lot and not the theologians who would presume to speak for
a Jesus of their own making from their pulpits and lecterns in the comfortable settings of our churches.
Little wonder Jesus wept.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando,
Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding.
For
what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to
walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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