Upside Down

Then he said to them all, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily to follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it."

-Luke 9: 23-24

Jesus didn't win many followers with this sort of stuff, in fact, he mostly frightened the ones he did have.  In those days crosses had not been sanitized by two millennia of standing nicely up on the tops of quaint little buildings where folks went to sing, pray and eat chicken salad and jello at potluck dinners.  A cross was a symbol of terror, a form of execution that was actually designed to be the opposite of humane, to make dying as painful as possible. The more I live with the Gospels the more I realize that Jesus was actually a terrible salesman, which is probably why, when he actually got put up on his real cross, he only had a few folks who you could really call his disciples.  All the sycophants and the folks who wanted something from him had gone away, and even his hard core group were hiding and denying and trying their best not to get nailed up next to him.

But the cross carrying wasn't the only way that Jesus gave his followers pause, his most famous sermon, The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's Gospel and the Sermon on the Plane in Luke, includes all sorts of things that give us clues that maybe this "Kingdom of God," thing isn't what we expect.  Consider the "beatitudes," this list of blessings that don't seem like blessings, or his injunction not to worry about things, or his commandment to love your enemies.  It's almost like he's trying to challenge everything that a rational human being would do in the interest of self-preservation.  In fact, he was challenging our notion of what it means to be saved.  

The people of Israel, of whom Jesus was a part, had endured centuries of exile and oppression, essentially being passed around from one Empire to the next.  They heard their prophets of long ago promise them something that many of them called Zion.  Zion was a longed for state of grace where they could somehow see the Temple, the Kingdom of David and Solomon, the house of their Father, the Promised Land, the Holy City and something maybe even like Heaven. Zion was a state of being that they hoped would come soon, to them, to Jerusalem, to Israel, to the world maybe.  The one who would institute this state of being would be the Messiah, God's anointed one.

The Messiah wasn't necessarily going to be a divine being, or God himself.  They would have settled for a regular old human being like Moses or Elijah, but they absolutely wanted someone who could really make them strong and end all of this uncertainty and constant domination by the Romes of the world.  Jesus never even makes a move in that direction.  He never gives a speech about raising an army of the Holy, he never puts on armor and goes storming about raising a rebellion.  He never tries to take power that isn't already his, in fact, on several occasions a stoked up crowd tries to make him king and he strenuously avoids that eventuality.

He keeps talking about the "kingdom of God," and how it's "drawing near," but he never makes any moves that look like a serious thing. By most standards he doesn't make much of an impression, historians like Josephus only mention him in an oblique way. He was one of several dozen "messiahs" that had been hung on Roman crosses, he wasn't even the only person named Jesus to be called a messiah.  His teachings, as we have them, are pretty head-scratching material, most of which seems determined to convince people that they should live by a standard that runs contrary to the very principles of survival.  No one, not even his closest students, gets it, it's just so very upside down and backwards.  How are the last first? How are the least of these so all fired important? What is the deal with the meek inheriting the earth?  That's not how any of this works.

Honestly, after the bloody work of the cross is done and the tomb is sealed, most of the followers are just about ready to go home and get on with life.  Then resurrection happens and all that upside down stuff doesn't seem so upside down any more, because obviously there's something more than survival involved in being saved.  Salvation didn't mean what anyone thought, it was bigger than that, and that is where the Church starts.