Into the Mystic

Then he said to them all, "If any want to become my followers, 

let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." 

-Luke 9:23

Jesus was a terrible salesman.  The fact that he even had 12 disciples is something of a surprise. If it wasn't for the miracles, I'm pretty sure he would have had trouble even getting that many.  If he was just this wandering teacher who told quizzical little stories about this thing called the Kingdom of God, he probably wouldn't have ever even created a ripple in the pond of history.  Everyone who follows him does so because of the "power," that he has.  Almost everything else he does seems deliberately designed to push people away from following him.

The parables (those quizzical little stories) force the audience to stand on their head to make sense of them, and regularly challenge everything that anyone believes about God on their own.  Prodigals welcomed?  Samaritans as the hero? Weeds and wheat just left to grow side by side? Vineyard workers getting equal pay no matter how long they work? Royal weddings that no one comes to and the king invites regular people off the street? That's just a few examples of Jesus' irrational and highly questionable revelation of a God that seems to insistently want to get involved in unlikely circumstances with less than ideal people.

If you were a student of the covenant that God made with Abram, you would know that this sort of thing is not a new wrinkle, but rather a feature of God's being. God is not afraid of our mess. Even the messes, like say crucifixion, that terrify us beyond limit.  For Jesus to use the image of taking up a cross, was to reference a brutal and humiliating form of execution that was used by the oppressors that everyone believed the Messiah must surely be there to conquer.  The expectation that he was the conquering type of Messiah was persistent, and has been persistent even into the life of the church after 2000 years.  There are still large and successful forms of Christian faith that hold on to the notion of a powerful and ascendant god that will smite their enemies and give them personal victory and prosperity.

There is a Biblical personage that offers that sort of bargain, but it ain't Jesus (see Luke 4: 1-13). Jesus takes a different path, a path that is really only consistently adhered to by spiritual people we call mystics.  Jesus' path is the path of descent, the way down.  One of the main points, if not the only real point, of the incarnation is a demonstration of God's continued willingness to meet us where we are.  Without this path, god becomes either a vague abstraction, a mere universal concept, or a monstrous tyrant who has created us to suffer (perhaps endlessly).

I think there is a good philosophical and perhaps even existential reason why so many works of supernatural fiction, if they include a supreme being at all, treat god or gods as either ineffable to the point of utter absence (see Preacher and Good Omens), or they make some sort of ham-handed attempt at making god our actual enemy.  Those two things seem like the only alternatives.  Except Jesus is the other alternative.

Somewhere underneath all the static of "organized religion" that has encrusted itself around this wandering Nazarene, there is a way and a truth and life.  The early communities of disciples did not call themselves Christians or churches, they called themselves "people of the way."  What they "believed" could be surprisingly and perhaps even shockingly heterodox, but they centered themselves on the counter-cultural and indeed blasphemous (to Romans and Jews alike) affirmation that "Jesus is Lord."

In these new communities it was no longer just about miracles (although some still happened), it was literally about the way of life.  It was a way that offered people who lived in a brutal world an unbreakable hope.  It was a way that showed people who were often literally considered property or entirely disposable that they were loved by the Creator.  It was the way of life that became the core of what it meant to be a disciple, which was what Jesus was trying to teach all along.  He was trying to show his disciples that the way to God was not triumph but sacrifice, not success but humility, not power but love.

Institutionalizing this way has proven difficult, nay impossible.  Crosses are hard things to sell. Inviting people to walk through the valley of the shadow of death seems to make them want to run the other way, unless they are already there. There's a verse from the song Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen that I think rings with a great deal of truth, and I think it is a good invitation to a bit of mystic contemplation for a disciple of Jesus to engage with: 

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water,

And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower,

When he knew for certain only drowning men could see him,

He said, "All men shall be brothers then, until the sea shall free them."

But he, himself, was broken, long before the sky would open,

Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.

And you want to travel with him,

And you want to travel blind

And you know that you can trust him

For he's touched your perfect body with his mind.