PsalterMark

In 2006 a fairly awful film starring Will Ferrell called Talladega Nights was released. It’s about a racing driver, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, even fans of NASCAR racing. Yet despite its lack of any cinematic value, it does have a rather memorable scene in which a family gathers to say grace. They end up arguing over which Jesus they prefer and which Jesus they are going to pray to. Will Ferrell’s character likes Baby Jesus best and prays to him as he gives thanks for their takeaway food. He explains his preference like this:

Well, look, I like the Christmas Jesus best when I’m sayin’ grace. When you say grace, you can say it to Grown-up Jesus, or Teenage Jesus, or Bearded Jesus, or whoever you want.

Poor humour aside, for 2,000 years people have often remade Jesus to avoid the real Jesus. One of the most sobering collective efforts of doing this was in early 20th Century Germany where liberal theologians tried to describe the true historical Jesus, who lay behind the gospel accounts, by scholarly means. They peered down the well of history, and rather than seeing the God-Man Jesus staring back they saw a liberal modern academic German reflection looking at them. Reading their own taste and prejudices into their conception of Jesus was a disaster for them and, in part, led to many of them having a misguided enthusiasm for the First World War.

As human beings, we are made in God’s image. But we have a tendency to attempt to make God, to make Jesus, in our image.

Sometimes I hear of a thoroughly human Jesus. A Jesus made solely into an ethical teacher and role model—this is a danger of the What Would Jesus Do? movement, despite its good intentions. And of course, they are good intentions: Jesus is an ethical teacher and a role model—the best in fact—but he is so many more things in addition. There are so many facets to Jesus, and we need to celebrate and live out every one of them.

The fully human and fully divine Jesus is vital to living out the Easter message. The challenge of this message is seen in John 15 where Jesus personally owns the words of King David from Psalm 69.

Verse 4 this psalm puts it starkly, yet poetically:

Those who hate me without reason
outnumber the hairs of my head;
many are my enemies without cause,
those who seek to destroy me.
I am forced to restore
what I did not steal.

Jesus had so many people oppose him that they outnumbered the hairs on his head! This is the very story of Holy Week. Religious Leaders, Roman authorities, even a disciple, all play their part in leading Jesus inexorably to death, even death in a cross. And all this is but a snapshot of a greater opposition—the ongoing opposition to God of a broken humanity.

It started with Adam and to this day all of humanity rebel against their creator. It is our very nature. We have all sinned against God in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.

Jesus’ claims in John 15 that, by association, those who take up the cross and journey with him in the hope of bodily resurrection will also experience such hostility.

“They hated me without reason” is Jesus’ experience. What if this is to be our experience too? What if our testimony were to become “They hated me without reason”? Are we as Easter disciples open to opposition? Are we ready for such opposition?

In Jesus Christ we have the collision of a theology of the Cross—Good Friday—with a theology of glory—Easter Sunday.

In the medieval period, a theology of the cross eclipsed a theology of glory. Our ancestors knew how to mark Lent with serious effort, so as to change their diets and family life for that season. They made great effort to experience Holy Week with inconvenient solemnity. Plague, high infant mortality, and subsistence farming left them in little doubt of their brokenness, frailty, and profound need of God’s grace

Modern health care, the comforts of modern life, and supermarkets bulging with food make us susceptible to a theology of glory which blots out the cross. Our recent entitled gripes over the lack of unseasonable fruit and vegetables points to our immense historical and geographical privilege. Taken to extreme our comfort can instil an insidious prosperity gospel which is no gospel at all.

I’m not suggesting we should return to medieval church practices such as casting out the more troublesome of sinners from the congregation on Ash Wednesday for the period of Lent. Or that we should reinstate the practice of penance.

But praying that we have ears to hear Jesus’ call to the cross. The gospel is a call to be Christlike, although this is not as individualistic as it sounds to our modern ears—we are collectively Christ’s body. Jesus explains that we should not be surprised that the world will hate us. We should expect persecution. We should know opposition.

The measure of our collective Christlikeness in how we respond when opposition comes. Opposition should be met with grace. That is what Jesus did.

• Is another measure of our Christlikeness perhaps whether opposition comes at all?
• Can we welcome being Christlike when this means a growing list of enemies?
• In Jesus’ terms this should be our delight—more enemies, means more people to love.
• It means that grace abounds all the more.
• Are we collectively willing to know the words of Psalm 69, which Jesus prayed, our own:

Those who hate me without reason
outnumber the hairs of my head;
many are my enemies without cause,
those who seek to destroy me.

Mercifully we do not have to live out the last part of this verse:

I am forced to restore
what I did not steal.

Jesus was accused of wrongs he had not committed. And yet he literally fulfils these words later in Holy Week, as he is compelled to restore all wrongs, including yours and including mine.