Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.

When blindness strikes someone after they once had sight, they forget what they once saw.  The images once stored leave their memory.  Everything fades to black. Physically, the brain forgets how to see as well.  If sight is ever regained after being lost for a long time, it takes a very long time – years – for the brain to relearn how to see.

     Blind Bartimaeus got two miracles that day when he encountered Jesus.  His vision was restored – his eyes worked again – and his brain immediately was able to meaningfully process the information it was receiving. Something that should have taken a long time took just a moment.

     Jesus struggled with blindness.  We are not completely certain how long the process of regaining his sight took, but we can imagine that it took years – the long period of time leading up to his public ministry and beyond. We don’t have any reason to believe that his physical eyesight had ever been lost, but I am confident that he was very aware of the cultural blinders that he very naturally acquired as a man born into the context in which he lived.  This sort of blindness is very much related to the blindness we struggle with in our own time. It is a coming to awareness that our lenses have been very much affected by influences beyond our control and choice to see the world and everything in it in a particular way.  While we sometimes have moments when it feels like the veil has been removed, we later discover that it was just one veil of many that has impacted our ability to see clearly.

     As we’ve noted before, the crowd in the story likely acted just like crowds do today with those who are blind.  They treated the blind as if they were dumb.  They communicated in different ways that those who were blind were a burden on society, which shamed them.  And they communicated to those who were blind that surely their affliction was an indication of God’s wrath for something they did.  Note: similar attitudes and behaviors were held toward people who struggle with other afflictions: leprosy, paralysis, Gentile heritage, being female, being gender binary, being poor, as well as some afflictions of choice such as occupation (prostitutes and tax collectors come to mind). Overall, the culture Jesus was born into viewed all these people as “less than”.  To varying degrees, the “less than” attitude served to dehumanize these others, which then allowed the culture to treat them as less than equal human beings.  Their cultural lens shaped their vision to perpetually treat the “other” inhumanely.

     Jesus ventured into non-Jewish territory a little, but mostly he lived his life around the region of the Sea of Galilee, which was not the center of the Jewish or Roman universe.  He spent most of his time with Jewish people who thought just like the folks of Jericho.  We know that Jesus was able to recognize his cultural blindness because of what he did, what he taught, and the feedback he received.  He was considered radical because he treated the “others” as human beings instead of the labels the culture placed on them.  He didn’t simply publish books or articles or podcasts or YouTube videos or TED Talks about it – he actually lived according to his new way of seeing, with less and less of the cultural blinders that restricted him.  He took a lot of heat at times.  He was schooled by a non-Jewish woman asking for help for her daughter – can you imagine Jesus’ blinders being called out by a foreign woman, and he accepted it?!  Remarkable!  Religious leaders and the general public were stunned by his choosing to be with – up close and personal – all the “others” who had been dehumanized by the majority.  He treated them as human beings. There was a first time for all of these gracious moves closer to those who had been ostracized.  Especially the first few times, it had to be tough to swim upstream, to go against the crowd, to choose to see differently than everybody else around him.

     Jesus did this very thing when he stopped in his tracks, against the flow of the crowd, and treated Bartimaeus with humanizing dignity and compassion. Nobody else did.  Certainly not the crowd.  Apparently not the local religious leaders.  Not even his disciples who had journeyed with him so closely.  Not even Jesus’ disciples!  They were still learning to see and live by what they saw.  What strength and courage it must have taken Jesus to take a humane stand when everyone else just kept moving forward.  All the way to the end of his life, Jesus chose to take a stand for grace, dignity, compassion, love, all because he began to see differently and live by what he saw.

     Bartimaeus received his sight, and he chose to follow Jesus, to risk living on what he was seeing.  This is similar to the healing of a blind man in Jerusalem according to the Gospel of John. He is credited with the brilliant statement of faith, I once was blind, but now I see.  His new sight and insight led him to stand up against the inhumane bullies that treated him like he was dumb, a burden, and cursed.  When he chose to stand, he found himself alone, rejected by the leaders of the crowd. He was alone, until Jesus found him and invited him into his company.

     In the Christian tradition for the majority of Church history we have been told what it means to be a Christian based on easily identifiable scriptures – mostly from New Testament writings apart from the four Gospels.  The letters – mostly from Paul – were written to churches or regions to help people with their theology.  The new religion was a religion about Jesus. But this is not the same as the religion of Jesus – what Jesus believed and practiced.  According to highly respected Christian ethicist David Gushee, Christians have largely missed the core meaning of what it means to actually live like Jesus because so much emphasis has been placed on what to believe about Jesus. Read an excerpt from his book below, or go directly to the article from which the content below was taken.

 

     I have written a new book called After Evangelicalism. I claim that white American “evangelical” Christianity is fatally flawed, and probably has been from the beginning of its modern incarnation in the 1940s. It certainly has become a carrier of theological and moral beliefs and practices that fall far short of the way of Jesus, that deeply harm specific groups of people, and that are driving many away from faith. My book both attempts to diagnose what has gone wrong and to propose better ways forward for a post-evangelical Christianity.

     In thinking through these issues, I make my way to the question of Jesus. I explore who Jesus is for white American evangelical Christians, in contrast with who he is in Scripture itself.

     I suggest that white evangelical Christianity has produced four flawed versions of Jesus. Which version is presented in various churches depends a lot on who the preacher is and how local traditions develop; and undoubtedly sometimes multiple versions of Jesus are presented in one church.

     Here is my list of pseudo-Jesuses:

     Jesus the Crucified Savior. The primary function of this Jesus is to come into this dark world to die on the cross so that we believers might be forgiven our sins and go to heaven when we die.

     This was the primary version of Jesus I was first exposed to in Southern Baptist Christianity. Jesus loves you and died on the cross for your sins. This Jesus can easily be rooted in the New Testament, although not mainly in the synoptic Gospels. Paul’s writings are a central source of this vision of Jesus, as is John’s Gospel.

     This is a defensible Jesus, in New Testament terms. But there is a lot missed with this version of Jesus. Specifically, this Jesus has no necessary moral content. He doesn’t really ask anything of believers other than belief. He doesn’t really care about anything other than eternal salvation. This Jesus can produce churches filled with people who believe they are saved but have no particular idea about whether Jesus has anything to say about how we live now. This means we will need to look elsewhere for guidelines for personal and social morality. “Elsewhere” is dangerous territory.

     Hallmark Christmas Movie Jesus. This is the kind, attentive, ruggedly handsome guy we sing about sometimes. This is the Jesus whom we ask to “hold me,” one who is there “when I am weak and he is strong,” and “when I am down, he lifts me up.” This Jesus is the best (platonic) boyfriend or bro-friend I could possibly have, the one who is there for me all the time, my comfort and encourager. He also runs a really nice Christmas-related operation, so that’s a plus. (This is a joke about Hallmark Christmas movies, which always feature a lonely guy in a cute small town who runs something like a mistletoe shop or candy cane store and just needs a good wife.)

     This is a highly sentimentalized Jesus, whose main role is our emotional stabilization in a trying world. This is a Jesus who again doesn’t make moral demands. He doesn’t help me think about what faith requires in action. He just wants to comfort me and look good in flannel.

     Jesus Who Wants You to Succeed. This latest Jesus is a staple megachurch evangelical Jesus. In suburban evangelicalism, this is the Jesus who offers success principles for leadership and life to upwardly striving young professionals. In prosperity gospel land, this is the Jesus who wants you to be as wealthy, lovely and thin as the pretty leaders on stage.

     I see little contact between this Jesus and the New Testament. This is also not a Jesus who could help me understand why I can’t follow Hitler and Jesus at the same time.

     Vacant Jesus — Fillable with Any Content We Want. This Jesus, having been distanced so profoundly from his Jewish roots, his account of himself and any New Testament depictions, is a mere shell, symbol or totem. This is a Jesus always available to be filled with whatever content we might like to drop in there.

     The way you get to this Jesus is by systematically ignoring the Jesus one meets in the Gospels. Or, if he is not ignored, we find ways to evade what he said, to thin down his theological vision and moral demands as far as possible, to shave away anything that might make a claim on us.

     “Vacant Jesus is not just useless. He can be positively harmful.” This Vacant Jesus is not just useless. He can be positively harmful. This can be the Jesus of the KKK, the Race God Savior of My People Only, #MAGA Jesus or Football Jesus or Corporate Jesus or Straight White American Jesus. Vacant Jesus is always available to be the totem of my tribe, my class, my race, my party, providing ultimate religious justification for whatever I most strongly believe in.

     The most dangerous thing about Vacant Jesus is that we can deploy him to reverse the actual demands of the real Jesus.

 

Jesus according to Jesus

     For my book, I decided to see what New Testament scholars are right now saying about Jesus. I turned to a British scholar named James Dunn, a highly respected scholar who died just after I finished the book.

     In the last book Dunn ever wrote, which is called Jesus According to the New Testament, he acknowledges that the New Testament offers various pictures of Jesus — although none of them are Hallmark Jesus, Success Jesus or Vacant Jesus. He zeroes in on what he calls “Jesus according to Jesus” — the core depiction of Jesus himself as presented in the synoptic Gospels. This very core Jesus, the most basic Jesus, looked like this:

·       Jesus created and articulated the Love Command as the highest statement of moral obligation: love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself.

·       Jesus placed priority on the poor. This was visible in his preaching, his parables and his actions.

·       Jesus offered welcome to sinners. He also taught that welcoming sinners is what God does. This drew criticism because it upset the expectations of those around him.

·       Jesus demonstrated openness to Gentiles. He taught that many will come from all directions to the messianic banquet, he ministered to many Gentiles, and he commissioned the disciples after his resurrection to go and make disciples of all nations.

·       Jesus included women among his close followers. He gave women a vital role in his ministry, including them among his band of followers, ministering to them just the same as to men, and appearing to them after his resurrection.

·       Jesus demonstrated openness and love to children. People brought sick kids to Jesus and he healed them. Jesus rejected the disciples’ efforts to shoo them aside. He elevated a certain kind of innocent childlikeness.

·       Jesus relaxed Jewish food laws and related regulations about purity. He emphasized inward rather than external cleanness.

·       Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper. This unforgettable last meal with Jesus became an important part of the ritual life of the early church and provides a link between the ministry of Jesus, his death and the practice of his followers.

·       Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, which he understood as already evident in his ministry but also with a grand consummation lying ahead. He offered powerful, authoritative teaching and was notable for his striking parables.

·       Jesus healed and exorcised demons through the power of the Holy Spirit.

·       Jesus understood himself as commissioned by God for ministry, sent by God his loving Father, anointed by the Spirit, coming as messiah of Israel.

·       Jesus understood that, contrary to common expectation, his messiahship meant suffering, rejection and death rather than triumph. He expected to die in Jerusalem, and he did.

Take a second and consider this list against the background of the four evangelical Jesuses I started with. Might you join me in finding it a little troubling that there are few points of contact between any of those evangelical Jesuses and the accounts of Jesus that we have just reviewed?

     To drive the above home even further, I close with the following article by William Willimon. Don’t have nine minutes to read it?  Here is the gist: if you want to follow the real Jesus, expect a bumpy, adventurous ride where you are stretched in ways you did not know you needed to grow, where you get to learn to live the way Jesus lived, and also where you will most certainly experience the same kinds of pushback as Jesus did as well.  This Way, Truth, and Life is where the Spirit of God thrives and the world becomes a bit more like it was intended, and the people in it are able to live into their True Selves in all of their made-in-the-image-of-God glory.  Awesome.  Difficult.  Unblinded.  Let’s go.

 

Repentance, Conversion, and Faith: Jesus transforms, jolts, and disorders for the better every life he touches. By William H. Willimon

 

Repentance: Wising up. Turning to the God who, in Christ, has turned to you – to change your heart and life.

     Metanoia (Greek for repentance) is cousin of metamorphosis. When John the Baptist prepared the way for Christ, he told the crowds to hear the good news, get washed up, be drowned, give away surplus clothing, practice justice, in short, “Repent!”

     Although Jesus discourages us from showing off our goodness, he commends public admission (confession) of badness. Critics attempted to trap Jesus in a discussion of tragedy by asking, “Hear about the tower that fell and killed those people in Siloam [natural evil] or the Galileans whom Herod executed [human evil]? What did they do to deserve that?”

     Jesus responded with a non sequitur: “Unless you change your hearts and lives, you will die just as they did.” If we can’t repent of our temptation to keep God at a distance with our detached theological discussions of others’ pain and injustice (and maybe even our books on Christian vocabulary), we’ll never know much about God.

     Repentance is turning and facing in a different direction whereby we are enabled to see. Until we stand under the gospel, we can’t understand it. Faith is best known from the inside looking out. Salvation is free and very costly. Jesus transforms, jolts, and disorders for the better every life he touches. When God turns toward you, and you turn toward God, your life turns around.

Conversion: Detoxification. The God whom we wanted on our terms, taking us on God’s terms.

     Crabby Tertullian said, “Christians are made, not born.” Christians come from the church’s baptismal font, not people’s loins. Because Jesus and his kingdom fundamentally challenge everything we thought we knew for sure, conversion is part of the project. Paul didn’t know whether to describe what happened to him, when he met Christ, as birth or death. It felt like both at the same time.

     Christian is not synonymous with being born American. Conversion is mandatory. Rarely is the Christian life an orderly progression toward God. More typically, it’s a series of jerks and jolts, lurches to the left or right. Fasten your seat belts, you could end up miles from here.

Nobody ever gets so adept at being a Christian that you lose your amateur status. Seldom a one-and-done experience, as Christ told old Nicodemus, “You must be born again,” to which Wesleyans add, and again, and again, and probably again. Birth to death, darkness to light then, at the end, death leading to life.

     Warning: I’m not saying that the Holy Spirit takes advantage of us when we’re down, but if you are going through a particularly painful time in your life, know that Christ enjoys showing up at such moments and working them to his gain. On the other hand, if you are happy with the life you are living, pleased as punch with the person you are, happy with the world as it is, be careful hanging around Jesus. He may take you just as you are but never leaves you there. Everyone he touches, Christ transforms.

     Extreme makeover, like our salvation, is something that God does to you rather than something you do for yourself. Baptism is not a declaration that you’ve at last found a faith that works for you but rather your bodacious willingness to let this faith work on you. Christ’s baptismal promises: you are not doomed to plod along in the life your parents handed you. By the power of the Holy Spirit, anybody can be a saint, everyone can have fate transformed into destiny by God. You, even you, can hit the road with Jesus. “Come die with me,” he says, “that you might rise to the life I wanted to give you in the first place.”

     As Jesus headed down the road one day a man comes up and asks him a deep theological question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” One Gospel says that the man was a “ruler,” another that he was “young.” All agree that he was rich. Jesus brushes him off by telling him to obey all the commandments. Turns out this man is really good at being good; he’s been totally obedient since he was a kid, a hard-core success, both materially and spiritually. Then Jesus speaks those converting words that Christians like me have always wished he hadn’t: “Go … sell … give … follow me.”

     If you journey with Jesus, expect a rough ride.

Faith: Acknowledgement that what scripture says is happening, actually is. Willingness to be whom God has created us to be; readiness to be transformed and transfigured by someone who works beyond, beneath, and above things as they seem to our senses. More a welcoming wave than a stiff salute, when Christ turns to us. Paying attention. Overcome by light. Enraptured.

     Faith happens when reality, first experienced as mundane and speechless, overflows, so that we hear something and exclaim, “I believe.” Better than some innate human yearning, faith is our reasonable response to an occurrence that has happened to us, named Jesus Christ. More than intellectual assent, the Christian faith is about walking with Christ even when you aren’t sure where he’s taking you. Being faithful more than having faith.

     Faith arises when we begin to trust Jesus more than ourselves. Most of us come to trust the God that Christianity talks about before we sign up for the whole system. Once you take that first trusting step toward the God who turns to you, Christian teaching, beliefs, and behavior begin to make sense.

     Paul didn’t know whether to describe what happened to him, when he met Christ, as birth or death. It felt like both at the same time.

     Jesus asked a man born blind, whom he has just healed, whether or not he “believes” in the Human One (or Son of Man). Jesus isn’t asking the man if he thinks that Jesus exists – Jesus stands in front of him. Jesus is asking if the healed person is ready to trust the one he is staring at. The man responds simply, “I believe.” When a gang of religious scholars gives the man hell for saying he believes in Jesus, the man replies, “Don’t know much ‘bout theology. All I know was I once was blind but now I see.” This dynamic – believing before all the evidence is in – occurs in the souls of millions.

     We are saved “through faith,” which sounds to us pragmatic, mother-I’d-rather-do-it-myself Americans like another assignment for self-betterment. No, faith is a gift. Not what we should, ought, must but rather God’s having done, finished, given. If we can say, “I trust Christ,” it’s a sure sign that God has made good on God’s electing promise: I will be your God; you will be my people.

     Paul says that Abraham (who wasn’t a Christian) is the prime exemplar of faith. Old Abram saddling up the camels, his geriatric wife pregnant, heading out on the basis of a cockeyed promise from a God he had only recently, briefly met. Abraham and Sarah are about as good examples of faith as we’ve got.

     However, Jesus repeatedly rebukes his disciples for their lack of faith, little faith, slow faith, and inability to believe what prophets said about him. Fortunately, we don’t need much of it; faith the size of a mustard seed will do. Bring on those mountains.

     “Faith” categorized as a generic human tendency is insipid. Everything depends on what you have faith in. The bland expressions “people of faith” or “faith community” presume that all faiths are the same and that there are people who have “faith” and people who don’t. When someone says, “I don’t have faith in Christ,” it means, not that they are faithless but rather that they have put their faith in someone other than a Jew from Nazareth who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly. When free-floating “faith” becomes “faith in Christ,” that’s when our lackluster little lives become adventurous and talk of “faith” becomes interesting.

     Have trouble trusting that Christ is the truth about God? Be patient. Faith comes to you rather than you to it. The God whom you have difficulty turning toward has promised to turn toward you. Besides, who wants a God who is no more than the one you chose?