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| "Jesus" by Bas Uterwijk | Post Photography |
Imagine a man ... He's the Creator in the midst of the thing made. + Francis Spufford, Unapologetic
He sees the world at every moment with the thwarted tenderness of its creator. So that he is that creator, not his spokesman or his representative or his ambassador, but the creator him- or her- or itself, no longer thwarted but also no longer immune.
+ "Yeshua", pg. 109
This is how Francis Spufford imaginatively begins Chapter 5: Yeshua, my favorite in his poetic and punchy, a bit brash with some dry British "force and crackle" coming through, yet also beautiful Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. For an introduction to Unapologetic from Spufford himself, check out:
+ Francis Spufford introduces Unapologetic (9+ minutes)
What will follow in this post (the first of three from Unapologetic) is a collection of organized excerpts featuring what Spufford describes as an invitation to "imagine a story, making a story-like sense, and having a story's chance to move us" (pg. 109).
For those familiar with Yeshua (or Jesus in His Latinized name), as well as those who are skeptical if His story has much truth or is merely the stuff of overzealous religious myth-making, I think Spufford's words craft a wonder-filled bit of holy imagination for us to receive a bit of a (re)introduction to Yeshua in 2023.
Yeshua | He Is As Human as We Are, But Responsible for the Universe
He's a male Jew in first-century Palestine, so he's probably bearded ... and quite short. He is in his early thirties in an age of hard labour and rudimentary medicine, when the average life expectancy is forty-something, so he may well be rather worn out and middle-aged.
He looks like us, for a value of 'us' which includes the entire human race. We have faces and bodies; he has a face and a body. He is as human as we are, but if you meet him, you are also meeting the being responsible for the universe ... His name is Yeshua, later to be Latinised as 'Jesus'. And what he has come for? To say some things; to do some things.
Yeshua | The Place He Has Come To, the Province that Simmers
The place he has come to (the place he has been born into) is a province of the empire that controls pretty much the whole known world. The empire has owned it for two generations, but it has not been independent for much longer. Before this empire there was another one, and another one before that. The province is not specially important, or specially rich. It has no famous sights. The only city is a huddle of yellow stone on a desert hilltop. But it is unusual. It is the only place in the world, so far, which is populated by worshippers of the God of everything. You can find scatterings of them elsewhere but this is the single place in which they are the majority, the natives. This is where their history happened. This is where they have worked their way from thinking that their God is the most important god, to thinking that He is the only God for them, to thinking that He is the only God there is.
The empire and its filthy gods encroach. Tourists wander into holy places, chattering and laughing. The empire's money with its blasphemous pictures has to be used for buying innocent, ordinary bread. It's as if the people of the province are being kept forcibly dirty, all the time. Somehow, they think, the favour of God has been forfeited.
The kingdom (of God, of heaven, apart from the empire, yet breaking into the empire) has started to represent righteousness itself, the state (in both senses of the word) in which God's people live in accord with Him again. It has become the focus of their longing. But a longing that cannot be acted upon. The occupiers are much too strong. Even tucked away in their barracks, the people know they are there ... backed up by superb organisation, matchless military technology, the wealth of the world. So the province simmers.
Yeshua | He is Called Moshiakh, 'the Anointed One' ... He Certainly Isn't Careful
The high officials of the one God's one temple perform a difficult balancing act, trying to keep the people happy, trying to keep the occupiers sweet so they don't take away even more of the province's limited autonomy. Low-level terrorism flourishes, followed by example-setting public executions. An ever-changing selection of pious groups offer ever-changing prescriptions for getting back God's approval. Preachers and would-be prophets are everywhere, prominent for a season and then gone. Some people say the rules of purity should be even stricter. Some people say you should abandon everything and go into the clean desert. Some people say you need to be washed in the province's one river. A lot of people think that the world will end soon; fear it will end soon; hope it will end soon, because then a more than human justice may put things right.
All the time, there are whispered rumours of someone, somewhere, claiming the kingship and starting the holy war to get the kingdom back. It never seems to be true, but every fanatic up in the hills knows the role is waiting to be filled. The religion has made a space for this figure, the king-who-is-to-come, the man whom the God of everything will choose to lead the uprising. He is called moshiakh, 'the anointed one', after the holy oil that kings wear. In Greek, where oil for hair is chrism, his title translates as christos. But it's a no-show so far ...
In summer the tension gets specially bad; and also at festivals, which are supposed to celebrate things being right, and make it feel much worse that they aren't. The soldiers are jumpy and resentful too. They don't like it here. The fleshpots of the exotic East it isn't. The locals are loons. Any moment, some teenage boy may try to stab you with a kitchen knife, and you can't tell if the girls are babes because they're all covered up. It's a grim little armpit of a posting. Say the wrong thing, eat the wrong thing, touch the wrong thing – any little thing can kick off a riot.
Into this setting comes Yeshua, with the love song to all that is ringing continually in him, and he says: don't be careful. He certainly isn't careful himself.
Yeshua | Nothing Lasts; Nothing But God ... He Wants Your Reckless Generosity
When crowds gather, to check out this new source of entertainment or outrage, to see if he's conducting himself like a teacher or a prophet or just possibly like a guerrillero looking for recruits – when the crowds gather, he sits them down in the sheep pasture, and he says: behave as if you never had to be afraid of consequences. Behave as if nothing you gave away could ever make you poorer, because you can never run out of what you give. Behave as if this one day we're in now were the whole time, and you didn't have to hold anything back, or to plot and scheme about tomorrow. Don't try to grip your life with tight, anxious hands. Unclench those fingers. Let it go. If someone asks for your help, give them more than they've asked for. If someone hits out at you, let them. Don't retaliate. Be the place the violence ends. Because you've got it wrong about virtue. It isn't something built up from a thousand careful, carefully measured acts.
Virtue comes, when it comes, in a rush; it comes from behaving, so far as you can, like God Himself, who makes and makes and loves and loves and is never the less for it. God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity. Try to keep what you have, and you'll lose even that. Give it away, and you'll get back more than you bargain for; more than bargaining could ever get you.
By the way, you were wanting a king? Look at that flower over there by the wall. More beautiful than any royal robe, don't you think? Better than silks; and it comes bursting out of the ground all by itself, free and gratis. It won't last? Nothing lasts; nothing but God.
Yeshua | He Doesn't Seem to Be Disgusted by Anybody, Anybody at All
He isn't a relativist, though. Far from it. He doesn't think you should relax and do what you like, and it won't really matter what. He believes in good and evil all right, to a drastic degree. He has a vivid, horrified sense of the HPtFtU (i.e. sin, or as Spufford defines it, the "Human Propensity to F%#k things Up"), in all its elaborate self-deceiving semi-oblivious encrustedness, and he talks as if it overshadowed huge swathes of human activity, including the human activities that humans tend to be proud of.
Whenever anyone asks him about the law, he usually ups the ante; he amps the law up towards a perfectionist impossibility, in which anger is forbidden as well as murder, in which desire can be as much a betrayal as adultery – in which internal states of being that apparently don't hurt (or even affect) anyone else weigh as heavily with God as external acts.
He seems to think a change is required in us as complete as the change that comes when chaff is set blazing after the harvest, and the fields billow with flame. We must all be 'salted with fire', he says. He can be frightening, indeed he can. He says it would be worth chopping off bits of yourself ... if it would rid you of what separates you from God. Yet he is an optimistic pessimist.
Come on, says somebody. How could anybody ever stand right with God, if it were as hard as you say? With God, everything is possible, he says. He annoys people when he talks like this. Because the implication of his perfectionism is that everybody is guilty; and if everybody is guilty, nobody gets to congratulate themselves, and murderers and adulterers cannot be shunned.
He does not seem to be disgusted by anybody, anybody at all.
On the other hand, he has a lot to say about self-righteousness, which he compares, not very tactfully, to a grave that looks neat and well cared for up top but is heaving with 'corruption' down below. For him, being sure you're righteous, standing on your dignity as a virtuous person, comes precious close to being dead. If you won't hear the bad news about yourself, you can't know yourself. You condemn yourself to the maintenance of an exhausting illusion, a false front to your self which keeps out doubt and with it hope, change, nourishment, breath, life. If you won't hear the bad news, you can't begin to hear the good news about yourself either. And you'll do harm. You'll be pumped up with the false confidence of virtue, and you'll think it gives you a license, and a large share of all the cruelties in the world will follow, for evil done knowingly is rather rare compared to the evil done by people who're sure that they themselves are good, and that evil is hatefully concentrated in some other person; some other person who makes your flesh creep because they have become exactly as unbearable, as creepy, as disgusting, as you fear the mess would be beneath your own mask of virtue, if you ever dared to look at it ...
+ First excerpts (subheads added) from pgs. 109-119 in Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense; more to come in ...
Bonus Video Stories about People Connecting w/ Yeshua Today
+ The More I Realized Yeshua is Our Messiah (7+ Minutes)
+ New Age to New Life in Yeshua (8+ Minutes)
+ Jewish Teacher Becomes a Student of Yeshua (6+ Minutes)
+ Millionaire Spiritually Bankrupt until I Met Yeshua (5+ Minutes)
+ Yeshua Gave Me Ultimate Self Worth (4+ Minutes)
Recent posts on overviews of the Story of Yeshua found in the Bible:
Creation, Crisis, Covenant, Christ, Church, (New) Creation | The God Who Loves Kindness, Justice, and Righteousness | The Whole Gospel for Guilt-Innocent, Shame-Honor, and Fear-Power Cultures | The Story of God in Nature | Black Identity in the Story of God | God Is Fully Present with Us | Embracing the Body We're Given | At Work in a Sanitation Truck
With wild wonder and hope,
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