Emmaus City Church | United with Jesus in what He is doing in, with, and for Worcester, MA: Yeshua | He Never Says Anyone Is Too Lost to Be Found

Thursday, February 2, 2023

Yeshua | He Never Says Anyone Is Too Lost to Be Found

"The Good Shepherd Is On the Way" by Kevin Carden

Lost people arouse (Yeshua's) particular tenderness. In all their varieties. + Francis Spufford, Unapologetic

What matters is that what is lost should be found, what is broken should be made whole.

+ "Yeshua", pg. 127

This is how Francis Spufford continues in 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 second of three following Yeshua | He Sees the World at Every Moment w/ Tenderness) 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 | Take the Crazy Talk Somewhere Else, They Say

He arrives in new towns and anti-welcoming committees greet him. Take the crazy talk somewhere else, they say. But it isn't just strangers who think he's making a fool of himself. His own family think so too. They are embarrassed by him, and beginning to be frightened for him as well, correctly seeing that if he goes on like this, he is cruising for a bruising.

One day when he's preaching in a house, and the alleyway outside is blocked solid with interested onlookers, his mother and his brothers and sisters turn up in a body to retrieve him. They can't force their way through the crush, so they send in a message: tell him his family have come to take him home, tell him his mother's here and very upset, tell him it's time to stop all this nonsense. But he won't go. He won't even come out to talk to them. Instead he weaves their message straight into what he's saying. Mother? Brother? Sister? What are those? What good does it do if we only love those who love us back? God wants more than kin loving kin. He wants more than the natural bonds. He wants more than biology.

Yeshua wants our love to do more than run around the tight circle of our self-interest; more, even, than it should run around the wider circle of our altruism, if altruism means we get some kind of round-about payback for love in the end. God, he says, wants us to love people we don't even like; people we hate; people who hate us.

Yeshua | What We Deserve? He Wants Us to Have More than That

God is not in the game of harnessing fear and anger, and trying to turn them into fairness. God does not need to struggle to get from the shouting and the screaming and the sword in the night to the calm room where a judge is doing their best to see what somebody deserves.

The law says that everyone should get what they deserve, but God already knows what we deserve with terrible precision, and He wants us to have more than that. He sees that we need to do justice to each other, but He wants to give us mercy. He wants deserving to be overflooded by love.

So, if you want to live in accord with Him, you can't do it just by being law-abiding. You have to try, again, to be like Him, and to do what He does. He doesn't wait for us to come to Him where He is, out there beyond the need for the law; He comes to us, right now, where we live in the grip of our necessities, to bring us the rest of His gift, to complete the work the law began.

Yeshua | Kingdom All the Time, Every Day, Almost Every Hour

He talks about the kingdom all the time, every day, almost every hour, as much as any of the threadbare bandits in the hills who tell themselves they'll be sitting on silk cushions in the city when the christos comes. Yes, the kingdom is coming, he says. But in his mouth the great object of the province's yearning for a century and more turns ... elusive. When he talks about it, it skips from analogy to analogy, keeping all its power as heart's desire and humiliation's remedy, but sliding ever onward, impossible to pin down as a political plan.

Yeshua's kingdom apparently exists in ever-changing resemblances. He does not say what it is, only what it is like. It's like a tiny seed. It's like a big tree. Like something inside you. Like a pearl you'd give everything to possess. Like wheat growing among weeds. Like the camel climbing through the needle's eye. Like the way the world looks to children. Like a servant making good use of the master's money. Like getting a day's pay for an hour's work. Like a crooked magistrate, who has fixed the case in your favour. Like a narrow gate, a difficult road, a lamp on a stand. Like a wedding party. Like a wedding party where all the original guests have been disinvited and replaced by random passers-by. Like yeast in dough. Like a treasure, like a harvest, like a door that opens whenever you knock. Or like a door you have to bang on for hours in the middle of the night until a grumpy neighbour wakes up and lends you a loaf. The kingdom is – whatever all those likenesses have in common.

The kingdom, he seems to be saying, is something that can only be glimpsed in comparisons, because the world contains no actual example of it. And yet the world glints and winks and shines everywhere with the possibility of it.

Yeshua | Nothing Is Hidden Except to Be Revealed, He Says

Then there are His stories. The stories are always about homely, everyday things. They're about sheep, vineyards, money, weddings, bosses and servants, parents and children ...

And then you'll greet a story which is just baffling; and not because it is making some profound but hard-to-understand statement, or because it is doing the Zen thing of deliberately invoking an impossibility to jump you into an altered state. These are baffling because they seem to have several different layers of meaning going on at once.

He tells a story about a woman who has ten coins, loses one, and finds it again. He doesn't seem even to notice the nine coins she still has left. The losing and the getting back are all that stand out to him. He doesn't seem to understand ownership. It's as if someone is speaking for whom loss, and making good on it, is so urgent, so prominent in the world, that they scarcely have any attention left over for possession.

What matters is that what is lost should be found, what is broken should be made whole.

Yeshua | Lost People Arouse His Particular Tenderness. In All Their Varieties.

Lost people whose bodies or minds don't work properly. People especially mangled by the HPtFtU (Human Propensity to F#!k things Up). People who live beyond the usual bounds of sympathy, because they are ugly, or frightening, or boring, or incomprehensible, or dangerous. People who are not like us, whoever 'we' happen to be; people who are not the right kind of people, whatever that is being defined as. In theory he has come to help the lost sheep among the God-fearers, the lost sheep of Israel – that's what he says – but in practice, over and over again, he gives his whole attention to whoever he meets, including a multitude of foreigners, and members of the occupying army.

The lack of limit in what he asks of people, the limitlessness of what he wants for people, washes away the difference between insiders and outsiders. He is never recorded as saying no to anyone. Anyone can claim his time, if they can find a way to him through the crowd, and when someone does, whatever their reason is, he speaks to them as if the dust and the noise and the reaching hands had receded and nothing else were going on in the wide world but he and they talking. All his conversations seem to be personal.

Even in argument, even practising neat word-judo on a heckler with an agenda, he appears to be fully focused on the particular individual in front of him. When he offends a rich person by advising them to dump their possessions, he does not say it to push them away; it is his real prescription for what afflicts them, and when they do not take his remedy he is sorry, if unsurprised. He seems to know the names of strangers without asking. He knows things about their histories too. One by one, as they get their moment with him, they are each vividly, substantially present to him. They matter. They matter in themselves. They are not means to an end.

Yeshua | He Says More Can Be Mended than You Know

It is not a good day for him when he wins lots of new followers, or a bad day for him when he doesn't. Yeshua's sense of people is not additive. More is not better.

Each person in front of him is, for that moment, the one missing sheep. He never says that anything – anyone – is too dirty to be touched. That anyone is too lost to be found. Even in situations where there seems to be no grounds for human hope, he will not agree that hope is gone beyond recall. Wreckage may be written into the logic of the world, but he will not agree that it is all there is. He says, more can be mended than you fear. Far more can be mended than you know.

Yeshua | How Can an Unlimited Love Be Applied to a World of Limits?

To begin with, as he goes about the province, Yeshua seems to be trying to do it physically. What do you want me to do for you, he asks the people he speaks to, and very often the answer is, heal me; make me better from the diseases that this time and place in human history cannot cure. Leprosy, epilepsy, paralysis, schizophrenia. All the accidents of a biology which palpably is not safe, is not designed, is not secured from harm by the love that backs the universe.

And Yeshua does what he is asked to. He licks his fingers and makes a paste of mud and spit, he lays his hands on twitching stick-limbs and the nubs where hands used to be and the sides of heads which are canisters of unbearable noise or skittering electricity; and where he does so, without any fuss or visible fireworks, the patient shining that precedes all particular things is somehow enabled, just this once, just at this particular moment, on a tiny scale, very locally, to seep through from the brightness beyond into the here and now, into what is, and to remake it as love would have it be. Impossibilities occur. Blind eyes suddenly see. Severed nerve cells reconnect. Legs straighten, infections recede, pain fades, horrified minds quieten. Up you get, says Yeshua.

Go, get up, live, be in motion, be about your business, be the mended version of yourself. Perhaps this momentary suspension of the laws of the universe can happen because the maker of all things is now no longer outside them, impartially sustaining them, holding everything but touching nothing in particular. Now, instead, the maker is within as well, and he has hands that can reach, he has a local address in space and time from which to act.

But now, by the same token, he cannot be everywhere at once. He has only two hands, one voice. He can only touch the people who are within the reach of his hands, as he travels at foot speed or fishing-boat speed around the province. And he himself, existing in the domain of limits, has limits too. Healing people exhausts him; it makes him sway on his feet. Day after day ends with him helplessly asking his friends to get him away, and they carry him off in a boat, or up into the hills, just so he can sleep, leaving behind the vast total of the world's suffering almost unaltered, only the tiniest inroads made into it, only an infinitesimal fraction of it eased. One man doing miracles in West Asia doesn't even more the leprosy statistics. The cruelty of the cruel world reproduces itself far faster than his slow hands can move. He brings sight to blind eyes, and all the causes of blindness rage on. He interrupts one stoning, and that very week twenty other stonings proceeded without a hitch.

He can't mend the world's sorrows this way – weep though he does, berate himself though he does, say yes though he does to every request. The healing of damaged bodies can only be a sign of what he's truly come to do. His business is with the human heart in the metaphorical sense, not with the clenching muscle in our chests. He's here to mend the HPtFtU, not to cure diseases. (And yes, he knows the difference. The idea that disease is a sin, or at least a consequence of one, is very popular in the province, and Yeshua takes care to disagree whenever he comes across it.) That's what he means by the camel skipping through the needle's eye, by the lost sheep being found, by the ruined boy coming home.