What do you find most compelling about Jesus? Why do you follow him?
A few things come to mind. First is that I think I love Jesus because he comes as this embodiment of a God that it’s very hard for me to wrap rings around. So, for instance when I read the Hebrew scriptures, I read this account of a huge creator God, Yahweh, that’s so big and yet it’s very difficult to read through some of the contradictions and paradoxes that are seemingly there you know? (laughs) and to really know what to do with God’s name, I AM, you know? (laughs)
What Jesus does, is comes and embodies that - in a way we can emulate and follow and to me Jesus isn’t a contradiction but is a fulfilment and an embodiment of that God.
Perfect love
That’s part of what the incarnation was about, was to, you know. We’d floundered in our message for so long that God comes to love, show us what perfect love looks like. So in a really practical way I love Jesus’ imagination, I love how he transforms, asks polarising questions and really rejects the political goals of his day and doesn’t settle for anything less than God’s dream. So I think that imagination really inspires us to what we call ‘prophetic stunts’ or ‘theological pranks’.
The truth
You know, when he takes money from a fish’s mouth, or when we give out money on Wall Street, I think those are things that provoke the imagination and invite people into truth. One of the things I think is so important about Jesus’ life is that invitation, it’s not something that Jesus goes around forcing down people’s throats, you know that ‘I’m this God, bow down,’ but he lives the mystery of who he is and lives the mystery of God’s truth in a way that magnetises people. I think one of the realities of the incarnation of Jesus is that the mystery is as magnetic as the truth is, so people are just drawn to Jesus by the trail of breadcrumbs behind him, and when they figure out who he is, like ‘Oh, you’re the son of God’, he’s like ‘Sssh! Don’t go around telling everybody!’ (laughs)
He’s like: ‘Let people figure it out, let them find out for themselves, then that truth is theirs, it’s not something that’s been handed to them by religious folks, you know, so I think that has a lot to inform how we interact with the world we live in and especially those outside Christendom, how we interact with people who have a lot of questions about Jesus.
What is God’s dream for the world, do you think?
Well what Jesus talked about pretty much every time he opened his mouth was the kingdom of God, that was obviously politically loaded language, and he uses a lot of the popular language of his day to spin it on its head and talk about what the world should look like.
I think the things we see he’s talking about are the real stuff going on around them, you know like day labourers and wages and courts and widows and orphans. And so I think in the same way our faith engages the world that we live in politically and socially and in a very peculiar way so it’s not just about throwing Herod out of office, or about giving the world a better form of the kingdom of this world. It is about actually creating a new kind of people and a peculiar kind of politics that doesn’t interact with evil on its own terms, but really calls the world to conform to the norms of God’s kingdom.
And that’s where I think the great challenge is today, there’s a lot of temptation, especially in this country: we have to be culturally relevant, right? Relevant magazine (laughs) Relevant magazine asked me to write an article it was called ‘the marketable revolution’ and it was of particular relevancy (laughs). They didn’t print it!
But I think that one of the things that Christianity has often been is this peculiar thing of being counter cultural, a group of people who find themselves ‘cultural refugees’, like John the Baptist, who go to the desert, who are like wearing camel skin and eating locusts, like that was totally weird, and the funny thing is that irrelevancy is very attractive right now - the irrelevancy is relevant because the culture is so empty, so that’s the paradox that we live in and we have to be as Jesus says as shrewd as serpents but innocent as doves as we navigate that.
What Jesus does, is comes and embodies that - in a way we can emulate and follow and to me Jesus isn’t a contradiction but is a fulfilment and an embodiment of that God. That’s part of what the incarnation was about, was to, you know. We’d floundered in our message for so long that God comes to love, show us what perfect love looks like. So in a really practical way I love Jesus’ imagination, I love how he transforms, asks polarising questions and really rejects the political goals of his day and doesn’t settle for anything less than God’s dream. So I think that imagination really inspires us to what we call ‘prophetic stunts’ or ‘theological pranks’.