Training For Something Greater
This weekend Dr. David Wray is coming in from Abilene to share some thoughts with us about Spiritual Formation. David was one of my professors and has a had huge influence on me as a teacher, learner, and follower of Jesus Christ.
Right now the lectures are in full swing at ACU. I almost went. It came down to going there or going skiing in Colorado next week. No brainer. Next week I’ll be buying lift tickets and tapes of the lectures I missed.
I really appreciate the discussion about “The Passion” that we’ve been having around here over the last week. I’ve asked some questions and shared a few opinions. I’ve had good friends disagree with me sharply and people I don’t know very well chime in with support. The conversation here has spilled over into email and face to face discussions. I have no idea how you’ve found all this, but I have found it to be extremely helpful.
If I were rewriting my previous posts on this topic I would delete a few sentences and sharpen the point on some others. But in my mind, and at my site, that’s not what blogging is about. This is a conversation. This is me thinking out loud and you getting a chance to think out loud with me by making comments. (I wish I had more time to interact with the individual comments that are made, but I don’t.) Not everything I write here is my “official position” on any given subject. Sometimes I’m submitting my off-the-wall thoughts, tentative conclusions, and hair-brained ideas to the wisdom (and sometimes for the amusement) of the community that reads this blog.
I’m saying all this because I know there are a variety of people reading this thing. Not everyone necessarily understands what I’m trying to do here. I’m usually pretty careful about what I say when I’m preaching. I’ve found that a sermon is not a very good place to think out loud unless I make sure people know that is what I’m doing, and even then . . .
When I’m having coffee with a friend, I’ve got a lot of freedom to express myself and not worry too much about what he will think. If I do say something too far off base, he can call me on it and I can refine my communication. I view this blog as being something in between a coffee conversation and something I might say from the pulpit. This is not an intimate conversation between friends, but it is not an act of formal communication either.
Whatever it is, I’m glad you’re a part of it. Thanks for reading.
By the way, Spencer Burke has posted an interesting article about “The Passion” over at the ooze.
Hip New Churches Pray to a Different Drummer
(Thanks Mike Cope)
“. . . you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
Anne Lamott
Frederica Mathewes-Green has written an interesting article on the sufferings of Jesus. (via fluidfaith)
Most of us have yet to see Mel Gibsons “The Passion,” but weve gained one sure impression: its bloody. “I wanted to bring you there,” Gibson told Peter J. Boyer in September 15s New Yorker magazine. “I wanted to be true to the Gospels. That has never been done before.”
This goal means showing us what real scourging and crucifixion would look like. “I didnt want to see Jesus looking really pretty,” Gibson goes on. “I wanted to mess up one of his eyes, destroy it.”
Its a mark of our age that we dont believe something is realistic unless it is brutal. But theres another factor to consider. When the four evangelists were writing their own accounts of the Passion, they didnt take Gibsons approach. None of them depict Jesus with a destroyed eye. In fact, the descriptions of Jesus beating and crucifixion are as minimal as the writers can make them.
“Having scourged Jesus, Pilate delivered him to be crucified,” the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) agree. “When they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him.”
Little more than a dozen verses later he is dead. The evangelists did not linger over his suffering in order to stir our empathy. The account of physical action is so brisk that, back when I was in seminary, I asked one of my professors why we presume Jesus was nailed to the Cross, rather than bound with ropes. He supposed it was because Paul later refers to redemption through Christs blood. (It slipped the mind of both of us that, in St. John’s Gospel, St. Thomas puts his finger into the wounds in Jesus’ hands.)
If Mel Gibson had allotted his time the way the evangelists do, the majority of his film would have been about the swirl of people around Jesus in his last days, how they interact with him and what they do because of him. The scourging and crucifixion would have passed in a flash.
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