Monday of the Third Week of Lent
Coming home to Nazareth was risky. Neighbors and family remember him running around as a toddler with a load in his diaper. Town gossip questioned his parentage. They recalled the gawky, adolescent Jesus. He’s back home after going down to Judea to join up with another one of those wacky apocalyptic movements, this time with an unhinged wild man at the River Jordan. In very little time, his hometown had had it with him.
Attempting to hurl Jesus off a cliff wasn’t a one time thing. We who claim his name have tried to do it for two millennia. We do it by sanitizing him. We do it by domesticating him. We do it by making him into some sort of good luck charm.
Jesus was a troublemaker. He made people uncomfortable. He rocked the boat. People who heard him were apt to say, “Somebody is going to kill this man.”
So to make ourselves feel more comfortable, we’ve turned him into some warm and fuzzy celestial boy scout floating about doing good deeds. But the word “nice” is nowhere to be found in the whole of the Bible.
It’s preferable to turn him into good ol’ plastic Jesus: “I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my plastic Jesus ‘sittin on the dashboard of my car. He don’t slip and he don’t slide, ‘cause his feet are magnetized, ‘sittin on the dashboard of my car.”
But nobody wants to hurl a boy scout or a good luck charm over a cliff.
The flesh and blood Jesus “comforted-the-afflicted” and “afflicted-the-comfortable.” His Kingdom of God movement turned the world on its head. He questioned and unnerved, so much so that he drew the attention of the domination system (Rome) of his times. He was a threat and he still is.
The flesh and blood Jesus says that those easily scapegoated and marginalized are greater than we. The ones turned into a “they” or the “other” are placed front and center in the Kingdom: the homeless, the underemployed, the trans couple, the addicted, the morbidly obese, the illegal immigrant, the incarcerated, the uninsured, those on death row, the aborted, the emotionally troubled ...
Maybe it’s time to hurl good ‘ol plastic Jesus off a cliff.
-Timothy J. Cronin