JESUS Short Essay 4 of 4

JESUS

by Norm Lowry

We are actually free to choose the way of love which Jesus has shown us.— John Stoner

Last evening while sitting in my prison dayroom thinking about how to best write about Jesus, a fellow inmate, Derrick, came and said, “Hey Norm, thanks for writing a letter to me.  What’s it say?

“Dear Derrick, I love you!  You’re a free man!  What are you going to do with your freedom?”

“Derrick laughed nervously.  I had just broken a couple of sacred rules:  Never say “I love you” to another inmate and never talk about freedom to a man not scheduled for near release.  Derrick smiled and said, “You’re weird, Norm,” and walked away.  

At first glance, most folks don’t much care for the Jesus I know and love.  He didn’t come to cosign any existing religion or to start a new one.  Nor did he come to placate any governance other than that of his nonviolent dad, our Creator.  Saying “No” to church and state, for the sake of God’s nonviolent love, got Jesus arrested and executed, as a traitor to both church and state.

The nonviolence of Jesus is quite obvious in the Bible’s New Testament. His call to love both neighbor and enemy was a call to defeat evil with the greater power of love.    But  most folks start getting nervous when it comes to comparing the nonviolent Son to his supposedly violent Creator-God Dad, in the Old Testament.  In Bible college, my venerated professors said this was due to the “dispensational” (changing) nature of our supposedly unchangeable God.  This pretty much sounded like a large crock of “skubula” (Greek, for crap), to me.  People change but the God and Jesus I intimately know never change.  

Beside going to Bible college, I’ve read the Bible in just about every English translation there is (many of them multiple times), and I’ve read 12-1500 supporting God books.  In spite of the opinions of all the respected church leaders and writers, I still see the Bible in terms of the nonviolent God of love creating all things and calling them all good.  Along the way, the humans decided to reclassify all these good things, according to good and bad—a conundrum not of God’s doing.  Their resulting confusion resulted in good desire becoming rivalry—becoming violence—becoming murder; a complete platform from which to challenge our nonviolent Creator-God (or so they thought).

Well, the humans took charge of the dialog and soon had God changing his mind and calling good, bad. Now there were just too many bad humans.  So God had to repent and destroy the world (except for a few marginally good humans and animals), and the humans had God right where they wanted him (or did they?)  The dialog continued and illicit religion joined with illicit state, for the purpose of dominating humanity, in the name of an illicit and violent God.  Enter Jesus….

Jesus lovingly kept the dialog straight and held the preachers, teachers and his own followers to the same nonviolent standard of love.  When they spoke truth, Jesus called them godly.  When they slanted the truth in their favor or lied, Jesus called them “snakes,” reptilian  sneaks,” and ‘devils” (THE MESSAGE).  

That Jesus’ Dad was God and his mom was human has become a never-ending discussion of godness vs. humanity.  But to what end?  Jesus referred to the prophets who taught that “the human one [Jesus] is the son of God precisely because he is the son of man made in the image of God, and is thus not different from God but like God” (John Stoner).  This is pivotal yet largely despised by preachers and teachers of both his and our day, as it affirmed the godness of all people and nullified all lists of exclusions.  Jesus took away the illicit church’s and state’s ability to control and/or manipulate others, save by escalating violence, which was by some strange dynamic—the grim result of rejecting Jesus’ way of nonviolence— set loose to rampage by Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Yet compassion, the gift of our nonviolent Creator-God, was also released to escalate by Jesus’ death and resurrection.  And, as taught by Jesus, nonviolent love will prevail against violence, with its lack of love.  Jesus’ kingdom is emerging through nonviolent transformation, as opposed to the illicit church’s lie of evil violence being disposed of by righteous violence.

Does our society ever persecute Jesus’s followers for their nonviolent love?  Come and visit me some day and we can discuss the why of my imprisonment.  “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain.”

8/24/16