The Cure for Our Collective Insanity

I have come to conclude that the human race suffers from a collective insanity.  This insanity manifests as abuse and anger, which is ultimately driven by the engine of fear.  We all suffer from this collective insanity, and as a result, we inflict enormous abuse to ourselves and to each other.

The same was true in Jesus' time.  Jesus prescribed a solution in Luke 13-.1-9, the parable of the fig tree.  The owner of a garden discovers a fig tree that is dying, so he tells the gardener about it.  The gardener replies that manure will be spread on the fig tree, and that it will be cut down in a year if no fruit grows from the tree.

It speaks volumes about our theology that most sermons on this text identify God as the gardener, and interpret the gardener's agenda as destroying the tree because the tree has not born fruit.  If we read the text carefully, we see that the gardener's agenda is to save the tree.  More importantly, if the tree fails to bear fruit, the tree is dying, and the act of cutting down the tree is redundant because the tree is already dead.

God is not the gardener or the owner.  God is the soil and the water.  God's role in this story, and in our story, is to bring us life, and God wants nothing more than for us to stop hurting ourselves and each other.  The last thing that the human race needs is more violence and death.  If there is more violence and death in this world, it is a product of our insanity, not God's acts or omissions.

Here is the good news of the story: it is the nature of the tree to grow fruit, just as it is our nature to live as God's people and overcome our insanity.  The human race is lost, but all it needs to do to be found is for us to look at ourselves, see that our collective insanity is causing us to hurt ourselves and each other, and do what is natural to us, which is to live in peace with ourselves and with one another.  God is eager to be in relationship with us and to impart grace to us so that we can be holy.

How the Church Persecutes Jesus

If you are trying to destroy a prophet and the prophet's message, you would think that the most effective way to accomplish this is by killing the prophet.  This is what the residents of Nazareth tried to do unsuccessfully.

Rome learned the hard way that killing prophets not only isn't the most effective way to silence them--it actually has the opposite effect.  Look at Jesus.  Jesus is executed by the Roman state by the most cruel and humiliating manner imaginable.  Killing Jesus failed to silence Jesus and the emerging movement that arose around him.  In fact, it empowered and energized the movement.  Rome learned the hard way that by killing a prophet, you actually send the opposite message intended.  You send the message that the prophet's message is important enough that it has to be removed.  You reveal your own inadequacies and powerlessness rather than the powerlessness of the prophet.

Over the centuries, Rome decided that it had to do something about the emerging Christian movement as it gained influence and numbers.  Everything about following Jesus cut against everything that Rome believed.  In Rome's worldview, there was nothing as important as the Roman State.  In fact, there were a number of rituals that were practiced that required citizen's to affirm the supreme importance of the State.  Roman society was built upon established standards of behavior in terms of class and gender. 

The emerging Christian movement was challenging all these understandings.  Followers of Jesus followed Jesus first and Rome second.  Followers of Jesus, paraphrasing Paul, believed that as Jesus had initiated a new Kingdom and new order of creation, there was no longer slave or free, and no longer male or female.

Rome silenced Jesus by doing something much more insidious than murder.  Rome silenced Jesus by endorsing Jesus and making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Or more specifically, by re-framing Jesus' message to one that was palatable to everything that Rome represented.  Jesus became the mouthpiece of Rome.  Christian leaders started dressing and acting like Roman politicians.  Churches started being built consistent with the architectural style of Roman seats of government.  Jesus' radical teachings about the Kingdom of God, loving our enemies, and concern for the outcast was downplayed if not outright ignored.

Here is a lesson for the Church.  Let Jesus speak with all his power and glory.  Let the teachings of Jesus transform us and make us a new creation.  The way to kill a prophet is to transform the prophet's message to one that simply parrots our preexisting beliefs and values.  Let me put it this way: if the Jesus that we believe in does not require us to radically change our lives, we are not believing in the real Jesus.