An Unexpected Light

An Unexpected Light—March 1, 2018

“The woman said to [Jesus], ‘Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth’.” [John 4:19-24] 

Our brains, as wonderful and amazing creations as they are, need boxes to put things in… even when the items in front of us won’t fit into a box of any size.  And when we come across something we cannot quite make sense of, these brains of ours start forcing them in and try to convince us that nothing is spilling over or getting bent.

Take an instance you and I have all lived through before: you are driving along the road on a gloriously sunny day under a blue sky, and as you look at the road stretch up ahead of you, you see a shimmer that appears to lay across the asphalt in the distance.  We all know by now that what we are seeing is a mirage, but for a split second our brains are still fooled and tell us we are seeing water, standing in large pools, across the road.  The first time you see a mirage, you might actually be convinced that the road is flooded up ahead… and that starts your brain worrying about questions like, “How will we get across this water?  How deep is it?  Is it flowing or standing?  Will my car be able to get through?”

What’s actually happening, of course, is that our eyes are seeing refracted light because the temperature of the air right above the road is bending the light rays (because of a difference in temperature in the air there), and we are seeing the blue of the sky down on the ground.  But here’s the trouble: your and my brains don’t like to leave that data unprocessed—we don’t just say, “Blue light down on the ground…” but our brains jump to the next question, “What IS that?”  And that’s when the boxes come out.  Our brains look for anything to explain the unexpected light on the road up ahead, and they start trotting out boxes from past experience.  Since the only thing that looks at all like what your eyes are telling you they are seeing is a pool of clear water reflecting the sunlight, your brain files a report that says, “You are seeing water up ahead.”  But really, of course, there’s never any water there, and your eyes don’t really see a pond. They just see an unexpected light, and then our brains try to make sense of it the only way they can—by forcing it into a mental box. 

We have learned to tell our brains not to jump to that conclusion when we are driving along the road, but we don’t realize that we have the same trouble when it comes to the way of Jesus.  We know now not to think there is deep standing water covering the road ahead on a sunny day, but we still try and force Jesus into a box to make sense of him.

And so often, the box we try and cram Jesus and his way into is… religion.

We assume, hearing Jesus talk about God, show us the presence of the divine, and bring an unexpected light into our world.  And because the usual category for “God-stuff” is religion, we figure that Jesus also will fit into that box.  Jesus, we assume, must have come to teach us the “right” religion, or to give us the correct “religious rules,” or to give us the proper technique to correctly “practice” our religion.  We go searching his words for the “right” way to pray, the list of ten correct Things You Have to Believe in order to get into heaven, and a list of proper good behaviors by which we are supposed to earn our way into God’s good graces.  It’s the mirage on the highway all over again—we take the light in front of us and try and put it into some kind of category that already fits with our experience.  And, well, religion, we know.  A way of life staked on grace… that is foreign and strange and unfamiliar territory, and our brains can’t process the raw data of it.  So we take the way of Jesus, and we try and put it in a religion box.

And when that happens, something vital is lost in translation.  Not only that, but we end up missing the point of what Jesus is really about, and we end up starting to ask questions that Jesus never intends to pose.  When you glimpse a mirage on the road, you would \ start asking yourself what you are going to have to do to get through the standing water on the road if you really believed that’s what you were seeing.  And when we think that Jesus is selling us on a religion, rather than on his way of living in the audacious grace of God, we start asking all sorts of well-intentioned, but totally-misguided questions, and they often start with, “What do I have to do…? 

In his book, The Astonished Heart, Robert Farrar Capon puts the trouble this way:

“To begin with, Christianity is not a religion; it’s the proclamation of the end of religion. Religion is a human activity dedicated to the job of reconciling God to humanity and humanity to itself. The Gospel, however—the Good News of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—is the astonishing announcement that God has done the whole work of reconciliation without a scrap of human assistance.  It is the bizarre proclamation that religion is over, period. All the efforts of the human race to straighten up the mess of history by plausible religious devices—all the chicken sacrifices, all the fasts, all the mysticism, all the moral exhortations, all the threats—have been cancelled by God for lack of saving interest. More astonishingly still, their purpose has been fulfilled, once and for all and free for nothings, by the totally non-religious death and resurrection of a Galilean nobody.”

That’s it, isn’t it?  It’s like Jesus brings this unexpected light before our very eyes, and our brains want to explain it in terms of “religion,” when Jesus himself refuses that box in his own words.  Christianity-as-religion is the way we try and box the light in, rather than seeing Jesus on his own terms, leading us into a whole way of life, lived free of all questions that begin, “What do I have to do to get God’s love… to be saved… to get into heaven… to earn acceptance?”

In the conversation Jesus has with a random stranger at Jacob’s well, Jesus says as much.  This stranger, a Samaritan woman, tries to steer the conversation toward anything away from herself and her own actual life and heart, and so she opens up the can of worms of talking religion in polite company.  She gives Jesus the chance to make his religious sales-pitch—and Jesus balks, because he isn’t selling anything in the first place, only giving things away for free.  “All right,” she says, “since you’re a Jew, and Jews have their Temple in Jerusalem, make your case for why we should worship there, when our parents and grandparents told us to worship here at our own mountain.”  She is asking a religion question—a question of which “box” to look in for “proper worship location.”  If Jesus had an answer, this would have been his chance to give it.  This would have been his moment to say, “If you want access to the true God, you must make an appointment at a properly licensed franchise, and the only location in your area is indeed the Jerusalem Office.  Go there.”  But Jesus doesn’t answer that way.  There are no boxes to his answer at all, in fact—only light.

You’ll also notice that Jesus doesn’t respond by saying, “If you want access to God, you must first pray this prayer to invite God into your heart, since God isn’t allowed to begin service without a signed contract.”  Nor does he say, “If you want to meet God, you have to get your life together properly first—I notice a lot of bad behaviors on your resume, and I’d suggest doing these five things as acts to show your sorrow.”  You won’t hear Jesus insist on a club membership, distribute a prerequisite list of requirements to be considered for a spot in heaven, or solicit a donation.  There is only his unexpected light.  “The hour has now come when we don’t fuss anymore about which location to worship God—it never mattered to God, but finally you all are ready to hear it.  It’s not about location, or music style, or brand-name, or denominational government-style, or adherence to Robert’s Rules of Order… it’s about God’s way of putting things right from God’s side and our way of daring (even half-heartedly) to believe the voice of the Spirit whispering in our ears that it is true.  Spirit and truth and unexpected light.

That’s what it is to walk the way of Jesus. For all the ways we try and box him into the category of religion, with all the lists of disqualifying behaviors, charts of preferred “family values,” catalogs of required rituals, magical thinking, and pious deal-making that come along with religion, Jesus has always been simply a reflection of unexpected divine light right here at ground level with us, and his death and resurrection have done, by themselves, what none of us thought we were trying to do with all of that junk we pulled out of the religion box.

What if today, we saw our faith in Jesus less as a matter of practicing the right religion and then rounding up new club members, and more as a matter of walking the way ahead of us in freedom, right on ahead to where the light is?

What if we let go of the mirage we thought we saw flowing across the road, and instead allowed Jesus’ surprising grace to meet our eyes and our hearts on his own terms, without a box to cram him into?

Lord Jesus, come to us on your own terms, and lead us on your way, beyond the religious boxes we want to put you into.