deeper demand for justice, for love, for humility, and for reconciliation.
In the texts Jesus comes across as a lively, dynamic, restlesslycompassionate man. He chooses not to distribute approval to the pious, and he offers encouragement to people struggling with faith. “Go and learn what this means,” he says at one point. “ ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ ” He attacks the professionally religious for obeying small rules of behavior and missing the core purpose of a life of faith. “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” he says in the Gospel of Matthew, “for … you have neglected the more important matters of the law, like justice and mercy and faithfulness.”
This unexpected splash of cold water woke me up. During one summer while I was still in high school, I suffered a bleeding that left me immobilized for a week. Looking for something to read, I picked up the Bible and worked my way through the gospels. Again I was struck by Jesus’ energy, his restlessness, his bubbling passion. And having learned that about him, I was less surprised to read that he regularly felt great frustration when his message did not seem to penetrate the minds of those who loved him and followed him closely. To many he said sadly, “You have eyes but you do not see, you have ears but you do not hear.” And in one of the most poignant passages of all, he evoked the image of children using music to try to elicit some kind of response, happy or sad, and failing, implicitly likening this to his own inability to generate a response:
To what shall I compare this present generation?
You are like children calling to each other in the marketplace
,
“I piped for you and you would not dance;
I wailed for you and you would not mourn.”
This person, whose two-thousand-year-old story was sitting in millions of bookshelves and pews, was not, by my reading, someone who floated with gentle detachment above the sufferings of the world. This was a man who loved those around him with an intensity that even he sometimes found hard to bear.
My own faith was still in its early stages, but what I read moved me and drew me in. I didn’t know if I really understood it, or if I could live up to it, but the reverberations of his fervent way of seeing the world began to resonate inside me. And once that resonance started, it started me down a path of wonderment and growth and change.
While I was in college, I considered becoming a minister, but I rejected the idea decisively. It seemed like the ministry would demand too high a standard of behavior. I knew my own weaknesses and flaws, and I knew that even if I managed to control my greed, resentment, pettiness, lust, and pride, they would all still reside within me—and somehow that seemed even worse than acting on them. How could I pretend to be someone pure and loving when there were plenty of moments when I was not? How could I represent an institution with so many glorious ideals and so many ugly historical failures? The answer seemed clear: I could not.
The decisive moment came for me at the end of my years in college, when I experienced a reawakening of my faith that is difficult to describe and even more difficult to explain. It came at a time when I felt broken and adrift, uncertain about my deepest values and my direction. I was not sure whether God existed and whether it mattered. I felt caught in a spiral of expectations about what I desired to be and knowledge of how frequently I failed. And at that point I met a young woman who asked me a very simple question: Had I ever mentioned my unhappiness in prayer? Had I ever actually spoken to God about the matter?
I was embarrassed to say no. My first reaction was that it didn’t make sense to do so. Later I turned the thought around: What could I lose if I tried it? The greatest risk, it seemed to me, would be silence—and the resulting disappointment. So outside on a small bench one evening I cast my prayer into
In the texts Jesus comes across as a lively, dynamic, restlesslycompassionate man. He chooses not to distribute approval to the pious, and he offers encouragement to people struggling with faith. “Go and learn what this means,” he says at one point. “ ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ ” He attacks the professionally religious for obeying small rules of behavior and missing the core purpose of a life of faith. “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” he says in the Gospel of Matthew, “for … you have neglected the more important matters of the law, like justice and mercy and faithfulness.”
This unexpected splash of cold water woke me up. During one summer while I was still in high school, I suffered a bleeding that left me immobilized for a week. Looking for something to read, I picked up the Bible and worked my way through the gospels. Again I was struck by Jesus’ energy, his restlessness, his bubbling passion. And having learned that about him, I was less surprised to read that he regularly felt great frustration when his message did not seem to penetrate the minds of those who loved him and followed him closely. To many he said sadly, “You have eyes but you do not see, you have ears but you do not hear.” And in one of the most poignant passages of all, he evoked the image of children using music to try to elicit some kind of response, happy or sad, and failing, implicitly likening this to his own inability to generate a response:
To what shall I compare this present generation?
You are like children calling to each other in the marketplace
,
“I piped for you and you would not dance;
I wailed for you and you would not mourn.”
This person, whose two-thousand-year-old story was sitting in millions of bookshelves and pews, was not, by my reading, someone who floated with gentle detachment above the sufferings of the world. This was a man who loved those around him with an intensity that even he sometimes found hard to bear.
My own faith was still in its early stages, but what I read moved me and drew me in. I didn’t know if I really understood it, or if I could live up to it, but the reverberations of his fervent way of seeing the world began to resonate inside me. And once that resonance started, it started me down a path of wonderment and growth and change.
While I was in college, I considered becoming a minister, but I rejected the idea decisively. It seemed like the ministry would demand too high a standard of behavior. I knew my own weaknesses and flaws, and I knew that even if I managed to control my greed, resentment, pettiness, lust, and pride, they would all still reside within me—and somehow that seemed even worse than acting on them. How could I pretend to be someone pure and loving when there were plenty of moments when I was not? How could I represent an institution with so many glorious ideals and so many ugly historical failures? The answer seemed clear: I could not.
The decisive moment came for me at the end of my years in college, when I experienced a reawakening of my faith that is difficult to describe and even more difficult to explain. It came at a time when I felt broken and adrift, uncertain about my deepest values and my direction. I was not sure whether God existed and whether it mattered. I felt caught in a spiral of expectations about what I desired to be and knowledge of how frequently I failed. And at that point I met a young woman who asked me a very simple question: Had I ever mentioned my unhappiness in prayer? Had I ever actually spoken to God about the matter?
I was embarrassed to say no. My first reaction was that it didn’t make sense to do so. Later I turned the thought around: What could I lose if I tried it? The greatest risk, it seemed to me, would be silence—and the resulting disappointment. So outside on a small bench one evening I cast my prayer into
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