Need a Little Romantic Jesus
I know it's almost Valentine's Day, and everyone is thinking about love, commitment, relationships. Or else protesting the holiday and celebrating Single's Awareness Day. Regardless, romance is on people's minds.
The kind I want to talk about is capital-R: that is, Romantic. Romanticism, the literary movement at the turn of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century that focused on emotions as the way to experience the world instead of the filter of rationalism. I have a class about it this semester, so it's on my mind. Today we were reading Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."
First I should say, Blake himself was very anti-religious. Many of his poems point out the hypocrisy of the church of the time, how it failed to help the poor, had corrupt leaders, things like that. "Marriage" is actually designed to stand against everything Christianity was at the time; it talks of Satan as a hero (a la Milton), Angels as stupid and wrong, and the Ten Commandments as the source of strife.
And yet, reading this poem with my background and my faith, I am nevertheless struck by something Blake says: "If Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree [here he basically says that Jesus broke several commandments]... Jesus was all virtue and acted from impulse, not from rules."
Obviously, the bit about loving Christ to the greatest degree resonated with me as being so so true, regardless of how Blake intended the line to be read. But I want to look more deeply into the second part of that: "Jesus was all virtue and acted from impulse, not from rules."
When I was younger I saw the Old and New Testaments as entirely separate- the one telling about the early days, God's anger and wrath, and the other as Christ almost negating that with salvation. Obviously this is an extreme oversimplification, as I now understand. Themes cross over, prophecies come true, Jesus even preaches about Old Testament scriptures. And you see angry!Jesus and forgiving!God, too.
The fact remains, though, that in the Old Testament people's lives were dictated by the law. The entire book of Leviticus enumerates laws for the priests to follow, and many other laws and customs are prescribed in other books.
In Jesus' time, too, there were rules to be followed. And Jesus broke many of them: He worked on the Sabbath, gathering food (Matthew 12:1-3; Mark 2:23-7; Luke 6:1-4) and healing people (Matt 12:9-13, Mark 3:1-5; Luke 6:6-10; John 5:1-13). This is in all 4 Gospels, which doesn't happen often. He also protected the woman from stoning, which the law prescribed as the punishment for adultery. He hung out with people he shouldn't, according to custom: the Samaritan woman, tax collectors, all manner of sinners, the people Jews were told would make them unclean and unholy.
He even broke the biggest rule of all, the one rule everyone can depend on: people die. He broke that, winning eternal life for His followers. (Ok, so the plan originally wasn't for death (see Garden of Eden) but because we humans messed up it became the reality, a rule we could not break ourselves.) At His death the temple curtain tore, allowing people to see the holy of holies for themselves; the rules said only the high priest could do that, and only once a year.
So, yeah. Some pretty big rule breaking going on. What about Jesus "acting from impulse?" This one is a little bit more sketchy. He had human impulses, being fully human Himself, but I'm not sure he acted on them. You could argue the overturning the money lenders in the temple was done out of impulsive anger, and I think His moment in the Garden of Gethsemane asking "Let this cup pass away" (Luke 22:42, for example) came from a purely human impulse to fear death. He overcame that immediately, though.
BUT we can look at impulse from another perspective, too. Blake talks about childhood a lot in his poetry and how children have it exactly right: they question rules and advice, and they pretty much do what they want. Pure impulse.
Ever notice how accepting young children are? Some studies indicate they don't notice differences in color, or disabilities, unless it is pointed out to them. They share with everyone; one little girl I'd never met before ran up to me and offered me popcorn.
Granted, they can be extraordinarily selfish, too. And cruel. But I think they are good more often than bad. And certainly I don't agree with Blake that every emotion, every fleeting fancy, is worth pursuing. We have to exercise judgement when it comes to exercising our impulses. But Blake's point about actions stemming from love of our neighbor being virtuous does have merit.
Which brings me right back to Jesus: He loved everyone. He loved the whole world so much that He was willing to die to save it. That is Christ's greatest impulse, to love. It's also the impulse that drives children to play with others, share their toys, please their parents. (Seriously. Give a small child a compliment; see how they react.) We are frequently told to be like little children. In our faith, yes, but I think also in our willingness to love and open up to others.
This is why I am a Christian. It is freeing. It frees me from my bondage to sin. I am free to do the things I want, free to enjoy life, free. Free will (hmm... coincidence that it's called that??) means that sometimes I use this freedom in ways that God doesn't always like, but that is how you learn.
Part of what I think the church as a whole needs to do is talk more about Christ as a freeing presence. Not one who shackles you with rules and expectations, who wants to limit your friends and hobbies. Not someone who would trap you in hell for disobedience. We're all going to be disobedient at times. We need to show the world the freeing Christ, who breaks customs like ostracizing the kid who acts a bit different, ignoring the homeless man on the street, denying that there's things going wrong in your life, isolating ourselves via technology and pressures to be self-sufficient and successful. We need to act on our impulse to love everybody and the world. We can't love things we don't experience.
Because once they understand how freeing it truly is to have Christ as a savior, they will begin to view the expectations differently, because they are there. It would be something you do because you want to, because you feel it in your heart that it's right, because God calls you to it, not to keep shucking off the shackles of hell. It becomes an impulse, then, a desire springing from inside ourselves. And once we start acting in love, Christians will actually start resembling Christ.
So, "Jesus was all virtue and acted from impulse, not from rules." He broke rules to free us from them, to give us freedom to act in love. He acted out of the impulses of love to reach out to people, welcome them, and give us an example of the same.
Wouldn't a little Romantic Jesus do the world a lot of good?
The kind I want to talk about is capital-R: that is, Romantic. Romanticism, the literary movement at the turn of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century that focused on emotions as the way to experience the world instead of the filter of rationalism. I have a class about it this semester, so it's on my mind. Today we were reading Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."
First I should say, Blake himself was very anti-religious. Many of his poems point out the hypocrisy of the church of the time, how it failed to help the poor, had corrupt leaders, things like that. "Marriage" is actually designed to stand against everything Christianity was at the time; it talks of Satan as a hero (a la Milton), Angels as stupid and wrong, and the Ten Commandments as the source of strife.
And yet, reading this poem with my background and my faith, I am nevertheless struck by something Blake says: "If Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree [here he basically says that Jesus broke several commandments]... Jesus was all virtue and acted from impulse, not from rules."
Obviously, the bit about loving Christ to the greatest degree resonated with me as being so so true, regardless of how Blake intended the line to be read. But I want to look more deeply into the second part of that: "Jesus was all virtue and acted from impulse, not from rules."
When I was younger I saw the Old and New Testaments as entirely separate- the one telling about the early days, God's anger and wrath, and the other as Christ almost negating that with salvation. Obviously this is an extreme oversimplification, as I now understand. Themes cross over, prophecies come true, Jesus even preaches about Old Testament scriptures. And you see angry!Jesus and forgiving!God, too.
The fact remains, though, that in the Old Testament people's lives were dictated by the law. The entire book of Leviticus enumerates laws for the priests to follow, and many other laws and customs are prescribed in other books.
In Jesus' time, too, there were rules to be followed. And Jesus broke many of them: He worked on the Sabbath, gathering food (Matthew 12:1-3; Mark 2:23-7; Luke 6:1-4) and healing people (Matt 12:9-13, Mark 3:1-5; Luke 6:6-10; John 5:1-13). This is in all 4 Gospels, which doesn't happen often. He also protected the woman from stoning, which the law prescribed as the punishment for adultery. He hung out with people he shouldn't, according to custom: the Samaritan woman, tax collectors, all manner of sinners, the people Jews were told would make them unclean and unholy.
He even broke the biggest rule of all, the one rule everyone can depend on: people die. He broke that, winning eternal life for His followers. (Ok, so the plan originally wasn't for death (see Garden of Eden) but because we humans messed up it became the reality, a rule we could not break ourselves.) At His death the temple curtain tore, allowing people to see the holy of holies for themselves; the rules said only the high priest could do that, and only once a year.
So, yeah. Some pretty big rule breaking going on. What about Jesus "acting from impulse?" This one is a little bit more sketchy. He had human impulses, being fully human Himself, but I'm not sure he acted on them. You could argue the overturning the money lenders in the temple was done out of impulsive anger, and I think His moment in the Garden of Gethsemane asking "Let this cup pass away" (Luke 22:42, for example) came from a purely human impulse to fear death. He overcame that immediately, though.
BUT we can look at impulse from another perspective, too. Blake talks about childhood a lot in his poetry and how children have it exactly right: they question rules and advice, and they pretty much do what they want. Pure impulse.
Ever notice how accepting young children are? Some studies indicate they don't notice differences in color, or disabilities, unless it is pointed out to them. They share with everyone; one little girl I'd never met before ran up to me and offered me popcorn.
Granted, they can be extraordinarily selfish, too. And cruel. But I think they are good more often than bad. And certainly I don't agree with Blake that every emotion, every fleeting fancy, is worth pursuing. We have to exercise judgement when it comes to exercising our impulses. But Blake's point about actions stemming from love of our neighbor being virtuous does have merit.
Which brings me right back to Jesus: He loved everyone. He loved the whole world so much that He was willing to die to save it. That is Christ's greatest impulse, to love. It's also the impulse that drives children to play with others, share their toys, please their parents. (Seriously. Give a small child a compliment; see how they react.) We are frequently told to be like little children. In our faith, yes, but I think also in our willingness to love and open up to others.
This is why I am a Christian. It is freeing. It frees me from my bondage to sin. I am free to do the things I want, free to enjoy life, free. Free will (hmm... coincidence that it's called that??) means that sometimes I use this freedom in ways that God doesn't always like, but that is how you learn.
Part of what I think the church as a whole needs to do is talk more about Christ as a freeing presence. Not one who shackles you with rules and expectations, who wants to limit your friends and hobbies. Not someone who would trap you in hell for disobedience. We're all going to be disobedient at times. We need to show the world the freeing Christ, who breaks customs like ostracizing the kid who acts a bit different, ignoring the homeless man on the street, denying that there's things going wrong in your life, isolating ourselves via technology and pressures to be self-sufficient and successful. We need to act on our impulse to love everybody and the world. We can't love things we don't experience.
Because once they understand how freeing it truly is to have Christ as a savior, they will begin to view the expectations differently, because they are there. It would be something you do because you want to, because you feel it in your heart that it's right, because God calls you to it, not to keep shucking off the shackles of hell. It becomes an impulse, then, a desire springing from inside ourselves. And once we start acting in love, Christians will actually start resembling Christ.
So, "Jesus was all virtue and acted from impulse, not from rules." He broke rules to free us from them, to give us freedom to act in love. He acted out of the impulses of love to reach out to people, welcome them, and give us an example of the same.
Wouldn't a little Romantic Jesus do the world a lot of good?