Can We Leave Jesus Out of the Conversation?
January 7, 2016 Roland Kuhl 0 Comments
As I read and listen to the controversy going on between Wheaton College and Professor Larycia Hawkins, who donned a hijab during Advent to show solidarity with Muslims because as she expressed, Muslims and Christians worship the same God, and both are people of the book (cf. http://www.ibtimes.com/who-larycia-hawkins-wheaton-college-professor-suspended-after-comparing-christianity-2229036), I keep wondering about how we are engaging the conversation. Many of my friends have weighed in with their perspectives on whether Dr. Hawkins’ expression that Muslims and Christians (for that matter also Jews) worship the same God?
In one sense, yes! In a real sense, indeed yes! Jews, Christians and Muslims are all identified as Abrahamic faiths – having their roots in Abraham, who was called by God to journey to the promised land – and so we worship the same God, if we worship the God who called Abram/Abraham. We may identify God by different names (YHWH, God, Allah), have different experiences of God, but essentially we have in mind the same One God who encountered Abram in Genesis 12: 1-3, and made a covenant with him in Genesis 17: 9ff.
So the question is not whether we are fixing our eyes upon different gods – we have the same God in mind.
However, it seems we understand this God very differently, we worship this God very differently, we experience this God differently. And maybe that could be the end of the discussion, should be the end of our arguing with each other – and we could sit down at table easily together as brothers and sisters who have a different perception of the One who created us – if it were not for God showing up and messing it all up, for God desiring to reveal himself more fully to us.
Yet, what kind of God is God who desires to be revealed more fully to us? Why would we not want to see and hear this God more clearly? Yes, more would be required of us – and maybe therein lies the rub – we are happy with our perceptions of God; we do not want God to muddy the perceptions of who we think God is, a god whom we can control.
But yet, God chose, God chooses to become more fully known to us and so our contentness of shaping God in our own images is muddied, shattered.
How can God becoming human, to make God more visible to us become such a bad thing? A dividing thing? The problem is with us, not with God.
John expresses in the opening words of his gospel that in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and this Word became human and dwelt among us (cf. John 1: 1-14). John iterates “We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
God becoming human was meant to muddy the waters – to challenge our being content within ourselves in our own controlling realities and prejudices. The incarnation of God was meant to turn our worlds upside down, to uncover our self-empowering images of ourselves and a God who serves us. God came among us, as one of us, to show us God more clearly, more fully and also us more fully, more clearly. Paul further expresses in Colossians 1: 19 that “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him.”
God came to rip off the covers of our controlling visions of God and our controlling visions over others. We are all in need of seeing who we are, and having a more clear vision of who God is. God becoming human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is for all humanity – who came into human history through the political history of one people group – Israel (after all Jesus was born a Jew). But, Jesus was never meant to be owned by or restricted to one people group – let alone become the mere God and Lord of Christians. It was our need to control and take charge that we took ownership of Jesus, taking God for ourselves, setting God against all those to whom God had come to be revealed, rather than taking on the posture of worship, of submission, of yielding ourselves to God (which is interestingly what the term “Muslim” means – “one who submits to God/Allah”).
In essence to leave Jesus out of the conversation, as so many of us are seeking to do – in misguided motives of wanting to be politically correct, of not wanting to offend, is indeed to muddy the waters, is to keep our voice as more important than the voice of the other. To refuse to acknowledge God who has come among us in the person of Jesus, is actually to acknowledge that we really do hate our neighbor, that we truly do want to lord ourselves over others, that we prefer to see the other as our enemy, that we do not want to live in harmony with all humanity.
In our not wrestling with how we are to understand and engage Jesus, this one who is God among us (Immanuel – cf. Matthew 1:23), we are opting to keep God hidden and to worship our images of self as images of God. We opt to keep God obscure from our sight, our lives, to be content with painting God in our own images, our own experiences, our own perspectives, rather than having ears to hear and eyes to see how God seeks to reveal who God is who is with us, among us, seeks to walk with us. Jesus, is not the property of “Christians,” nor of the Jews, nor of Muslims, nor Buddhists, Hindus, nor any other religious or human community – Jesus is God, who has become one of us, to draw all of humanity into relationship with God, and also in relationships of shalom, salaam, peace with one another.
We miss God, when we miss seeing Jesus, connecting with Jesus – because God became one of us in this man. Jesus, then, is God’s Word – God who can be touched, heard, seen – for this planet, and for all who indwell it. And for us to keep Jesus out of the conversation is to intentionally seek to keep God out of the conversation, out of our lives, and out of our world.