9/16/18 “Who Is Your Jesus” by Nancy Petty
Text: Mark 8:27-38
On Tuesday, as the Carolinas and parts of Virginia and Georgia braced for what meteorologists were predicting as “possibly the worst hurricane in U.S. history” prompting mass evacuations in coastal areas, televangelist Pat Robertson via his Christian Broadcasting Network was praying for Jesus to place a “shield of protection” around Virginia and around “innocent people” in the storm’s path.
Robertson asked his followers to “put a hand out toward the Atlantic” and repeat the following incantation:
“In the name of Jesus, you Hurricane Florence, we speak to you in the name of Jesus, and we command the storm to cease its forward motion and go harmlessly into the Atlantic. Go up north away from land and veer off in the name of Jesus. We declare in the name of the lord that you shall go no farther, you shall do no damage in this area.”
Following the prayer, he warned his followers that they must have no doubts in their faith for the ritual to work but added that the “shield” has worked against previous hurricanes. “It’s almost hilarious to see them try,” he said. “They try to get in and they can’t, and then they go north and they turn around, try to come back in. They can’t do it.”
On Thursday, Robertson began celebrating claiming he prayed Hurricane Florence away from Virginia. On his program Thursday and Friday Robertson said: “We asked the Lord to take it out of here and he did. It’s like a shield that God has put around us. God’s people prayed. This is a miracle, ladies and gentleman. We’ve had a hand of protection over this area, and when we pray, God does miracles.” He goes on: “God has answered prayer in relations to us here at Regent and CBN. All I can say is thank the Lord that we, at this point—sitting here with CBN, Regent University, and all the things we do here—has been spared once again and people have been praying. I hope you would pray—those of you in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, wherever you live—seek God and he is able to give you relief.
My point in taking this much space to quote Pat Robertson is not to belittle his faith, although it is such theology as his that, I believe, does such damage to Christianity today. But my point in sharing the televangelist prayer is that in his praying we learn quite a bit about who his Jesus is.
His Jesus is a Jesus who hears the prayers of some and intervenes and ignores the prayers of others. His Jesus protected his property but allowed a tree to fall on a house in Wilmington and kill a mother and her newborn baby. His Jesus protects “innocent people” and leaves, I guess, the guilty to fend for themselves. His Jesus can be persuaded to shift the direction of hurricanes. His Jesus grants the wishes of some and not of others. And most striking for me, his Jesus doesn’t tolerate doubts for Robertson proclaims: “you must have no doubts in your faith.”
Who is your Jesus? That’s the question. It is the question Jesus asked his disciples in Mark 8. To put the question another way, Jesus is asking his closest friends, “What are people saying about me? What are you saying about who I am?” “Throughout Mark’s story up to this point…no one is quite sure what to make of Jesus. In fact, no one even knows who he is. Except, that is, for the reader, because we are told in the very first verse [of the gospel of Mark] that he is the son of God. And so when we read Mark we feel that same sense of tension you do whenever you watch a movie and know something the main characters don’t know—you want them to figure it out and worry what will happen if they don’t. And so we almost breathe a sigh of relief when Peter, in a flash of insight, is no longer content with viewing Jesus as one of the prophets of old or new, but realizes that Jesus is…the one chosen and anointed to deliver Israel from oppression…We think, he’s finally gotten it!”
But has he? One theologian writes of Mark 8 and of this question of who is your Jesus this:
“Peter gets the title right, but he doesn’t seem to understand what that title means. And so when Jesus begins to talk not about the road to glory but instead the one that leads to the cross, Peter rebukes him…and then Jesus rebukes Peter right back. Which calls into question our own understanding of Jesus. Because [Lose continues] we have to admit that Peter’s definition of Jesus is usually the one we prefer as well. Peter, we, and just about everyone we’ll ever know want a strong [Jesus] who heals our illnesses, provides ample prosperity, guarantees our security, urges our military and sports teams onto victory, and generally keeps us happy, healthy, and wise. [And I would add, and steers hurricanes away from our property.]
[David Lose concludes]: But that’s not what Jesus offers. Instead, Jesus…meets us in vulnerability, suffering, and loss…in those moments when we really need God, when all we had worked for, hoped for, and striven for fall apart and we realize that we are, quite simply, mortal, incapable of saving ourselves and desperately in need of a [Jesus] who meets us where we are.”
Who is your Jesus? And how would you answer if Jesus showed up here today or sometime in the future and asked you, “Who do you say that I am?” This is the question that has been on my mind this week as I have studied and reflected on Mark 8 and on Pat Robertson Christian magic spell. And so I began to imagine a conversation with Jesus on this topic. It went something like this:
Jesus: So, Nancy, who am I to you?
Nancy: That’s a good question Jesus and I’m not sure how to answer it. Not because I haven’t spent many hours of my life trying to answer it. But every time I do, something happens or changes and then I’m not sure about what I had been thinking. In all honesty Jesus, you seem a bit elusive to me—that is who you are and who you are supposed to be. You eat with sinners and with the religious elite. You talk about peace but then there is that time you said you came “not to bring peace but a sword.” So I’m not sure who you are or who you are supposed to be.
Jesus: Nancy, don’t think about who I am supposed to be. Who am I to you? Where have you experienced me? What seems real to you about who I am?
Nancy: Well Jesus, I would have to start with what I know about you through scripture and what the church taught me about you when I was a youth. I used to think that you were all about being a “Savior” and saving me from my sin. For the most part, when I knew you that way, I was scared of you. You seemed to be untouchable. You were someone that I was supposed to be like but because I was so sinful, I could never be like you. So you seemed distant, out of reach, beyond me. So I kind of forgot about you and I focused more on God and who God is.
Jesus: And how did that work for you?
Nancy: It was good. Frankly Jesus, I needed to step away from you for a while. I needed some distance so that I could think for myself. I needed time away from Pat Robertson and Billy Graham and from all those church teachings and someone else interpreting for me the stories about you in my sacred scriptures. I needed to let go of a lot of stuff people say about you. So yeah, it was good.
Jesus: What about now, Nancy? Did you ever make your way back to thinking about who I am to you?
Nancy: Yes, and it has been and is an amazing journey. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still not sure who you are but I think I have some clues about who you are to me.
Jesus: Go on.
Nancy: When things changed in my thinking about who you are, Jesus, was when I realized that your mission on earth was not to start a church but rather a movement. And so, while you can and do sometimes show up in the institutional church, you are more likely I have found, to be hanging out where people are suffering—in the shelters, at the soup kitchens, at the borders in Palestine and the Rio Grande. As I know you now, Jesus, you are more likely to be marching with union workers than with Christians who want to put the Ten Commandments in public schools. It seems to me you would rather dine with and listen to the stories of queer and trans youth who are struggling than with a bunch of faith people who want to argue about the authority of scripture.
Jesus, I have come to realize you don’t take away my pain or my struggles nor do you shelter me from those dark nights of the soul. Rather, you meet me in those places and share my pain. That’s been my experience. And while my prayers haven’t always been answered in the way that I have prayed them, I have felt your presence. You don’t send a “shield of protection” around me. But rather, you enter into those places where pain and suffering are real in my life.
I have come to feel you challenging me, Jesus, when I think I know best or what is right or wrong or moral or immoral. You nudge my conscience and makes me feel uncomfortable when I act out of fear or insecurity or out of my ego. You break open my heart when I fail to show compassion to others. You find ways to set me on a right path when I stray, sometimes gently and sometimes not so gently.
You show up in the familiar and the unfamiliar, in the mysterious and in the ordinary. And while I can’t understand it, you remind me again and again that you love Pat Robertson just as much as you love me.
And so, when you ask me, Jesus, who you are to me Jesus, I would have to say that you are the suffering servant who enters the pain and struggle of those who are hurting, you are the constant comforter in all things of life, you are the mysterious constructive critic who breaks open hearts to let in more compassion, more love, and more forgiveness, and you are the One who loves without bounds—the innocent and the guilty, the non-doubters and the doubters, those who go to church and those who never darkened the doors of a church, those who claim a faith and those who don’t, those who call upon your name and those who never utter your name, those who pray and those who don’t. I don’t know if you are fully divine or fully human or both. I don’t know if you are the Son of God by some mysterious conception or the son of a teenage girl and her carpenter boyfriend. What I do know is that you are continually changing my life.
Jesus: Keep your heart open, Nancy, and you will keep on discovering who I am.
I know my hypothetical dialogue with Jesus is a little one sided, since I got to write both parts. But I am reminded of that Jesus hymn I loved as a child. Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me. See on the portals he’s waiting and watching. Watching for you and for me. Asking, “Who am I to you?” I encourage you to take some time this week to enter into your own dialogue with Jesus on that question. There are no right answers. There is only the truth of your lived experience. And Christianity today need your lived experience. Who is your Jesus?
