Brendan Gleeson in the film, Calvary.
Have you lost Jesus?
Maybe you never had him in the first place. Maybe you’ve never thought you even needed him. Or maybe this is a painful topic for you: you want Jesus, or you want something Jesus represents, you even (when you’re honest with yourself) want him a lot, but you can’t find him.
Jesus is elusive. For many of us, Jesus seems to recede into a childhood past, into irrelevance. To the extent some people think about him at all, they think of him as a caricature of a religious figure, a gauzy, ridiculous tall white man with 1970s hair, draped in old-time robes from a corny Hollywood bible movie, smiling faintly up from funeral-home prayer cards and tacky glass candle holders. As religious figures go, the Buddha is much more hip and interesting.
But this old-time Jesus is not always benign. For many, he is an icon of judgment, abusive religiosity, and inhuman sexual piety. Kitschy Jesus is, at best, silly; at worst, destructive. If we have lost him, then we are well shot of him.
But then there’s the boy Jesus who lags behind his family’s caravan today, worrying his parents, dazzling the temple scholars. He is far more interesting. This young Jesus is a short brown Palestinian Jewish kid, smart, insightful, and not too concerned about his mother’s emotional well-being. At twelve, he isn’t yet responsible for his own actions, so if he does get lost or hurt, that will not only traumatize his parents, but also cast them in a bad light. So this Jesus is a little troublesome, a little dangerous, wizard-smart, hard to pin down, tremendously valuable but impossible to fully control.
And I say, if you’re going to show how Jesus is both divine and human, this seems to be the best way to do it. Don’t portray him as a serene man with a dated haircut and a beatific look on his face. No, the divine-human Jesus is more like a savvy, impetuous tween.
This Jesus is compelling, unpredictable, intriguing, and maddening. This Jesus belongs to no one, and yet is indispensable. This Jesus is God becoming humble to share in our humanity, so that we can share in God’s divinity. This is a Jesus I can get behind.
This Jesus causes real distress when we lose him.
When we, like Mary and Joseph, lose this Jesus, we lose a lot. We lose our youthful, creative tolerance of risk, our willingness to jump into something challenging, even when that jump will take us out of safety and comfort. Our faith needs this youthful, creative tolerance of risk. Our faith needs us to be brave, and this Jesus shows us how to do that.
But we also lose something else, when we lose this Jesus: we lose our hold on the anchor of our faith, the source and ground of what we believe, and who we say we are. The tween Jesus didn’t just light up Jerusalem with his buddies: he went to the temple. He asked penetrating questions, and offered intriguing answers. He was willing to learn and grow. He was curious. He took his elders seriously. (He even, finally, took his parents seriously, in the end: he answered his mother’s question, and returned to her side as a good son.) This Jesus isn’t just a wild child. He is also a young adult, willing to go deep with the faith, and with his peers, his elders, and his kin.
I want to say this another way. There’s just something distinctly Jewish about this boy Jesus, and we are diminished if we lose him, or overlook him, or discard him. Our Jewish cousins teach us to wrestle with God, to ask hard questions of God, and to do these things with one another, too. It’s not right for us to simply sigh and say things like, “Well, I guess it’s all just a big mystery.” It’s not right for us to preach hope without engaging doubt seriously, or to throw up our hands in doubt without contemplating hope seriously. This Jesus is spry, tense, alert, active. He is never pedantic. He likely learned from his devout parents his habit of engaging the world with creative energy and intellectual curiosity. He takes the life of faith seriously, and demands much from his peers, and from himself.
This Jesus, finally, is a Jesus worth keeping. This Jesus is someone who, if we lose him, we know we’ve truly lost someone valuable.
I want to illustrate this with a story that may come across at first as deeply disturbing. I ask you to hang in there with me. It is worth it, and it will take us to a lovely place.
When I came to the last semester of seminary in spring 2020, I finally got an essay assignment that I think I had wanted to get from the start: the professor asked us to write a few pages about what we think a priest is, or more powerfully, what kind of priest we saw ourselves to be, or aspired to be. My essay was firmly aspirational: I did not know, nor do I yet know, whether I can or will attain this identity, but I truly aspire to it.
I began my essay by referencing a film called “Calvary,” starring Brendan Gleeson, who plays an Irish priest. “Calvary” opens with the priest greeting a parishioner in one of those old-school confession booths. Surrounded by the trappings of religion, the parishioner tells his priest about his traumatic history as a victim of clergy sexual abuse. And then he tells this priest to put his affairs in order, because in a week’s time, this parishioner plans to kill his priest.
The parishioner explains his reasoning. He says, “There’s no point in killing a bad priest. But killing a good one? That’d be a shock, now. They wouldn’t know what to make of that.” He pauses, and says again, “I’m going to kill you, Father. I’m going to kill you ’cause you’ve done nothing wrong. I’m going to kill you ’cause you’re innocent. <pause> Not right now, though. I’ll give you enough time to put your house in order. Make your peace with God. Sunday week, let’s say.” (End quote.)
I think I understand what this deeply troubled man is saying. The church had been so steeped in evil that it did nothing for years while countless people were brutally damaged by their abusive priests. The violent death of a good priest as a consequence: this is an awful and cruel solution, but it makes sense, in its own dreadful way. This abuse survivor knew all too well the power wielded by an evil priest. But he also knew the tremendous power of a good one, and he believed that only the death of a truly good – a powerfully good – person would get anyone’s attention, and perhaps break the vise-grip of trauma that had so ruined his life.
This is all very grim and shocking, and I could suggest far better ways to heal this man and serve justice upon the criminals who hurt him. But there is a teaching here that I believe is solid, and worth learning, for all of us. I say “all of us” because this really isn’t just about priests: it is about all people who follow Jesus Christ, or better said, all people who follow a Jesus Christ worth following. I used “priest” language in my little essay, but it really is about baptismal identity, not priestly identity. But the topic sentence of my essay was this: “I want to be a priest worth killing.”
I don’t mean to be grotesque or macabre. I just mean this: I want to be a Christian whose life is palpably useful, demonstrably good, and powerfully helpful. I want to follow the tween Jesus who was – who is – vital, curious, and engaged. I want my faith to be charged with God’s youthful energy, God’s creative Spirit, God’s willingness to go to any length – even to death on a cross – to connect with, and to help, every living human person. I want this for all of us. I want all of us to be caught up in something that’s worth handing over our very lives if necessary. Now, God wants us to live, and this is not about gruesome blood sacrifices. But God also wants us to live for something. And this is what the tween Jesus teaches us today.
Luke tells us that Mary “treasured all these things in her heart,” and I imagine her in the caravan as it slowly makes its way through the exurbs of Jerusalem. I imagine her looking off into the distance and pulling together, into the center of her heart, all that had happened in the city with her exasperating son. My Mary reflects for a while on how her son does not belong to her, and perhaps nothing really does, when she gets down to it. “Nothing belongs to me,” she muses. “My control over anything is an illusion.”
But then Mary smiles. Stricken with the fear and sorrows of a parent, Mary nonetheless smiles at this wondrous thought: “I have a son whose loss would be devastating. I even have a son worth killing. This is terrible!” she acknowledges. But then she says to herself, “But I am among women the one most richly blessed.”
Preached on the Second Sunday after Christmas Day (Year C), January 2, 2022, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Psalm 84:1-8
Ephesians 1:3-6; 15-19a
Luke 2:41-52