Reading Jesus: Part VI Culture vs. Experience.
Have your ideas, beliefs and concepts about God, yourself and others changed over time?
Are you challenged by those who think differently?
It seems that the culture in which one lives or works often defines how and what one believes.
As I reflect on Reading Jesus (see a few of my previous posts) I see Jesus as one who lived in a particualr culture with a particular understanding of God. If you grew-up in Utah and were raised as a Mormon there’s a good chance that your ideas, understanding and beliefs about yourself and God were shaped by your cultural. It’s the same as if you grew-up in the South and were raised Southern Baptist or Brooklyn and Catholic or India and Hindu.
As I Read Jesus I realize that his understanding and experience of God didn’t quite fit the social context of his day. His ideas seemed irrational to many of the “relgious” folks. Jesus broke rules when rules and beliefs got in the way of loving others, justice, or acting compassionate. His method of living and believing didn’t mesh with the law-keepers.
Think about it: what have you been taught is the correct belief? Remember the Russians? My beliefs about Russians were formed and shaped by the culture in which I was raised. I guess the same could be said if you are white, black, straight, gay, male, female, etc. But something amazing happens when we allow ourselves– have the faith– to enter a different culture– we change.
For those of you who were raised to avoid hell. How would that shape your understanding of God? Your beliefs about yourself? The Bible? Christianity? It seems we are either moving away from something or toward something. I wonder, if one’s belief is that if they don’t shape-up and act right they will burn for eternity, if that is moving toward God and love or simply avoiding hell? Is it fear-based, law-based, or love-based?
Jesus’ simple teaching on “who is my neighbor?” made the Samaritan (insert any person who you think is the enemy or is excluded from the culture) the hero. It was love-based.
As I Read Jesus it seems that everything he did, believed, taught, and lived was love-based. It wasn’t purely cultural belief; getting it right; avoiding hell;etc. that motivated him to live and teach in the way he did; it was his deep understanding of his true, natural self; his deepest identity and his direct, intimate realtionship and experience of God that allowed Jesus to be who he was.
I suspect that is true for all of us.
It’s risky to go into our closet and encounter God;it’s risky to break the religious rules in a culture; it’s risky to speak and live from our direct experience of God; it’s risky to abandon all that we are; who we think we are; or who our culture tells us we are; it’s risky to befriend one who our dominant culture rejects; But as I Read Jesus, that is what he did.
“The Bible says…” is usually followed by a particular culture’s understanding and belief, and not always one’s direct experience of the Word made flesh.
I guess it really does take guts to challenge our culture’s beliefs about God and to follow Jesus’ way, truth and life example. but according to Jesus, that is the narrow path that leads to real life with God, ourselves and others.
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