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March 20

The Strident Christ

There are many ways by which we can typify and imagine Christ: the Innocent Child, the Suffering Servant, the Obedient Son of the Father, the Reformist Rabbi, and the Challenging Prophet. However, the Son of God is always beyond all of our images of him.

How we imagine Jesus often says more about ourselves than it does about the Savior of the world. We try to make Jesus fit into our ideas and values. Often the Christ we supposedly worship is the Christ of our own making.

That we have cast Jesus in soft pastel hues in the modern world says more about the kind of world we have and the kind of savior we want. As a consequence, Jesus is more a loving buddy or friend than a fearless and strong leader. This is because we don’t want Jesus to lead us. We only want him to help us. We don’t want to obey him.

William of St. Thierry, the abbot of a Benedictine monastery in the twelfth century, casts Jesus in very different terms. He writes, “our most powerful athlete, having entered as it were the stadium of the world, was anointed with the oil of the Holy Spirit for the match and rejoiced as a first to run the course of human dispensation.”79

It may well help us overcome our soft Christianity by thinking about Jesus as the fearless leader, the valiant Son of the Father, the brave as well as the obedient Son of God. This picture of Christ may challenge us to become the fearless followers of Christ rather than the consumer Christians we are at present.

Thought

If we want to remake ourselves, we may need to remake our image of Christ. Or more particularly, we may need to let Christ confront us in his otherness.