I commend the following article by Revd. Jon Swales for your attention. The concepts and ideas in the article are reflected in many other posts on this blog. Jon writes with authority and eloquence.
Jesus is strange.
Not strange in the way we sometimes make him strange in order to keep him safely religious, but strange in a much more unsettling sense. He is a stranger to both secular and religious sensibilities: an enigma, a mystery, a man who refuses to fit neatly into the categories we construct for him.
So we tame him. We create sanitised cultural imaginations of Jesus, reshaping him into a King who blesses our wealth and leaves our economic arrangements largely undisturbed; a friend of empire, a supporter of just wars, and someone who somehow has very little to say about greed, accumulation, possessions, consumerism or the relentless pursuit of more.
But then there is the wild Messiah.
The Jesus we encounter in the earliest stories about him is much harder to control. He flips tables. He announces good news to the poor. He warns the rich. He tells those who have more than enough to give it away. He touches the untouchable, eats with the wrong people and welcomes those respectable religion has pushed to the margins. He refuses to measure human worth by wealth, status or power.
And when confronted by the machinery of violence, he does something profoundly strange. He refuses to become violent himself. This is a King who would rather die for his enemies than kill them, a King whose kingdom does not advance through the sword, and whose victory comes not through crushing his enemies but through loving them.
This is the wildness of Jesus, and perhaps that is why we so often try to domesticate him. We smooth off the rough edges, explain away the difficult sayings and turn his teaching into inspirational wisdom. We sing about him without listening to him. We place him safely inside our religious systems, where his voice can be heard but need not disturb us.
But Jesus keeps escaping our attempts to contain him. He stands there in broad daylight in the earliest Christian stories, strange and uncompromising, and he says, “Follow me.”
Following Jesus means more than agreeing with a set of beliefs about him. It means stepping into his strange kingdom. It means moving towards the broken rather than away from them. It means feeding the hungry, not simply with bread but with dignity, friendship and hope. It means caring for the sick, not merely as problems to be solved but as people to be loved. It means clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless and refusing to look away from those whom society has learned to ignore.
It means forgiving when vengeance feels easier, making peace when violence seems more powerful, and loving enemies when everything around us tells us that enemies should be hated. It means crossing the boundaries that divide us and refusing to allow fear, prejudice or social status to determine who belongs.
And it means asking uncomfortable questions about the things we accumulate, protect and call our own. Jesus does not seem particularly impressed by our obsession with having more. Again and again, he turns our attention towards the poor, the hungry, the outsider and the least. His kingdom creates a different economy of life: people before profit, generosity before accumulation, relationship before status, and enough before more.
This is not sentimental Christianity. It is deeply political in the oldest sense of the word. It concerns the kind of community we become, the kind of world we imagine, and the kind of King to whom we give our allegiance.
The wild Messiah still stands in opposition to the powers that deform human life. He still calls us away from greed, domination and violence, away from the endless desire to possess, and towards mercy, justice, reconciliation, simplicity and the care of those who have been pushed to the edges.
To follow Jesus is to become strange. Not strange for the sake of being strange, and not eccentricity dressed up as holiness, but strange because the values of the kingdom are strange in a world organised around wealth, power, consumption and violence. In such a culture, the followers of Jesus should look different. They should be a people who give rather than hoard, welcome rather than exclude, forgive rather than retaliate, serve rather than dominate, seek justice rather than protect privilege, and choose peace rather than worship power.
They should be a prophetic people, a people who live as though the kingdom really is near.
Because perhaps the most unsettling thing about Jesus is not simply that he was strange. It is that he still says, “Follow me.”
And perhaps the real question is whether we are willing to follow him into the strangeness of his kingdom.
— Jon Swales, 2024
Appetite whetted? If so, the following article written by Jon Swales may be of interest:
I’ve got a hunch,
maybe even a dream,
that we as church leaders need
to keep on returning to theology—
not just the kind that fills books,
but the kind that lives and breathes in the world.
It’s about getting back to thinking theologically, where the heart of the Christian faith meets the messy realities of the world we live in.
As Karl Barth once said, we need the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. We’ve got to bring scripture and tradition into dialogue with what’s happening around us—engage with the real issues people are facing today.
At the center of this is Jesus Christ, the one who stood with the marginalized and took on the systems of power.
Theology that’s grounded in Jesus isn’t content with “business as usual.” It’s got to stir things up, challenge the comfortable, and disrupt the status quo. This is prophetic theology—the kind that speaks truth in a world that often doesn’t want to hear it. It cuts through denial and addresses the realities of injustice and oppression head-on.
But I don’t just dream of a theology that talks about change.
It’s got to lead to action.
Theology aligned with God’s kingdom doesn’t sit on a shelf or stay in a sermon.
It’s lived out.
It’s a theology that brings hope to those in despair and justice where there’s oppression. It’s not afraid to get messy and step into the hard places.
It’s a theology in service of liberation, one that refuses to rest while the vulnerable continue to suffer.
It listens to the cries of the poor and oppressed and responds with action, not just words, rooted in the radical love and mission of Jesus.
This is the theology I dream of—
born from love, in love, and for love.
A theology that’s alive, prophetic, and liberating.
One that demands transformation—
in our hearts, in our communities,
and in the systems around us.
It’s time we return to that kind of theology, where we refuse to let injustice and despair have the final word.
A theology driven by the
countercultural,
revolutionary
love of Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment