#SelfieNation

Mary and Joseph Selfie

I did something last night I’m not at all proud of. I took a ‘Selfie’.  I hope this public confession absolves me of my sin, though I’m far from alone in my narcissistic hubris.  Just open your Instagram account and see the incessant duck face photos and personal snap shots of everyone eight to eighty standing in front of a bathroom mirror trying to get the perfect shot from the perfect angle to project their perfect self.  SnapChat alone processes 350 million photos a day, most of which are selfie’s.  In fact, the phenomenon, like cancer, metastasized the world in 2013 forcing Oxford Dictionary to name ‘Selfie’ the word of the year.  Sadly, posturing in front of a mirror with an iPhone seems the perfect preoccupation for our narcissistic selves. But what is compelling our self-worship?

For starters, every culture thoughout history has had its own archetype or ideal, that individual or set of individuals who embody all we desire to be. Rome had her warriors, Florence her artists and Britain her royalty.[1] In America, it is the celebrity, and more importantly, the unending desire to become one, even if we are only famous for being famous.  Technology and social media provide the channels to achieve notoriety, as we project and pimp ourselves to as many people as possible.  But is this really what it means to be human; spending our lives flaunting a distorted version of ourselves to the world in a search for meaning?  Most of us are terrified to allow friends and family to see the whole picture, the one with the wounds, scars, addictions and pathologies that make up our real, total self.  Because somewhere deep down we still believe in the delusion of human perfectability, and "although we may not know what it means, we are disgusted with ourselves because we are far from it.”[2]

But God is not into Selfie's, He is into us. So much so that he became one of us, and took on the same shriveled vulnerability we all share.  His skin, his flesh was identical to ours in every way.  Over the last few centuries the church has unwittingly projected onto Jesus a human perfectibility that is incompatible with the human condition.  Jesus was not an ‘uberman’, or a fleshy version of some angelic being. He was fully human and fully divine.  And because we do not accept our own concrete humanity with all our flaws, we are less capable of appreciating the limited, human Jesus.  The writer of Hebrews reminds us, “He had to be made like them, fully human in every way”.[3]  So much so that “He didn’t look like anything or anyone of consequence—he had no physical beauty to attract our attention.”[4]  Contrary to our high Christology, Jesus did not embody the magnificence of Michelangelo’s David.  Anthropologists now know that the average male height in first century Palestine was all of 5’ 2’’ tall.  Are we comfortable with this picture of Jesus? A Jesus who may have struggled with his weight, who may have been bald, and according to Scripture, was not above being tempted to subvert his own life’s mission and purpose?

It is only in learning to accept the limitations of this perfect human being that allows us the capability to accept our own human deficiencies, and the limitations of others.[5]  That Christ assumed human weakness is critical to our salvation and our search for significance, since “what was not assumed was not healed.”[6]  Therefore, what was assumed was made whole.  Jesus came into the world not simply to make known the nature of God, but to disclose what it means to be a human being.  He unveils not only the divinity to human persons; Jesus reveals humanity to itself.[7] The humanity of Jesus is the mirror through which we see our own humanity as it should be, not the false self we parade through social media.[8]  

Therefore, if we keep in mind that Jesus reveals both the nature of God and the meaning of the human person, what does it mean that he spent the majority of his life in complete obscurity?  Or, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage.”[9]  In a time when celebrity Christians require a platform to serve God, when athletes are canonized for their all to public prayers and mega-church pastors star in their own reality TV shows, Jesus demonstrates the path of downward mobility by reminding us that “whoever is least among you—he is the greatest”.[10]  As Henri Nouwen explains:

“The one who was from the beginning with God and who was God revealed himself as a small, helpless child; as a refugee in Egypt; as an obedient adolescent and inconspicuous adult: as a penitent disciple of the Baptizer; as a preacher from Galilee, followed by some simple fishermen; as a man who ate with sinners and talked with strangers; as an outcast, a criminal, a threat to his people. He moved from powerful to powerlessness, from greatness to smallness, from success to failure, from strength to weakness, from glory to ignominy. The whole life of Jesus of Nazareth was a life in which all upward mobility was resisted…The divine way is indeed the downward way.”[11]

Yet, we who share the same skin Jesus wore secretly despise our daily, conventional life.  We long for significance, even celebrity status to validate our human condition.  But in Jesus we see the fullness of the divinity enfleshed in the ordinary.  We come to know a God who experienced the divine humiliation of becoming fully human in order that like Him, we too could discover the path of downward mobility. Only then will we have room in our hearts to cease looking at ourselves, and finally see Jesus in the daily. Loving God more than self is not some abstract ethic, it is overwhelmingly physical. "It means seeing in every person the face of the Lord to be served, and to serve him concretely."  Recognizing the poor, insecure, normal face of Jesus in the eyes of the broken and marginalized frees us from our narcissistic selves, while allowing each one of us to tangibly identify with the living Jesus enfleshed all around us.  And in so doing, we may just find that in losing our life, we might actually find it.  Then and only then will we know what it means to be fully human as we seek the divine.

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[1] Casey, Michael. Fully Human, Fully Divine.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Hebrews 2:17.

[4] Isaiah 53:2.

[5] Casey, Michael. Fully Human, Fully Divine.

[6] Nazianzen, Gregory. 4^th Century Letter to Cledonius.

[7] Kavanaugh, John. Following Christ in a Consumer Society.

[8] Casey, Michael. Fully Human, Fully Divine.

[9] Philippians 2: 6.

[10] Luke 9: 48.

[11] Nouwen, Henri. The Selfless Way of Christ: Downward Mobility and the Spiritual Life.

What Shall We Compare It to?

I just made, baked and ate my very first home-made loaf of bread.  I’m very proud of myself, although the entire process was painfully simple.  3 cups of flour, 1 ½ cups of warm water, 1 teaspoon of salt and ¼ teaspoon of live yeast make up the recipe.  Combine ingredients, let sit for 18 hours, bake and eat.  It’s that easy.  And as every baker knows, the yeast does all the heavy lifting.  Though the smallest ingredient, it is the most important; working unseen in the dough, causing her to rise and be ready for baking even while I sleep.

As Jesus points out, His kingdom is altogether similar. “’What shall I compare the Kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.’”  Once the yeast beings its work, it cannot be undone, it will end by overtaking the entire lump of dough, transforming it into life giving bread. And, much like my loaf of bread, the work of Christ’s Kingdom is being done outside of my strength and effort.  Yes, I need to be faithful and honor the recipe, but the real work happens almost mysteriously, even mystically, outside of my coercive power.  Again, Jesus refers to his kingdom:

“”This is what the Kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.’”

Just like the farmer in this parable, we ‘do not know how’ His kingdom is being fulfilled; we are simply called upon to be faithful to the process, to trust the recipe.  The eternal lesson is that the means of the kingdom must never be compromised by attempting to manipulate the ends.  And yet, it is awful tempting to either force God’s hand or use the current plausibility structures of coercion and power to impose the Kingdom in the here and now. If you are like me, you very rarely see a tangible expression of God’s kingdom on earth as it now is in heaven.  Much of life is filled with broken relationships, shattered dreams and pain.  But, over against the cynicism of determinism, Jesus pits the revolutionary patience and hope of his kingdom coming very soon, but just not quite yet.  And, in case we still have little faith, he offers up one final soliloquy of hope:

“Again he said, ‘what shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade.’”

No doubt, these parables helped to instill courage and hope within the small discipleship community Jesus gathered around him, especially as they lived under the scourge of Rome.  And, more than likely, they couldn’t see it either.  They lived, worked and died under Caesar’s dominion, wondering if and when Yahweh was ever going to put the earth to rights, overthrowing these monstrous pagans and establishing His reign and His righteousness by putting the rightful king upon the throne.   Like them, we too will probably die before the yeast and seed complete their work.  But this is no cause for despair.  For once planted and once kneaded into the dough, the transformational power of His work on this earth can never be overturned. 

Ecce Homo

Christmas Sunday has come and gone, and we in the Christian tradition celebrated and commemorated the Christ child born in Bethlehem. “For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given” (Isaiah 9:6). This is the greatest mystery the world has ever known. God became flesh. He dwelt among us, walked our sod, ate our food and felt our pain. He laughed when something tickled him; he wept when he was sad and when he had to well, you know, go, he went.

I was thinking through this incredible paradox Sunday when singing Away in a Manager. Starting the second verse, I stopped singing and became quite frustrated with the lyrics of this little lullaby. You know how it goes…

“The cattle are lowing the poor baby wakes, but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes….”

No crying he makes? Seriously? Let’s reset the scene as best we can: Jesus has just passed through the birth canal and into the hands of a teenage mother, his attending nurses are a well qualified cow and two sheep, his bed is a trough where goats are feeding, the smell of the cave would knock over a shepherd and we are to believe the kid isn’t crying?

The anonymous writer of this song has unwittingly captured the philosophy of our age, and we tend to like it. We don’t like to think of Jesus in human terms, maybe because he reminds us to much of ourselves: Needy, cold, scared, helpless and dependent. We’d much rather him pop out of the womb doing miracles, maybe turning the cow’s milk into wine. Or maybe it’s because we’ve bought the lie that says the physical world is evil and the only way to obtain utopia is through the spiritual realm, maybe heaven itself, whatever and wherever that may be. Plato was one of the first to unleash this belief system onto the Western world. Plato emphasized the immortal and immutable soul over the mortal and degenerative body. He believed the soul or psyche was a prisoner inside the body and could only find enlightenment and freedom if removed from the chains of the flesh. In very simple terms, our material world is only a shadow of the ideal, spiritual world beyond and it is not to be trusted.

Early Christian Gnosticism piggy-backed on Plato and claimed that Jesus did not actually have a physical existence. The Gnostics believed the Apostles interacted with the phantom Jesus who merely appeared human. This concept was necessitated by a dualistic worldview, claiming that matter is evil and only light or spirit is good. This early heresy of the church still finds its way into our minds, songs and stories. But why is it so dangerous? For starters, this heresy discounts the death and bodily resurrection of Jesus, it destroys our understanding of Christ being the first fruit of a new creation, and it undermines Jesus’ ability to show us what it really means to be fully human as the perfect “image-bearer” of God.

The human Jesus spent 33 years showing the human race the image of the invisible God. He himself said, “If you know me, you know my Father.” The human Jesus shows us once and for all what God looks like and in so doing, gives us praxis for bearing the image of God. Jesus shows us what it means to be wholly human. The true, complete human being living through the spirit loves his enemies, cares for the weak, welcomes the disenfranchised, forgives the oppressor, feeds the hungry, does not boast, is not proud, sacrifices his wants and needs for others, submits himself to the authorities, brings peace to the war-torn and justice to the perpetrator. A life lived in Jesus’ image is a life transformed by the truth and love of God, incarnately shown to us through the bodily life of the God-man Jesus.

The Jesus of Christmas is also the Jesus of Easter, who rose in bodily form and in so doing, brought His kingdom to earth as it also is in heaven.