Believing the Absurd





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Name this important person in history: He was raised in an obscure village of 200 to 400 inhabitants. He and his family were at the bottom of the social classes, even below that of the peasantry.

The house he grew up in was made of stones roughly stacked on top of one another. The floor was of packed earth; the roof was thatched, built over beams of wood and held together with mud. Two or three of these shacks were clustered together around an open courtyard where much of the cooking was done. There was a common cistern and a millstone for grinding grain. Garbage and sewage was tossed outside the house into alleyways between the groups of houses.

Conditions were filthy, malodorous and unhealthy. He and most residents had iron and protein deficiencies, and most had severe arthritis. Life expectancy was somewhere in the 30s.

Some of you may have guessed that this describes Jesus and, according to archaeologists, the circumstances in which he lived. Odd, isn’t it, that many people think of him as a sanitized, middle-class-like, pious guy, who was movie-star handsome? It’s easy to get comfortable with that kind of guy. He’s far enough away from us in time, way of life – and relevancy.

I’m currently reading “Jesus, A Pilgrimage” by James Martin, S.J. It has some fascinating descriptions of what archaeologists have discovered about life in Nazareth at the time of Jesus. It’s likely that Jesus lived much like the poorest people still live in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. He had little privacy, probably wore dirty and worn clothes, and until he became an itinerant preacher, was a common laborer.

(We think of him as a “carpenter,” but according to Martin’s book, that’s a bit romantic. He and others with that title had to do any jobs that brought income, including heavy lifting under the thumb of upper class employers.)

I find this fascinating for a couple of reasons. The first, as mentioned, is how much it contrasts with the common perception of the plastic Jesus. The second is the unlikelihood that someone born and raised in such an insignificant place and such pitiful circumstances could be “God’s son.”



I believe he is because as I’ve mentioned in these blogs, once I get beyond the idea that God exists, the rest – the Christ story and the religion that resulted – is a walk in the park. But I believe many Christians have lost the sense of its incredulity, its weirdness, of how radically counter-cultural it is.
 

Barbara Ehrenreich
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I’ve just started reading another book called “Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything” by Barbara Ehrenreich. Trained as a scientist, Ehrenreich became an activist and is the author of 14 books. During her youth, she writes, she attended camps and events sponsored by Baptists and Congregationalists. She also tried Catholicism, she says, but it occurred to her that “this was a religion whose central ritual was an enactment of cannibalism.”

She was evidently referring to Catholics’ belief in Jesus’ presence in the bread and wine at Mass and its reception in communion. At least she has an appreciation for how incredible this ritual is. It would do wonders for the manner in which we Catholics blandly receive communion if more of us appreciated how bizarre it is. Instead, many of us are “ho-hum” about it, having received communion hundreds of times.

St. Paul had a good notion of the absurdity of our faith. In his first letter to his Christian converts in Corinth, he mentioned that if what we believe isn’t true – speaking specifically of Jesus’ resurrection – we’re to be pitied.

“If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years,” Paul writes in The Message translation of the New Testament, “we’re a pretty sorry lot.”

Earlier in the same letter, he writes, “The message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hell-bent on destruction….”

Why should believers always be aware, as I believe they should, of the absurdity of faith? Because it makes us conscious that any degree of faith we may have does not entirely result from our own cleverness, but is a gift, often delivered through generations of believers. If it were entirely our doing, would be unwilling to buck the popular culture about faith and religion?

And if we intend to help others in a search for God, we have to present faith as it is. Despite the common view that faith is a comfortable, risk-free, no-cost way of life, we have to acknowledge to people searching for God that there’s a cost to discipleship, including the cost of being counter-cultural. I use the word “entirely” above because besides being a gift, faith requires on our part openness, honesty with self, resolve, patience with God and self, and the willingness to accept uncertainty.

The incredibly unlikely choices God made in choosing the circumstances of Jesus’ life gives us a glimpse of God’s otherness. Isaiah, the great Hebrew prophet, saw this thousands of years ago when he wrote, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.”