Weirdo with a beardo (keep christianity weird - pt. 3)

In chapter 3 of Michael Frost's swell little book 'Keep Christianity Weird,' he labels Jesus as "the original weirdo." He starts on p. 53 with:

"The Gospel accounts continue to defy the church's best efforts throughout history to turn Jesus into some kind of tame, dignified religious leader. Again and again, the Gospels reveal Jesus to be a strange and unlikely messiah. So strange and unlikely, in fact, that those who were searching the signs most intently for the coming of the promised king completely missed him."

He then offers several examples - mostly from the book of Mark - supporting this idea of Christ's wild and weird ways. Noting our call to be more like this ourselves, we are offered a snippet of Nick Cave's introduction to the book of Mark:

"Merely to praise Christ in His Perfectness, keeps us on our knees, with our heads pitifully bent. Clearly, this is not what Christ had in mind. Christ came as a liberator. Christ understood that we as humans were for ever held to the ground by the pull of gravity -- our ordinariness, our mediocrity -- and it was through His example that He gave our imaginations the freedom to rise and to fly. In short, to be Christ-like."

So we are given some case studies from the bible of those who followed... Nicodemus, the bleeding woman, and the children in the temple. For, as James Cone writes, "Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology." Amen.

I was particularly struck by the story Frost weaves of the bleeding woman from Mark chapter 5 (pp. 67-71). In the end, he says of Jesus...

"He forced the terrified woman, accustomed as she was to the shadows, to step out into an assembly of men and to testify to her actions. He did it, though, not to shame her, but to honor her... In the assembly of men, in the presence of a synagogue leader, Jesus brings testimony of the bloodied woman's great faith. He makes her the hero. He's doing what he told Nicodemus he would do. He's being the ultimate eccentric, leading his sheep out of darkness and fear, out of religious superstition and sickness, into fresh pastures."

At the close of this chapter was one of the highlights of the book for me, personally. Frost quotes New Testament scholar James Resseguie. He was a professor at the small seminary I attended in the 1990's and was actually my faculty adviser one year. Anyway, he quotes Resseguie as saying, "It is true that his [Jesus'] forms of speech emphasize his strangeness, but his strangeness serves to emphasize our strangeness, making strange our common, narcotized way of viewing the world." To which Frost sums up and closes the chapter...

"Here is the weird and winsome example of Jesus: At first, he seems strange to us, but the more we look, the more we realize that what is really strange is the culture in which we have become content. We have been sleep-walking. But the strangeness of Jesus wakes us up to the world as it should be."

Indeed! This is the Jesus I fell in love with. This is the re-awakening I need! Amen.