A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [150]
16. Even if the worst happens, God will surely graft some other new branches onto the ancient tree of peace, justice, healing, reverence, and life that has been growing on earth since long before the term “Christianity” was ever invented. God doesn’t depend on any single religious institution or movement to accomplish God’s good pleasure. (Here I’m recalling Paul’s warning in Rom. 11:17–24, a seldom-discussed passage that I think is strangely relevant to many branches of the Christian religion today.)
17. My favorite book on this subject is by Samir Selmanovic, It’s Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009).
18. By art, I am referring to Jesus’s use of creative short fiction (parables), poetry (the Beatitudes), guerilla theater (cleansing of the temple, triumphal entry), and beautiful performance art (healings, feedings, etc.).
19. In applying Jesus’s teaching of neighbor love only to fellow Christians, we perfectly fit into Jesus’s critique in the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, where he deconstructs the us-them, insider-outsider, political-religious identity: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them” (Luke 6:32; Matt. 5:46).
20. These questions, remember, make perfect sense within the six-line, Greco-Roman soul-sort narrative, but are hard to imagine outside of it.
21. Jesus mysteriously says he is going somewhere others cannot go no less than eight times in the gospel. First, Jesus tells the Pharisees and priests that he will go to the one who sent him, but they cannot come (7:33–36; 8:14–30). The Pharisees and priests are confused by his statement. They speculate that Jesus means he will go to the Jews scattered across the Roman Empire. They don’t realize that he is speaking figuratively (16:25). Then Jesus tells his disciples he is going somewhere they cannot come, although Peter (the pronoun “you” is singular) will come there later (13:33, 36). The disciples too are confused and troubled. Next Jesus tells the disciples he is going to his Father’s house, a place with many dwelling places, to which Jesus will bring the disciples later (14:2–4). The disciples are still confused (14:5, 8). Jesus later makes clear where he is going: to the Father (14:28), to the One who sent him (16:5). Where Jesus is going, he will not be seen (16:10), but then after a little while he will again be seen (16:16). These statements leave the disciples more confused than ever (16:17–18). Jesus’s ensuing explanation finally seems to bring everything together: “I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and am going to the Father” (16:28). The disciples reply, “Yes, now you are speaking plainly…. Now…we believe that you came from God” (16:29–30). Strangely, this response—not that they understand where Jesus is going, but that they believe where has come from—elicits a powerful affirmation from Jesus: “Do you now believe?” (16:31). These words are especially significant in light of the theme of belief that runs through John’s gospel (see 1:7, 12, 50; 2:22–23; 3:12, 15, 16, 18, 36; 4:21, 39, 41–42, 48, 53; and so on, through to 20:31).
22. This interchange, by the way, perfectly parallels a conversation Jesus had with James and John when their mother asked for seats to Jesus’s right and left in his kingdom (Matt. 20:20–23). There, instead of using the language of “going where I go,” Jesus uses the phrase “drink the cup that I am about to drink.” Like Peter, the Zebedee boys claim great loyalty, and Jesus similarly affirms that someday they will indeed suffer for him—but not now.
23. Very few stories are included in all four gospels, and this is one of the few. But although Matthew, Mark, and Luke include it at the end of Jesus’s ministry, John places it near the very beginning.
24. Jesus is constantly speaking “figuratively” and confusing nearly everybody in John’s gospel—along with, we might