Jesus the Stranger
Only the Jesus who is other, different, intriguing, frustrating, fascinating can change what one really is. A Jesus who is like the self only reinforces what is already in the self. And changing the self is precisely what his role in the moral life is all about.
Leander Keck, Who Is Jesus
“Yes’m,” the Misfit said as if he agreed. “Jesus thrown everything off balance.”
Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
Jesus came not only as Friend but also as Stranger. The one we thought we knew, we do not. He now appears as strange, other, even enemy. Why else was he crucified? Blasphemer, heretic, seditionist, disturber of the fragile Roman peace: he must go.
It may seem odd to describe Jesus as Stranger, but this may be the only way to make sure we have seen him as he is, not what we want him to be. “He comes to us as One unknown,” Albert Schweitzer said to those too smug about who Jesus was and is.
Frederick Buechner describes the Maundy Thursday sermon he heard in an Episcopal church in Wheaton, Illinois. The preacher was preaching on Peter’s denial on the night of Jesus’ arrest. “I do not know the man!” Peter exclaimed to his questioners. These words, said the preacher, were not only a lie, they were also the truth. They were not only a denial, they were a confession. After three years of following him, listening, watching he still did not know the man.
Perhaps this is where we begin with Jesus the Stranger. Unless we know that we do not know him, we cannot grow to know him. In Christian spirituality and theology, there is the Via Positiva and the Via Negativa.
The Via Positiva is also called kataphatic theology. It is about the God we can know. It uses words, concepts, images. The Via Negativa is also called apophatic theology. It recognizes we do not know, or cannot know. It is the path of unknowing. On this path we go wordless; we put aside images, thoughts, concepts, theologies in order to find a deeper knowing. We are willing to enter into what John Keats called “Negative Capability,” where we become,
… capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.[1]
What we thought we knew we do not. Christ came to Sojourner Truth – emancipated slave, abolitionist and women’s rights activist – in a vision. When he appeared to her she said, “I know you and don’t know you.”
I
In Luke 4:16-30 we observe how quickly Jesus changed from friend to stranger to enemy in his hometown. Soon after his baptism, he went to the synagogue in Nazareth for their Shabbat service and preached his “inaugural sermon” for them. He was invited to read from the prophets and read from Isaiah 61:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
Because God has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
God has sent me
to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18-19, RSV, adapted).
He rolled up the scroll, then sat, in good rabbinic fashion, to teach. “Today this scripture is fulfilled,” he said. Today.
The congregation nodded an approval. He was Judy Garland singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” God’s messianic kingdom was dawning! One listener punched his friend and perhaps with a hint of local pride said, “That’s Joe’s boy, isn’t it?!”
Then Jesus began to interpret the text; as he did the mood turned sharply. The kingdom was here all right, but not as they expected. It was coming to foreigners, outsiders. Jesus gave examples. There were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time during the great drought, but Elijah was sent (meaning, by God!) to a widow in Sidon. There were many lepers in Elijah’s day, but he cured a leper named Naaman, the Syrian general.
The kingdom’s here, but in Havana not Nashville. Healing’s happening but look, it’s a Shiite general in Basra who’s healed. God’s salvation is beyond our clan, our nation, even our brand of faith. The kingdom of God is not the kingdom of Israel, he was saying. It is larger.
All of a sudden, Jesus the homeboy became Jesus the stranger. The congregation was filled with rage, the text says, and they seized him and carried him to a cliff to throw him off.
It’s not how you picture your first sermon.
II
But this was not the only time Jesus was seen as a stranger, other, different, enemy. At one point, Jesus’ family came to “restrain him for people were saying ‘He has gone out of his mind.’” (Mark 3:21)
What was this state of mind? The Greek word exeste means literally “beside oneself.” Was it, to use the words of Wordsworth, “The divine insanity of noble minds?” Was it, to quote Frederick C. Grant, a state of “dangerous mental exaltation?” Was it from the Spirit of God or the devil? His opponents charged “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts our demons.” (Mark 3:22)
The charges against Jesus caused his worried family to take action, to try to “restrain” him (kratzsai), to take charge of him, perhaps to protect him from himself. Did he mystify his family, too?
In John’s gospel some adversaries came and said, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (John 8:48) Jesus answered with deliberate evasiveness: “I don’t have a demon.” Jesus would not let the charge of demon-possession stand. His power came from God, not Satan. But he did not answer the Samaritan question. He let it linger in the air. It’s an interesting accusation: Jesus the Samaritan, the outsider, despised and rejected, mixed race, heterodox, other.
Jesus told surprising parables with Samaritans as heroes. He brought the kingdom of God to a Samaritan woman, an outsider herself, then enlisted her in his mission. He healed a Samaritan leper, who was the only one of the ten (the other nine, Jews) who came back to thank him and praise God. Then, by God, Jesus must be a closet Samaritan!
Jesus was willing to be an outsider so that we might recognize there is no outsider to God. Jesus says: I am a Cuban, an Indian, a South African, a Jew; I am a Sunni, a Buddhist, Sufi, Sikh. I am black, gay, womanish and Latino/Latina.[2] I am human, created in the image of God, come as a stranger so there will be no more strangers in the household of God and God’s earth.
Are we willing to let Jesus come to us as a stranger, as unknown? Jesus the Friend represents the radical immanence of God, the nearness of God beyond imagining. Jesus as Stranger represents the radical transcendence of God, the otherness, the difference of God beyond imagining. As the prophet Isaiah said,
For my thoughts are not your thoughts
Neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are my ways higher than your ways,
And my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9, RSV).
Dietrick Bonhoeffer in Life Together speaks of the Word of God that comes to us from outside us, extra nos. The word of God that comes to us in the voice of another.[3] To be sure, God’s word is also near us, within us, “in your mouth and in your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:14). But sometimes the Word of God must come from another place, foreign and strange, upsetting our conventional thinking, our settled truths, our assumed beliefs, our accustomed politics.
The Welsh poet, Waldo Williams, gives us images of Jesus the outsider, the stranger, the riddler of the kingdom which comes to shatter and re-arrange all our kingdoms. “Who was it then, for God’s sake?” he asks,
… mocking our boasts, tracking our every trail and slipping past
all our recruiting sergeants?
…. He will arrive, the outlaw,
the huntsman, the lost heir making good his claim
to no-man’s land. The exiled king
is coming home one day; the rushes sweep aside
to let him through.[4]
Will we let him through? Welcome him? Will we let him bring the kingdom he would bring rather than the one we have devised? Richard Rohr says that when we pray “Thy kingdom come” we are praying, “My kingdom go.”
Jesus was willing to become a Stranger that we might open our eyes to the kingdom of God which was coming to rearrange things. And so were his followers willing to be strange, different, other in order to witness the life of Christ in them. Paul wrote:
For I think God has exhibited the apostles as last of all …. We have become a spectacle to the world …. We are fools for Christ’s sake (I Corinthians 4:9-10, RSV).
To acknowledge Jesus the Stranger is to recognize that there is a dimension of Jesus which will always be “counter, original, spare, strange” (Gerard Manley Hopkins). It is to enter into a reverent knowing and unknowing. The quest for the historical Jesus will never be finished. Our certainties about him are always ready to be upset. One day he is Friend; another day he is Stranger.
This reverent knowing and unknowing keeps our faith alive as we seek to know and follow him. Maya Angelou says that when overly zealous, overly certain people come to her and announce, “I am a Christian,” she answers, “Already?!”
We must allow Jesus to be a Stranger else our discipleship is chasing our own tails.
[1] John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters (Boston: Riverside Editions, 1959), p. 261.
[2] For an example of “Jesus as Stranger” theology, see Jesus as the Black Jesus and Black Christ in the work of James H. Cone: God of the Oppressed (N.Y.: The Seabury Press, 1975); and A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1970)
[3] Dietrick Bonhoeffer, Life Together (N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1954), pp. 22-23.
[4] Waldo Williams, “Between Two Fields,” in Rowan Williams, The Poems of Rowan Williams (Oxford: The Perpetua Press, 2002), pp. 92-93. Rowan Williams translated “Between Two Fields” from the Welsh. There is a variant translation Roman Williams made of one line, “the one who escapes the conscription of every army” from his Open To Judgement (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1984), p. 131.