Sorry, Jesus, but the truth is your kingdom is full of surprise endings, plot reversals, twists and convolutions. Where I grew up, we kids had a couple of favorite slang expressions for this, words that were fun to pronounce: wopperjawed and cattywampus. They meant something didn’t line up the way you would expect, maybe even lined up opposite of what you would expect. Last is first, losing is finding, giving is receiving, the rich are poor, servant is master, greatest is least, and freedom is slavery to the will of God. Yeah, Jesus, your kingdom is clearly wopperjawed and cattywampus. Maybe this explains why we have so much trouble getting ourselves aligned with the program.
For example, I have earnestly tried to apply WWJD (What would Jesus do?) as a simple rule of conduct. “Just do it” feels right and seems to work in a few obvious situations. Unfortunately, in the remaining ones, it’s not much help. I finally realized that, most of the time, asking WWJD cannot be the first step.
A close inspection of the gospels shows Jesus did what he did because he saw what he saw. “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” [Matthew 9:36; see also Mark 2:5]. Where the disciples saw a crowd control problem, Jesus saw people in need. He always saw what others ignored or avoided or minimized or pretended not to see. I should have known this already because, when he looks into my heart, he sees what I tend to ignore or avoid or minimize or pretend not to see. He sees, for example, that I often do good things for selfish reasons. So … in any given situation, perhaps the first rule should be: What would Jesus see (WWJS)? This doesn’t align well with my natural bent, which is (1) do it, then (2) see what happens. The Jesus rule is (1) see it, then (2) do what happens. It’s wopperjawed, like other parts of the gospel.
Around me, I see people I can learn to love but not necessarily people I can learn to like. Seeing was a completely different experience for Jesus. When he looked around, he saw people that were both lovable and likable. He genuinely liked the tax collectors and the prostitutes, the sick and the lame, servants and masters, nobodies and somebodies. The surprise is not that Jesus loves me and loves you; that’s old news. The surprise is that Jesus actually likes us.
If I apply the WWJS rule, I will need to see, in others, the qualities Jesus would have found likable. I will need to see their quirks and foibles as somehow endearing. I will need to see their self-inflicted predicaments as drama. I will need to see their misdirection as adventure. I will need to see the half-buried image of God in their lives. I will need to see their private world as a world where the kingdom is coming instead of a world that is going to waste. This kind of seeing will keep me living on the side of the God’s promise instead of on the side of what passes for realism.
Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy, invites us to see, as Jesus saw, that “this is a God-bathed, God-permeated world.” I’ll give that a try. Here, in context, is the full quote (Chapter 3, page 61):
Jesus’ good news about the kingdom can be an effective guide for our lives only if we share his view of the world in which we live. To his eyes this is a God-bathed and God-permeated world. It is a world filled with a glorious reality, where every component is within the range of God’s direct knowledge and control — though he obviously permits some of it, for good reasons, to be for a while otherwise than as he wishes. It is a world that is inconceivably beautiful and good because of God and because God is always in it. It is a world in which God is continually at play and over which he constantly rejoices. Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us.
Before you hurry to replace that WWJD bumper sticker with WWJS, you might want to consider that, in some quarters, it means “What would Jesus shoot?”
Specularity 