Day Nineteen

Just for fun, let’s suppose that Jesus’ focus was on the here and now rather than the hereafter. What difference would that make as to our regard for him? If he didn’t see his mission as guaranteeing us a place in heaven, would we have any reason to pay attention to him? What if we discovered that Jesus said something to the effect of “Ask not what the Kingdom can do for you, but what you can do for the Kingdom!”? Would we still be interested in getting on the Christian bandwagon? From the “what’s in it for me?” perspective such a discovery would radically impact Jesus’ actual worth in the scheme of things, although the possibility of immediate rather than delayed gratification would certainly be more consistent with our thinking.

Two-thousand years of history and tradition are not just simply shaken off, but I suggest that by using John Cobb’s analogy of peeling away the layers of an onion we might come to a fresh new understanding of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. And we have that mystical promise from John’s gospel that there is an abiding presence to assist us with the process. The challenge is to dare to think that we might come to our own conclusions about the man and his ministry without being totally dependent upon others to tell us what to think. It is the Wesleyan adventure of adding our experience and ability to reason to the mix of Scripture and tradition to develop a uniquely personal understanding of what the Christ is all about.

My own study of the subject has led me to feel that there is a strong argument to be made for Jesus’ emphasis upon the present. His gospel was that God’s reign is at hand, not somewhere in the future. What sayings of his that we have been able to determine as authentic address the imminent rather than the remote or distant, and the prayer that has survived the millennia is for the kingdom to come to Earth as it is in heaven. Indeed, it is difficult to find anything that Jesus actually said about the hereafter precisely because his focus was primarily on the present. If Jesus’ offer of salvation is for the present rather than the future, we may have some serious rethinking to do about whether or not we even want to consider it.