WHAT WAS JESUS’S NARROW WORLD?
I went to church on Easter Sunday, partly as an attempt to fit back in, partly because Kathe loved Easter and loved going to church on Easter where for most of her life she was in the choir.
But on Easter morning I had another slant on Easter that I don’t think I have ever thought of before and would like to puzzle about here.
The Easter sermon was about feeling the intensity of the presence of Jesus and being fully alive, rising from the dead. Easter is in the spring and is also a celebration of the rebirth of life after a cold, lifeless winter.
But what I suddenly wondered about was different. After being in Gujurati villages where people worship in a pre Hindu way and speak a different language from my own and live in cramped, thatched houses with thorn fences keeping the animals penned in around the house, and eating flatbread and dal for their meals, all of which are so far away from the way that I live and which make me realize that almost everything is my life is a result of idiosyncratic American culture, just one more way of doing things, no better and no worse, that my distance from a Gujurati village might also be true of my not knowing how Jesus ate or slept or spoke.
What caught my attention in the sermon was one line which followed the disciples visit to the tomb. “And then they went home.”
What was home like for those disciples, how did the sleep, what kind of food did they eat, what animals did they keep penned up around them, how did they shop, how did they get around, what were their religious beliefs, how did they feel about being dominated by Romans, what did they do for entertainment, what was their reality?
Just as the Gujurati village feels so different from my American cultural conventions, how different the disciples and their family’s lives must have been.
In fact, I’ve never thought of them as having families, or daily work, or of how they looked at the stars or what impelled them along through life. I don’t know anything about their lives.
And then I think of the European paintings of the life of Christ which I saw in Haarlem and have seen through the long history of Western painting since the time of Jesus. Almost all the settings are a form of stylized European setting, all the people are white Europeans. There is nothing Palestinian about the paintings. And then I think of grand church in Haarlem and all over Europe. How do they connect with a carpenter’s everyday life in Nazareth and Jerusalem or the everyday life of the disciples.
I have heard the Bible stories so often that they almost seem contemporary, directly related to my everyday life. But how could they be if a Gujurati village life is so different from the way that I live that there seems to be little connection between us.
And of course this raises the question of how, if someone wants to accept Jesus as the guide of their life, or even as their lord and savior, which is the message of Easter, how can we do this if we don’t have the faintest idea of how Jesus and his followers lived their lives. It also raises the question of how when these stories of Jesus were passed down orally from generation to generation and finally written down in Greek and then Latin how much the stories shifted to fit the way that the people who wrote them down lived.
This was just me wondering on a Sunday morning and came out of the recent experience of my trip where I went from one cultural reality to another and then to another until it felt as if none of them were absolute reality and all were dreamed up ways of living, as if I were floating along from dream to dream in my own dream world.
And then I come back and the dream is over and everything is fixed and I have to fit into American cultural conventions again and do just what everyone else does. I have to stop floating and settle down.
But before I settle down, on Sunday morning, I wonder whether I can understand Jesus without experiencing the culture in which he lived.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 