I’ve been thinking this week about something I heard recently in a video interview. The writer and poet Jackie Hill Perry was being asked questions about her path to faith and her approach to explaining that faith to others.
She said that people can be ‘put off’ God and the Christian faith when they see Christians and the way they behave. People should look at Christ to see what God is like, she said, not look at Christians.
Although I could say much about the designation Christ-ian and why that means we should look something like Christ, and how the apostle Paul explicitly enjoins the Corinthians to imitate him as he imitates Christ, Hill Perry makes a good point.
Someone I know came to mind when I heard this: someone who is an intelligent, thinking, compassionate individual, but someone who looks at the prejudice, the divisiveness, the sheer bigotry that some people who call themselves Christians seem to display, and cannot for the life of her understand why anyone would want to be a part of that tribe.
I understand that point of view; I really do, and whilst I know a lot of Christians who do indeed imitate Christ, who show incredible humility and compassion, and faithful adherence to the ways of Christ, I’d rather point people to look at Christ himself.
Yesterday, with a bunch of Christians, I spent some time looking at Jesus through a story Luke tells in his gospel. It’s the story about the widow at Nain in Luke chapter 7. What we see in this very brief story is a meeting between Jesus and a widow; she is already bereft and left unprotected and unrepresented in a world where a husband provided security and status. When Jesus meets her, it’s at the funeral of her only son. Talk about being at the bottom of the pile; this woman has lost everything. We can barely think of more tragic circumstances. There’s a huge crowd there, but Luke says Jesus saw her; Jesus saw HER. He stopped for her. He gave time to her. He raised her son from the dead and gave him back to his mother.
While this is a display of supernatural power in a resurrection miracle, it is also a display of the kindness, the tenderness, the compassion, the attention of a saviour who said Whoever has seen me has seen the Father (John 14:9).
Comments