An Alien Spirituality

Apart from the Christ child’s birth itself, Luke mentions only two events from Jesus’ childhood and both of them are set at the Temple in Jerusalem. Every Jewish boy faced two rites of passage. One was circumcision (on day 8 of life) and the other was some kind of bar mitzvah at age 12. For Jesus, both of these take place at the Temple.

In Xi’an, where we lived in China, the Hui Muslim boys in our city were circumcised at age 12. Talk about having your rites read to you all at once! Actually being circumcised when you are older is not that unusual a custom around the world. It certainly was the pattern set for Abraham’s son, Ishmael, but the descendents of Jacob adopted the custom of circumcision shortly after birth. Thus it was for Jesus.

His was a very religious upbringing. He grew up steeped in the teachings of the Law and the Prophets, learning a trade (in his case, carpentry), and going through the rites as every Jewish boy did. When Jesus later confronted the Pharisees and the religious leaders, he did so as an insider. Not because he came from heaven – he didn’t always use THAT trump card with them. He was an insider from their own world of earthly ceremony and tradition. He knew the Law and the Prophets better than they did.

There are striking parallels here with the story of Paul’s life, who was a strict follower of the Law. Because he had followed the pharisaical teachings to the max, Paul was able to speak to the heart of the Pharisees. The difference with Jesus is that, unlike Paul (Saul) before his conversion, Jesus never entered into the mindset that saw spirituality as a summation of these external observances. For Jesus always, and for Paul after the experience on the road to Damascus, faith was a matter of the heart and when it expressed itself externally, it did so in ways quite foreign to the “faith” of the religious stalwarts of the day.

Why was spirituality of Jesus and Paul so alien to the faithful of the day? Luke devotes two whole books explaining the contrast between the spirituality of Jesus and his followers and the pseudo-spirituality abroad in Israel at the time. What we see in chapter 2 here are glimpses of the spiritual conflict to come during Jesus’ ministry.

Simeon quotes the prophet Isaiah when speaking of Jesus being “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” Luke, a Gentile, picks up on the inclusive theme. But there is a darker tint to Simeon’s message of hope. Mary herself will feel the agony that the child’s mission will bring. For he is destined to shake up Israel and to be a lightning rod, specifically so that the inner thoughts of people will be revealed.

What makes Jesus’ brand of spirituality so alien is that it is heart centered. And yet it doesn’t end there, for this heart-centeredness affects everything around it. The religion of the day looked for certain politically correct expressions, just as our modern expressions of faith do. Vote a certain way and you are on the straight and narrow. Do these religious activities and you have eternal life. If these exterior expressions are fulfilled, then the heart has to be right, or so the thinking goes.

In the early 80s I had a long discussion with a pastor friend about college students at that time. In this friend’s thinking, the new generation was much more spiritually on track than the youth of the 60s and 70s, because they were more clean cut and appeared more conforming to civil society as he envisioned it. I countered that the youth of the 60s and 70s had displayed much more spiritual hunger in their protests and questions than the 80s youth were in their complacent conformity.

All might look right on the outside, but the heart can be dead wrong. People can have a form of godliness, but not the power thereof. In essence, as Jesus would later say, they are just like so many fancy tombstones. They look good, but they are “dead as door nails.”