When I was a child Jesus was my friend. I had had quite a few predecessors in the way of invisible companions, having a rather over-active imagination. Trying to grasp at the shreds of memory now, I have a nasty feeling that particular incarnation of Jesus had blond hair. I blame the Aryan stained-glass windows of our local church.
On the one hand it is easy to dispense with a childhood faith as naďve and superficial. But I still feel the loss of it. The sense of safety and eternal companionship provided by the presence of that good shepherd are not to be scoffed at. They are simply no longer part of my world.
I arrived to ministry in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London, armed with a bit of Buddhism and some new inkling of divine presence in the world. At the age of twenty, I had marched out of the Anglo-Catholic church of my upbringing, in high moral dudgeon at the wicked carryings-on of Christians of all stripes during the Reformation. I doubt that the study of history to advanced level in English secondary schools often produces revolutionary tendencies – but I was convinced Karl Marx was right: religion was responsible for all the suffering in the world. And that, as far as I was concerned, was that.
But my time as minister here in the East End has involved a rather disconcerting encounter with the prophet from Galilee. He doesn’t have blond hair any more, by the way. He’s a bit grubby because he’s been on the road for a while and he has an alarming light of conviction and determination in his eye.
Working class congregations are thin on the ground in the London district, in fact in the national Unitarian picture as a whole. Bethnal Green and Bow is economically the poorest constituency in the United Kingdom (or should that read dis-united?). I was warned in hushed whispers, before I took up the post, that the congregation “is very Christian, you know.” It took a while for me to realise that these two facts are, perhaps not oddly, related to one another.
For Jesus was, and continues to be, the prophet of the poor, the excluded and the oppressed. He heals untouchables by touching them, he sits down to feast with those considered well beyond the Pale by the doyens of respectability of his own time. His vision of the kingdom involves a complete inversion of the social hierarchy as known then and to this day:
“Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth.”
A message so radical that translators down the ages have preferred “the meek” to “the poor.” The meek, after all, can usually be guaranteed to behave.
In the context of world religions, this is pretty unusual. Hinduism saves most of its initiations for the Brahmin caste, even to this day. The Buddha, despite his demands upon his followers in terms of renunciation, largely preached to the merchant and ruling classes. Islam, despite its rigorous demands about care for the poor, does not ascribe any particular value to the perspective of the excluded.
Jesus does. His most radical teaching is not that we should dig ever deeper in our pockets to support the vulnerable, but that the excluded, marginalised, and oppressed have something to teach the rest of us about how the world should be structured. That it is they who are the true prophets of a new age that might be desirable to live in. That a world more in line with God’s longing for how we live together, might completely abandon the power structures that those of us at the top of the heap have come to take for granted.
For hundreds of years, Christianity was scorned by the ruling classes of the crumbling Roman empire as a religion of slaves. Which it was. Then by a curious series of inversions and hypocrisies, Christianity became the religion of empire.
“A friend once visited the catacombs of Rome. There he found that the most ancient depictions were at eye-level, and showed Jesus as the Good Shepherd. Then he visited some of the most ancient churches above ground, where the images were higher on the wall, and more often in royal garb. Finally, he noticed that in churches of the high Middle Ages, Jesus typically appeared only at the very top of the wall behind the altar, enthroned in majesty.
‘I don’t quite know why Jesus climbed the walls,’ he wrote, ‘but I suspect that it was because we could no longer stand to look at him eyeball to eyeball.’ “ (Cited in John Buehrens – Understanding the Bible)
And in this way, a new Christianity was born. Constantinian Christianity, one that told the meek they would be rewarded in heaven, that the flesh was sinful and to be ignored, that there was no hope of human beings ever living at peace with God and one another because we were innately too sinful, that this life didn’t matter. And by and large, prosperity gospel, its twenty-first century incarnation, is what you will get these days in the name of Christianity. This gospel teaches that wealth is God’s reward for a righteous life and pastoral advice includes where to find a suitable plastic surgeon so that god-fearing wives can fulfil biblical teachings on pleasing their husbands. Make no mistake, London bankers will not bend the knee beside the inhabitants of worlds they prefer to know nothing about. The world that lies, as it always has, outside the city walls.
It is no great surprise really that the ruling classes should engage in creative interpretations of the teachings of Jesus. In fact, the real surprise is that such radical teachings should have survived at all. As the privileged caste, not only of Europe but as Europeans, of the world, we don’t like being told to give up our stuff. We like stuff. We work for it, we shop for it, and we are going to enjoy it. Damn it. The fact that we don’t really enjoy it that much when it is all piled up just makes us want to run out and buy more stuff. After all, if we finally find the right stuff we will finally, finally be happy. Won’t we?
One of the most courageous sermons I ever heard was by a Unitarian Universalist minister when I was a student in Oxford. He said the fact that Unitarian Universalists didn’t like Jesus much was to do with their own success and the value they set by their own success, both personally and as a denomination. And no matter how you slice the salami, Jesus was a loser. He hung out with losers and worst of all, he died a loser’s death. I just hope that preacher had the guts to preach that sermon in his home town.
If we give up on the doctrine of atonement, that Jesus died to pay for our sins, all we are left with are his teachings. And Unitarians may be privileged but we are not, in the main, fools. We have a healthy tendency to literalism so that when Jesus says, “If you have two coats, give one away,” we don’t over-interpret. We just know it’s difficult to live with one coat when you could, if you chose, have two. As someone with a penchant for coats, I know this.
So, on the whole we prefer to keep a healthy distance from the teachings of the Galilean prophet. But I wonder for how long we can maintain what is in fact a choice to ignore the truth. The planet is already groaning under our excesses…you know the rest.
As H. G. Wells once said:
Jesus was like some terrible mortal huntsman digging mankind out of the snug burrows in which they had lived hitherto. In the white blaze of his kingdom, there was to be no property, no privilege, no pride, no precedence; no motive indeed, and no reward but love.
The Jesus I now see is still covered with the dust of the desert, a radical with a burning vision of a new kingdom. Not a comfortable companion, it must be said.
Rev.Jane Barraclough
Bethnal Green Unitarian Church.