First Congregational United Church of Christ – Eugene, Oregon

WHO WAS THAT GUY? A Youth/Adult Study Based on the Book “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time” by Marcus J. Borg

6 “Jesus: Teacher of Alternative Wisdom”

The strongest consensus among Jesus scholars today is that Jesus was a teacher of wisdom. There is virtually no disagreement on this point. Basically, wisdom is about how to live one’s life in accord with reality. Central to it is the notion of a way or a path, indeed of two ways or paths: the wise way and the foolish way. Teachers of wisdom speak of these two ways , commending the one and warning of the consequences of following the other. There are also two types of wisdom and two types of teachers. The most common type of wisdom is conventional wisdom; its teachers are conventional sages. This is the mainstream wisdom of a culture, it’s “what everybody knows,” a culture’s understandings about what is real and how to live. The second type is a subversive and alternative wisdom. This wisdom questions and undermines conventional wisdom and speaks of another way, another path. Its teachers are subversive sages. Lao-tzu spoke of following a “way” that led away from conventional perceptions and values toward living in accord with “the Tao” itself. At the center of the Buddha’s teaching is the image of a way, “the eightfold path,” leading from the world of convention and its “grasping” to enlightenment and compassion. The wisdom of the subversive sage is the wisdom of “the road less traveled.” And so it was with Jesus: his wisdom spoke of “the narrow way” which led to life, and subverted the “broad way” followed by the many, which led to destruction. To see the narrow way that Jesus spoke of, his subversive and alternative wisdom, we need to look at both the how and what of his wisdom teaching. Jesus taught, using aphorisms and parables. Aphorisms are short, memorable sayings, great “one-liners.” Parables are short stories, invoking comparisons. Together, they constitute the bedrock of Jesus’ oral teaching. Both are invitational forms of speech which invite hearers to see something they might not otherwise see. They tease the imagination into activity, suggesting more than they say, and invite a transformation of perception. The aphorisms of Jesus, of which there are more than a hundred, invite further insight. “You cannot serve two masters,” “You cannot get grapes from a bramble bush,” “If a blind person leads a blind person, will they not both fall into a ditch,” “You strain out a gnat and swallow a camel”–all are short, provocative sayings that mean more than what they say and that invited the hearers to see something they otherwise might not see. They were spoken one at a time in order to achieve maximum benefit, quite unlike the manner in which they are presented by Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount, which covers three chapters as a single discourse. They were also used over and over as a piece of oral teaching in the broader context of the social world of Jesus—the resonant lines standing alone as invitations to further reflection.

First Congregational United Church of Christ – Eugene, Oregon

So also are the parables of Jesus invitational, using the form of a story. Some of the parables of Jesus are very short, spoken as aphorisms, memorable enigmatic sayings complete in themselves: “The Kingdom of God is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till it was all leavened,” “The Kingdom of God is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” Other parables are full-fledged stories with considerable plot and character development, like that of the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan. By being good stories, they draw the hearer into the world of the narrative, then they invite the hearer to see something else in the light of what happens in the story. The invitation is to a different way of seeing. There are those who have eyes and yet do not see. There is a blindness that afflicts the sighted. And how one sees makes all the difference. How we see determines the path that we walk, the way that we live. As a teacher of wisdom, Jesus taught a way or path of transformation from a life in the world of conventional wisdom to a life centered in God. Conventional wisdom is the taken-for-granted understandings about the way to live. It is what everybody knows, the world that everybody is socialized into through the process of growing up. “Don’t chew with your mouth open,” “Don’t take the biggest piece of cake,” “Don’t sing at the table.” Conventional wisdom is the storehouse of oughts within our heads, and it functions as the internal cop and the internal judge. It is a life of anxious striving, in which everything depends upon how well we perform by conforming to the standards that our culture values most highly. When this is combined with “faith,” then God becomes the voice of the “ought” and the world gets divided up into those who have faith and those who don’t, with the implication being that God is kindly disposed toward the first group and not toward the second. As a teacher of wisdom, Jesus under-mined the world of conventional wisdom by speaking of an alternative way that leads from death to life. The way that leads to life is an invitation to see God as gracious and compassionate rather than as the source and enforcer of the requirements, boundaries, and divisions of conventional wisdom. It is an invitation to a path that leads away from the life of conventional wisdom to a life that is more and more centered in God. What is needed is a new heart—an internal transformation brought about by a deep centering in God. The way of Jesus invites us to move from “second-hand” religion to firsthand religion, from a way of being religious based on believing what one has heard from others to that to which the Bible and the teachings of the church point—namely, that reality that we call God or the Spirit of God. This, says Borg, is central to the alternative wisdom of Jesus and also to the Jewish tradition in which he stood. The gospel of Jesus—the good news of Jesus’ own message—is that there is a way of being that moves beyond both secular and religious conventional wisdom. The path of transformation of which Jesus spoke leads from a life of requirements and measuring up (whether to culture or to God) to a life of relationship with God. It leads from a life of anxiety to a life of peace and trust. It leads from the bondage of self-preoccupation to the freedom of self-forgetfulness. It leads from life centered in culture to life centered in God.

Next Week

“Jesus: the Wisdom of God”