BLOG. 4/15/13: POST-EASTER … “UPROOTING AND PULLING DOWN”
I want to continue a discussion I started in my last blog …
For those of us whose whole formation has been in Christendom church institutions, it is near impossible to imagine the disorientation of those disciples of Christ during those immediate post-Easter days. The reason is that we have all too much reverted to their pre-Pentecostal mindset.
Let me explain. Jeremiah’s prophetic commission from the Lord was: “See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and break down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10). In a very real sense, Jesus, as the great prophet of God to this age, did exactly that. What he came to do was so radically other that even his own most intimate disciples had no categories for it. Even though they had seen him do all those signs that the prophets had said that the messiah would do (heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, feed the hungry, raise the dead, and preach good news to the poor), even though they had seen the miracles and walked in his company … and even though they had heard him repetitively prophesy his own necessary suffering and death, somehow they couldn’t connect the dots after Easter.
Yes, and even though they had heard him predict the destruction of the temple and to declare himself to be the true temple, and though they had heard him tell them that suffering was a part of their calling and that if he was hated, so would they be hated for his name sake—yet they were still wedded to the traditional image of the messiah as some kind of a ‘knight on a white horse’ who would reclaim the glories of the David throne.
They had no capacity to hear or imagine a messiah who would be arrested, tortured, and killed by a collusion of temple authorities and the hated Roman occupiers. Much less did they have any capacity to even entertain the insane notion of one raised from the dead. They had no capacity to even comprehend one who would root up, pull down, and destroy the institutions of Israel, and then build and plant something unimaginably new and dynamic and redemptive of the design of God for the world.
So on that Easter Sunday and in the days that followed when he kept appearing suddenly in strange settings, they were still trying to connect the dots. This is obvious right down to those moments before his ascension, when they asked if he would at that time restore the kingdom to Israel. He only told them that they would understand when God would visit them by his Spirit, and that they must wait until that happened.
The wild ride that followed Pentecost all confirmed in their minds what Jesus had taught them all along. They quickly understood why he had to suffer and bear the sins of the world, and how he reconciled the world to God by his blood. And they understood that the Temple and its leadership were no friends, but would quickly persecute them as Jesus had predicted. And they certainly had never comprehended that the new community of the Kingdom of God would not be a homogeneous, pleasant, comfortable, carefully ordered and controlled religious institution—but rather that they would be launched out of their comfort zone into a real world, and that every one of them would be an integral part of this thrilling new creation called the kingdom of God.
Somehow the darkness has seduced the church back into a pre-Pentecostal misunderstanding of itself, of Jesus and of the mystery of the ages revealed in and through him. It has been taken captive by its own temple mentality, what with its professional priesthood, and that allows its ‘members’ to be passive, rather than rambunctiously involved in the obedience and suffering that will cause this gospel of the kingdom to be declared into every nook and cranny of this vast global human community.
“Root up? Pull down? Destroy? Overthrow? Build? Plant? New Creation? … Why not?
