Sunday Morning Med--Warning: Rewards

“By them is your servant warned; 

in keeping them there is great rewards.” Psalm 19:12

When I look back on my life it seems as if I’ve been a part of three wholly different eras.

I was a child in the fifties, when, in small-town America, the church was the central institution of our lives, the bona fide authority, and life seemed simple. In America, we’d just won a war against genuine evil. Tons of ex-GIs, my father among them, returning from experiences they’d never forget, were looking for little more than sweet peace and quiet security. War’s madness gave way to the order of the fifties, everything in place.

What I remember of Jesus from that time is a visual image almost everyone has seen. A pale glow surrounds his head, mysterious light from some unseen source, some spiritual iridescence. That light is convincing. If you’d ever harbored any doubt, one look at that painting showed his divinity, the King of kings. You know the drawing—Warner Sallman, circa 1940.

I grew up in the Sixties, when authority—church, state, even family—took a beating. Somewhere I have a slide of a kid in a t-shirt, a picture I took on an anti-war march in Washington D.C.; on the back of that shirt is a fist with a raised middle finger aimed at just about everything. He’s my age.

The wall of my office bears a Sixties Jesus portrait, this one in a swirl of long hair, his beard bedraggled, the sort of guy who would have left on a chopper with Peter Fonda to find America’s soul.

I’m growing old in yet another era, one not so easy—for me at least—to understand. I have no pictures of Jesus from this era, but I see one in the attitudes of my students. “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” might well be their theme song, if it could be played on a keyboard. Jesus sits in a Starbucks, something dark and rich steaming exotically in his hand, a sweet smile over his face, chillin’, working on relationships.

Which one is accurate? Go figure. We’re all, at best, fragmentary. Jesus Christ is always bigger, always more complete than whatever fantasy we have going.

Should we, like my students, think of him as a great guy? Should we, Sixties-like, hook arms with him and break up the military/industrial complex? Perhaps the most difficult pair of questions of all: Is he someone to love? Is he someone to fear?

There’s something about the balance in the diction of this verse that’s striking. I only wish there were a colon where there’s a semi-colon now, because I’m thinking that somehow the two sides of the verse go hand-in-hand. The verse reads like a bizarre highway sign: “Warning: Rewards ahead.”

Jaroslav Pelikan says that one of the most interesting questions of the scripture, one that needs to be answered every decade or so—and maybe more often—was one posed by none other than Jesus Christ: Who do people say that I am?”

The answer to that question is always the same—and always different, isn’t it? As mysteries go, he is the greatest.

But he loves us. Go figure.