Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century

by Marcus J. Borg

The third statement in my threefold summary of what the historical Jesus was like is that he was a social prophet. As a social prophet, he was like the great social prophets of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament—people who also had vivid experiences of God and who in the name of God became God-intoxicated voices of socioreligious protest directed against the domination systems of their day.

To put that threefold summary into three phases, there was to Jesus, first, a Spirit dimension, second, a wisdom dimension, and, third, a justice dimension.

Now, what would it mean to take a figure like this, namely Jesus, seriously as a disclosure or a revelation of what a life full of God is like? What do we see? What would such a life look like? I will speak about this again with the same three subheadings I have just named. First, it would be a life lived in relationship to the same Spirit that Jesus knew in his own experience.

Spirituality I define as becoming conscious of and intentional about our relationship to God.

Second, a life that takes Jesus seriously as a disclosure of what a life full of God is like would be a life lived by the alternative wisdom of Jesus. The alternative wisdom of Jesus, the way less traveled, is in fact the same as a life lived in relationship to the Spirit.

Conventional wisdom is a culture’s most taken-for-granted notions about two things—about what is real and about how to live.

Growing up is basically learning the categories, labels, and language of your culture. These categories and labels form a grid that gets imposed on reality, and the effect of this blinds us to the wondrous reality in which we live.

Yet conventional wisdom reduces reality to the visible world of our ordinary experience, which is nothing special. This is the secular form of conventional wisdom. There is a religious form of conventional wisdom as well. The religious form of conventional wisdom with its excessive certitude blinds us to the mystery and wonder of life.

A second effect of conventional wisdom is that it tells us how to live.

One could make a very good case that the central values of modern Western culture are centered in what I have called the three As—appearance, affluence, and achievement. All of us, at least in the first half of...

The way of Jesus is an invitation out of that kind of life—an invitation into a radically different kind of life.

The third element in my threefold summary is what I want to highlight in this sermon, because it is the most unfamiliar and most unsettling to us. It is the justice dimension of taking Jesus seriously. The

Why this passion for justice? Why is the God of the Bible so passionate about justice? The answer, it seems to me, is disarmingly simple. Because God cares about human suffering, and the single greatest source of unnecessary human suffering, of unnecessary social misery, is systemic injustice.

I think in many ways, this is a difficult notion for us, made more difficult to grasp by the ethos of American individualism.

Taking Jesus seriously means that our own consciousness needs to be raised regarding the way in which cultural systems cause enormous suffering for people.

So to sum this up, taking Jesus seriously means a life increasingly centered in the Spirit of God, a life lived by the alternative wisdom of Jesus, and a life marked by compassion and justice.

When I was growing up, repenting was always associated with experiencing guilt and becoming really contrite about one’s sinfulness. (Here I think of a remark made by one of my colleagues, John Dominic Crossan, about a week ago. It is one of those wonderful remarks that he makes so often. He said that he thinks of guilt on the heart as like gas on the stomach—something to be gotten rid of, a flatulence of consciousness, if you will.)

The roots of the word “repent” are very interesting and suggest something quite different—not intensification of guilt and contrition. When we look at the Greek roots of the word “repentance,” the verb is metanoata. The noun is metanoia. Meta means “beyond.” The noun from which the second part of the word “repent” is derived is nous in Greek, and it means “mind.” Putting that together, “to repent” means “to go beyond the mind that you have.”

Jesus came to change our mind about God, not God's mind about us.

If we take Jesus seriously as a Jewish mystic, it also affects how we think about God or the sacred. It means that we need to think about God not as a personlike being out there separate from the universe, a long way away, not here. But it means we need to think of God or the sacred as the encompassing Spirit that is all around us and that is separated from us only by the membranes of our own consciousness. A mystic like Jesus is one in whom those membranes of consciousness become very thin, and one experiences God or the sacred. Jesus invited his followers into a relationship to the same Spirit, the same God that he knew in his own experience.

Now, this radical centering in God does not leave us unchanged. It transforms us, and this leads us to the second focal point of what it means to follow Jesus, what it means to take Jesus seriously. In a single sentence, it means compassion in the world of the everyday. Slightly more fully, it means a life of compassion and a passion for justice. I need both of these words, “compassion” and “justice,” for compassion without justice easily gets individualized or sentimentalized, and justice without compassion easily sounds like politics.

It is found in Luke 6:36 with a parallel in Matthew 5:48 (very early Q material for those of you who like to know things like that): “be compassionate as God is compassionate.” The word for “compassionate” in both Hebrew and Aramaic is related to the word for “womb.” Thus, to be compassionate is to be womblike, to be like a womb. God is womblike, Jesus says, therefore, you be womblike.

To speak of compassion as the core value of the Christian life may seem like old hat to us, like ho-hum. But contrasted for a moment to what some Christians have thought the Christian life is most centrally about, that it is really about righteousness—keeping your moral shirttails clean, avoiding being stained by the world—in that sense, the Christian life is profoundly different from compassion.

We sometimes think that justice has to do with punishment, with people getting what is coming to them for what they have done wrong. When we think that way, then we think that the opposite of justice is mercy. But in the Bible, the opposite of justice is not mercy; the opposite of justice is injustice.

The gospel of Jesus is ultimately very simple. There is nothing complicated about this at all. The gospel invites us to stand with Jesus, to take Jesus seriously. Take seriously your relationship to God, and take seriously caring about what God cares about in the world.

The popular image—popular in the sense of most widely held—pictures Jesus’s identity and purpose with great clarity: he was the only begotten Son of God, whose purpose was to die for the sins of the world. Christians and non-Christians alike share this image, drawn from the Gospels (especially John) and creeds, carried through the history of the West and nurtured by our culture’s celebrations of Christmas and Easter. Christians are those who believe the image to be true, while non-Christians are those who do not.

We learned that in all likelihood Jesus did not speak as he does in John’s Gospel; that even the synoptic Gospels are a complex mixture of historical memory and post-Easter interpretation; that the image of Jesus as one who deliberately gave his life for the sins of the world is the product of the church’s sacrificial theology; and that Jesus probably did not proclaim his own exalted identity or even think of himself in such terms.

In part this conclusion resulted from the dominant scholarly understanding of Jesus that did emerge from the withering fire of historical criticism: that Jesus was the eschatological prophet who believed that the final judgment was coming in his generation.

He himself was conscious of being “the eschatological prophet”; the crisis that runs throughout his teaching was the imminent end of the world; his historical purpose was to warn his hearers to repent before it was too late and to invite them to ground their existence in God, for the world was soon to pass away.

There is a second feature of the historical Jesus that can significantly inform the life of the church today: his relationship to the society of his time. He was deeply involved in the historical life of his own people. Specifically, he saw them headed on a course toward historic catastrophe flowing out of their loyalties and blindness; he called his hearers to a radically different understanding of what faithfulness to God meant, an understanding that was to be embodied in the life of a community in history.

But almost without realizing it, recent scholarship has undermined the eschatological understanding of Jesus. That view was founded on the “coming Son of Man” sayings (e.g., Mark 13:24–27) as authentic to Jesus; yet New Testament scholars now routinely (and, I think, correctly) deny that the “coming Son of Man” sayings go back to Jesus.

But if the crisis that Jesus announced was not the imminent end of the world, what was it? It was a coming historical catastrophe, probably not yet inevitable, that would result from the combination of Rome’s imperial needs and insensitivity to the cultural direction of his own people. Like an Old Testament prophet (to whom he was compared by his contemporaries), Jesus criticized the present path and threatened destruction if it did not change.

In place of “holiness” as the imitatio dei followed by the other renewal movements (“You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy,” Lev. 19:2), Jesus substituted a different blueprint for the life of the community: “Be compassionate as your heavenly father is compassionate” (Luke 6:36). Moreover, this directive was intended for the earthly life of the people of God. Jesus’s intention was the transformation of his people in the face of a historical crisis.

We are called to become the church in a culture whose values are largely alien to the Christian message, to be once again the church of the catacombs.

Images of Jesus give content to what loyalty to him means. The popular picture of Jesus as one whose purpose was to proclaim truths about himself most often construes loyalty to him as insistence on the truth of those claims. Loyalty becomes belief in the historical truthfulness of all the statements in the Gospels.

But the image of Jesus as a man of Spirit, deeply involved in the historical crisis of his own time, besides being more historically adequate than either the popular or the dominant scholarly image, can shape the church’s discipleship today.

The first of these models or ways of imaging God’s character sees God as the lawgiver and judge who also loves us.

It is probably also the most common or visible image of God within the Christian church today. As lawgiver, God gave us the Ten Commandments and other laws about how to live. God told us what is expected of us.

God did love us, but it was a conditional love. Namely, God would accept us if—and here again you can fill in the blank—if we were good enough, if our repentance was earnest enough, if we believed in Jesus. So, even though God loved us, the system of requirements remained.

Now, I have no illusions about our being perfect or anything like that. I’m just commenting that this dynamic of sin, guilt, and forgiveness is directly correlated with imaging God as the lawgiver and judge who also loves us. I have since learned to call this model of God the monarchical model of God, from the word “monarch,” or king.

The monarchical model is thus God as the divine superego in our heads. That voice that ranges along a spectrum from “You’re no good” to “You’re never quite enough.”

This way of imaging God’s character, this model, has several effects on the Christian life. I will very briefly mention four.

The first of these is that the monarchical God is the Go...

Second, this way of imaging God’s character leads to an in-group and out-group distinction.

Third, ultimately the monarchical model of God is a God of vengeance.

Finally, fourth, rather than liberating us from self-preoccupation, this is the God who focuses our attention on our own salvation, on making sure that we have done or believed what we’re supposed to.

There is another image of God, another primary model for imaging God’s character in the biblical tradition as well as in the postbiblical Christian tradition. To give it a shorthand label, I call this one the divine-lover model.

Yet there is a danger to the divine-lover model. The danger is that it can become too individualistic, too sweet, as it were, as if the focus was primarily on me. We need to guard against sentimentalizing and individualizing this image, for the image of God as lover means that God loves everybody, not just me and not just us, but everybody.

So the image of God as lover is very much associated with a concreteness and particularity of life in this world. As lover, God is liberating.

As lover, God is compassionate. This is God’s character. Compassion, as many of you know, is an unusually rich metaphor in the Bible. It’s related to the word for “womb.” To say that God is compassionate is to say that God is like a womb or “womblike,” life-giving, nourishing. Compassion in the Bible also has resonances associated with the feelings that a mother has for the children of her womb.

As lover, God is not only compassionate, but also passionate about social justice. God as lover is passionate about social justice with a simple reason that its opposite, systemic injustice, is the single greatest source of unnecessary human social misery, of unnecessary human suffering in history.