Resisting our Resistance, An Advent Hope

“He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (John 1:11, NRSVUE). There are haunting words for this Advent season.

For ourselves and for everyone, we long for deliverance from the alienation of captivity and the despair of oppression. We yearn for wider and deeper experience of God’s saving justice, and overflowing mercy. Followers of Jesus affirm that, in him and through him, God meets our longing and fills our yearning.

Ironically, though, it’s possible to resist what we most need, to refuse the gift we most desire. “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” These words from John’s Gospel describe the resistance Jesus encountered from some of the people of his own faith. As faithful Jew, he held in common with them a covenant with one another and with God, pondered, as they did, the same sacred stories, and cherished, along with them, the Jerusalem Temple as a place of encounter with God. Jesus stirred many of those who witnessed his deeds and heard his words to believe that God was working compassionately and powerfully through him to remake the unjust and violent ways of the world into the right and peaceable ways of God’s rule and reign.

Some, particularly among the religious leaders, steeled themselves against Jesus: “he came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” What happened then happens still; but I’m making that claim for our time about communities of Jesus-followers, about churches gathered in his name. It is now, as it was then. Many people are drawn to him and his vision. They find in him beauty, truth, goodness, and love they crave. In the radiating energy of his life, they experience increasing wholeness, hope, and joy. With him, they see they see everyone as bearers of God’s image, possessing ineradicable dignity and worthy of profound respect. They take from him the challenge to love their neighbors and even their enemies.

Some, though, especially among leaders, resist him, even while loudly boasting of their Christianity. Some of Jesus’ own people do not accept him. They appear to be CINO: Christians in Name Only. The life, teachings, and actions of Jesus are alarmingly absent from the day to day lives of many people who call him Savior and Lord.

I know that there are harsh words, and I admit what I see in the extreme in others, I worry about in myself: there are always ways I fail to live in full faithfulness to the vision and mission of Jesus.

I’m greatly concerned, though, that there are swaths of Christians who have slowly but, by now, decisively replaced Jesus as Lord with a crude amalgam of nationalism, xenophobia, racism, cruelty, and condemnation which they have baptized in his name. I hear long-time Christians laughing in delight when people are called “garbage,” “vermin” and “pigs.” I witness calloused insensitivity to people who can’t afford to feed their children and can’t get the healthcare they need.

Across this month, there will be candy-cane-sweet and sentimental nods in Jesus’ direction. There will be wistful strains of heavenly peace and bright affirmation of joy to the world. With the shepherds, Christians will adore the baby in the manger, and, with the wise men from the east, offer kingly gifts to the wonder-child.

For far too many, though, there appears to be no room in the inn of their lives for Jesus, crowded as it seems to be by fear, ambition, and greed—no room, at least, for the grown-up, all-loving, prophetic, and world-changing Jesus. I’m praying that “his own”—the people called by his name—will welcome and follow him.