Fables of the Deconstruction

"No reason to get excited,"the thief he kindly spoke,

"There are many here among us, who feel that life is but joke."

"But you and I have been through that, and this is not our fate."

"So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late,"

-Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower.

Last week I talked about the Reclaiming of Jesus by certain faith leaders.  This Sunday I preached about how we need to orient ourselves according to the Good Shepherd and the Righteous Branch that the Prophet Jeremiah predicted and which I believe to be Jesus of Nazareth, who is called the Christ.  I believe that certain works of theology perform the important function of deconstructing some of the mythology that the centuries have layered upon the person of Jesus.  For instance, without a certain amount of deconstruction it is all too likely that you will take Jesus as your "personal savior" and apply that ethic to mean that he is also the mascot of your nationalism, your imperialistic urges and perhaps even your un-examined bigotry.  People can "baptize" a lot of things in the name of Jesus and if we don't occasionally peel back the layers and layers of ideas that we have accumulated in our dogma we very well might have some serious blind spots.

However, complete deconstruction is a fairy tale and a falsehood as much as the dogmatism it seeks to correct.  I think of some of the proponents of deconstructionist theology who have essentially become atheists, or pantheists, or deists of the vaguest variety and it makes me think that the cure for an over mythologized and under humanized Jesus is sort of like chemotherapy: it can make you sick to cure the disease.

The dangers of an overly dogmatic approach to Jesus are manifest in ridiculous things like Paula White's assertion that Jesus was, in fact, a refugee, but he must not have broken any laws in that process or else he couldn't be sinless and thus would not be the Messiah.  This is obtuse and absurd on many levels of logic, however, one need not engage in any theological parsing to show it as such.  Jesus was a child when he was a refugee, immigration in those days was not tightly regulated and so, no, he probably didn't break any laws in that case. However, Jesus did rather publicly and controversially break several laws during his adult ministry, the time when he was most visibly engaged in proclaiming the Kingdom of God.   He broke the sacred laws in violating the Sabbath, he broke the secular laws by destroying property and creating a nuisance in the Temple court and he committed blasphemy, according to those who enforced the law.  For good measure he referred to those who were in charge of enforcing the law, religious and secular alike, as "a brood of vipers," which was at least as bad as referring to police officers as "pigs," if not even slightly stronger. The idea that he obeyed all the secular laws of the land is an absurdity of the highest order, and I'm not even talking about theology... yet.

In light of such realities we also should not try to water Jesus down.  He was not always nice and he did not always play by the rules, but most of the time he had compassion on people who were suffering, even if they were people he didn't particularly like, or people who caught him a little off guard. Trying to deny the reality of Jesus, whether we are over-mythologizing or over-deconstructing is a rather pernicious trap.  Jesus was not a "normal" every day guy, nor was he some sort of Gnostic abomination with no real humanity.  He was a man who lived in tension between his Father in heaven, and his brothers and sisters on earth and he loved them both.  He prayed to his Father for the sake of his disciples, and he taught them that the Father wanted to receive them as children regardless of their level of prodigality.

The way we know this is remarkable: through written accounts called Gospels.  These accounts all have strengths and weaknesses, each writer wanted to accomplish certain things and thus they clearly have an agenda.  But here's the thing: their agendas, their personal feelings, even their grammatical foibles, none of it prevents us from seeing the real, complex and challenging figure whom we should be glad to call Lord.  It is a mistake to view knowledge of the truth behind scripture as a road to the destruction of faith.  Deconstructionists love to find these little wrinkles they use as "gotcha" moments to say, "This isn't true."  But the Gospel writers are not at all interested in truth by that standard, they're not hiding that.  They're not trying to synthesize their account with the others who are telling the story, I honestly think that perhaps they were doing precisely the opposite.  Each one of them was telling their story of Jesus, and that is precisely what he told them, and us to do.  This is the ongoing process of incarnation.  Jesus knew it would have to move beyond mere eye-witnesses.  Legal experts will tell you that eye-witnesses are often regarded as less than decisive.

It was not the goal of the first generation of disciples to relate the truth of Jesus with anything like photo-realism.  They were telling their stories of how they became a follower of his and specifically telling their audience that they wanted them to follow him as well.  They had different angles and different recollections, and yes things didn't always jive precisely the way our scientific minds would like.  We can work with the material though.  Deconstruction is useful up to a certain point, even to the point where it challenges your faith, however faith must somehow survive the affair or else we will be pushed into the void.

I would offer the insight that mature faith faces the challenge and survives.  Much like secular maturity is achieved by experiencing the twists and turns of life itself, dealing with success and failure, joy and tragedy.  Spiritual maturity involves having your ideas about God continually challenged and finding the reality that your ideas must grow, because they can never hold God as they are now. Most spiritually mature people will tell you honestly that there were times when they doubted and maybe even when they lost their faith entirely, but they didn't give up and walk away, they simply sorted through the rubble and found Jesus there with them, because he doesn't really ever leave, we only lose the ability to see him sometimes.