Jesus learning from life and practice

Over the last few months, this passage has cropped up several times. The latest being this morning's readings (I started writing this on 14 December) for Morning Prayer. Perhaps noticing it has been an artefact of a particular reading of it having got my attention and that perspective sinking in and being weighed by my unconscious thought processes. So the passage is this.

"...a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’ 23 But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’ 24 He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ 26 He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ 27 She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ 28 Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly."      Matthew 15:21-28 NRSVA - The Canaanite Woman’s Faith - Jesus - Bible Gateway: 

And the perspective on reading it is as follows.
This way of understanding it proposes that we take it that Jesus learns from the woman in the course of the conversation and that we are actually seeing him in this little narrative moving from a somewhat ethnocentric mindset to one which explicitly grasps that God's Mission is bigger than that. In short, we see Jesus in the process of learning during the course of this conversation and his teacher is the Canaanite woman and, presumably, the Holy Spirit (echoes of the Nicene Creed there).

Now it seems to me that the Evangelical knee-jerk reaction to this (and maybe not just Evangelicals) is to be very suspicious of it or to reject it outright. I know this because my own first reaction was precisely to be suspicious of it and I found that I had to ask myself why I was resisting the idea. To be fair, full disclosure here, the reason I asked myself what that resistance was about was because I found the idea somehow intriguing and maybe that was because I'm interested in how learning takes place and what it means to be a wise and faithful human in the way of Christ, believing that it is in the moments of challenge that learning is forged and wisdom and orientation tested. So I was perhaps more disposed than before to thinking about the humanity of Jesus in relation to how he learnt things. And I have to say that in the moment, I felt that there was something wonderful about the possibility that we were catching Jesus in the act of learning. In fact perhaps participating in one of those wonderful conversations that I'm sure most of us have from time to time where we get caught up with others in a slightly excited thinking together as each contribution opens out further insight, learning and application of something that enthuses us. I wonder whether we are seeing a snapshot of Jesus enjoying just such learning banter.

So, I think that focus on divinity is precisely where the resistance from many roughly-orthodox Christians comes. I suspect that thinking first about his divinity (or even as a hugely gifted sage, come to that) tends to set us up for a default perspective that assumes that Jesus had got it all together, that he always saw things coming and had a ready-composed response or was meticulously inspired in the moment. But that is almost-certainly some kind of Docetism (see this article for more theological background). It is worth asking ourselves, too, whether for some of us there could be an inner resistance formed by the idea that it is unworthy for Jesus to learn from a gentile woman. However, I think that part of the marvellousness of the episode lies just there: that someone whom religious teachers of the day would have placed at the bottom of a hierarchy of likeliness -even worthiness- to have valuable spiritual insight, that person is just the one whose insight is affirmed and built on by the embodiment of Divine Lore.

So we are duty bound to question our Docetic tendencies by returning to value the humanity of Jesus and the logic of incarnation. In this case doing that means recognising a bunch of probable facts about Jesus, most of them to do with him being a baby, then a child and growing up in a human household and small town, perhaps even being apprenticed to a trade. I want to pose this in the form of some questions and musings. So, for example, how do we think Jesus learnt Aramaic, Hebrew and (probably) Greek? It seems to me that it probably happened in the regular sort of way: hearing them spoken, making sense, trying things out and noting responses, and eventually working on letters in scrolls. I don't really think that he was born knowing the languages or that God downloaded them Joe 90 style into his brain. In fact, let's put that more theologically still, by providence and Spirit the means God used for Jesus to become eloquent was interaction with parents, relatives, friends and wider community. Or, do we think that Jesus picked up carpentry or sailing (or whatever it was he did for 20 years before his preaching ministry) by sudden divine transformation or do we think his neurons, muscles and sensorium grew and developed through usage and relationship to others: teachers, customers, colleagues and the like?

But perhaps we are comfortable with the idea that Jesus learnt everyday common-place ordinary-life things in the same way as the rest of us. But are we comfortable with thinking that was the way it was with spiritual learning? And perhaps this is where a spasm of Docetism lurks more fully for us. And perhaps with some reason (even if misaligned reason): when the things of God are less obvious and more contentious, we feel that a more 'direct' learning from God is wanted to help guarantee the purity of the message. We feel we need Jesus to have the kind of hotline to God we sometimes wish we had. But I want to suggest that this too is Docetic and undervalues the fully human processes of spiritual formation -that is learning to think and act in godly ways and to cultivate a positive relationship with God.

Let's ask ourselves, then, how Jesus learnt religion and spirituality. I think that perhaps we should prepare ourselves to think about this in continuity with the other learnings we considered just a few sentences ago. I would rate as a high probability that in the household Jesus grew up in, he was socialised into religious practice and viewpoints pretty much as any other child of that day and place. In fact, given that the Hebrew scriptures have instructions for such things, perhaps we should recognise a Christ-centred divine intention in those instructions being in place: in part they were there to help to form the spirituality and upbringing of the Messiah in the midst of God's people. In other words, it's highly likely that the divine intention was for Jesus' growth in spiritual awareness to be achieved in part at least by the processes of learning, ritual and religious practice witnessed to by the Hebrew scriptures.

So Jesus would have heard and learnt to memorise scripture and to ask questions about it and weigh opinions regarding interpretation. He would have accompanied his family and friends in reciting prayers, going on pilgrimage, participating in festivals and fasts and generally be/com/ing Jewish. And in God's providence this was an appointed means for the Messiah to learn from and about God and God's mission. This involved the sculpting of neuronal pathways and patterns and bodily responses which is apposite to be/com/ing human. So, the fact that Jesus could deftly quote scripture and make insightful remarks about religious matters and ethical issues is built on that human training and personal time spent learning and reflecting on the inherited traditions of his people. This was a significant means of God's teaching of him.

But ... but ... You may want to interject: that's still not quite the same as the incident with the Canaanite women, is it? By the time he starts his ministry, and having starting with that baptism and the Spirit descending and all that, surely that means he's got it all down by this point? And doesn't the idea that perhaps Jesus didn't know something like this imperil the reliability of his teaching? That is, if there was stuff he didn't know at this point then that could mean he might miss something or fail to pass on something that we really need to have there in the corpus of his teaching. And there is some merit in that concern because ignorance can be the means of things going astray. However, I think I would want to suggest a couple of things in response to that. One is to do with Jesus' relationship to God and the other is to do with God's providence.

Jesus's relationship to God, mediated by the Spirit, would be such that Jesus would be receptive to God's leading and so in an encounter like this one with the Canaanite woman we also see by implication the work of the Spirit 'quickening' the incident to Jesus's imagination or conscience or just 'tingling his spidey senses' so that he paid attention in the right kind of way to be led through what unfolded in a God-revealing way. And the incarnational take-home from that is that the same Spirit is at work in us so that, in principle, we too could learn-in-the-moment from God. It also indicates to us that there is something important about the fact that we are teachable -to be teachable in this way is to be and become like Christ -as we are called to become.

In fact it seems to indicate that whatever crap stuff our culture and upbringing might bequeath to us can be challenged and put aside and we can step into new insight and new relating. The background we inherit is not in itself sin; it's what we do with it that can become sin. It is the resistance to the Spirit moving us on that is the problem and the definition of sin. So here, Jesus' background had a streak of theologically bolstered ethnocentric pride in it which at this point for Jesus he became aware of through and in the interaction with the Canaanite woman. That he allowed the challenge she posed to stand and is able to affirm the larger vision and implications contained in that challenge is the point and the thing we need to learn from. We don't need to have it all sewn up, we need to be teachable and humble enough to learn and affirm the insights of others.

The providential element in all this is to take seriously that Jesus is the One for whom everything that exists, is made (this I take to be an implication of  Colossians 1:16ff ... all things have been created through him and for him. ... in him all things hold together.) In which case Jesus' experiences are part of the ordering of things towards making sure that God is personally present in human flesh, blood and soul in the life of the one we call Jesus of Nazareth (among other things). The implication of this is that the learning experiences are part of incarnation and so the incident with the Canaanite woman is about God sharing what it means to be a learning, growing human and in such a way as to be for us and our salvation. Through this incident we can see the trajectory of imagination that leads to the inclusion of gentiles in the people of God. We should let the actual life of the incarnate Christ inform our thinking about what it is for God to become flesh rather than let our never-fully-understood doctrines try to (mis)inform us unchallenged about what Jesus must have been like.

Christ-centred creation and prodigality

This excerpt from a talk by Tom Wright resonated with some things I've been thinking about in relation to the nature of creation centred in time and space on Christ. +Tom says:

... if creation comes through the kingdom bringing Jesus, we ought to expect it be like a seed growing secretly. That it would involve seed being sown in a prodigal fashion in which a lot went to waste, apparently, but other seed producing a great crop. We ought to expect that it be like a strange, slow process which might suddenly reach some kind of harvest. We ought to expect that it would involve some kind of overcoming of chaos. Above all, we ought to expect that it would be a work of utter, self-giving love. That the power which made the world, like the power which ultimately rescued the world, would be the power not of brute force, but of radical, outpoured generosity. We ought to expect, in other words, that the creation would not look like an oriental despot deciding to build a palace, and just throwing it up at speed, with his architects and builders cowering before him. 

What I find helpful in this is how our attention is drawn to the prodigality of it all. One of the minor objections from creationists is the wastefulness of the processes that the rest of us believe we discern in the geological records and other related evidences. Linking the debate in the way that +Tom does here; to the parable of the sown seed, helps see a kind of implicit endorsement in Jesus' own teaching of a prodigal creative process in which there is some 'hit and miss' element to it all. It kind of finds in creation a prodigality, which Jesus draws attention to and thereby endorses rather than questions. And while this doesn't add up to saying 'this is the meaning of the parable' it does take Jesus' acceptance of the wastefulness of both the creational type and the parabolic antitype as at least the possibility of seeing that generous endowment in which there is more and to spare as the way things are and develop.
I'm finding that really helpful to think further about.

Doubt as a way of faith

"I'm so mixed up I doubt my doubts -only to discover I believe!"
Okay, so I made that quote up but it came to mind as I was thinking about the gospel passage for this coming Sunday.
First we have John the Baptiser having a wobble:

 "When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples ³ and said to him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’" (Mt.11:2&3).

Perfectly understandable: first of all John's in prison which perhaps doesn't seem fitting to him but might be part of the programme if the Messiah would then actually do something to bring about the Promised renewal. restoration of national life under God. But Jesus doesn't seem to be set to do that. So, is it all for nothing?

Then there's also the doubt that Jesus seems to be addressing when he turns to the crowds. Presumably, John's followers had come upon Jesus in public and asked their question in public; meaning that the doubt that John implies by his question is communicated to the crowd. If they have the same sort of particular Messianic script in mind as Jesus needs to address and subvert and reconceptualise in the apostles at other points in the gospels, then how much more the crowd? And how much more important to frame what they've heard helpfully.

I find it encouraging that doubt is not dealt with harshly -indeed it's not even named as such here. In some Christian contexts doubt has become "Doubt": it's a big thing, the beginning of the end, the start of a descent into lostness and to becoming one of those people that our church or our ministry sees as a enemy to the Gospel. I think, though, that doubt is a continuum one end of which is faith destroying, the other end is potentially faith-building, It is worth recalling, to help us understand doubt, that 'faith' is ambiguous. On the one hand we might mean something like 'a system of propositions about the nature of life/reality' on the other hand it may be about 'trust and/or commitment'. True enough: the two are linked -if your cognitive doubt is sufficiently foundation-shaking of the belief system, then the trust and commitment ebb away. And, of course, in some cases the commitment overcomes evidence or selects evidence of a more cognitive nature to support the commitment.

But some doubt is not so existential. Some doubt is mostly about trying to see things whole. It's about recognising differences of perspective and apparent dissonances in experiences or interpretations or some combination of those. And a lot of times that is more about 'making sense' brought about by changes in circumstances which change our reflex perspectives, or help us to see things from a different point of view, perhaps gaining sympathy with someone or an idea that previously seemed 'out there' for us. Sometimes it arrives with an increase in knowledge which questions something we'd previously assumed or makes a different line of thinking seem more fruitful, plausible or explanatory for us. The thing is, all learning, all making-sense, is initially disorienting to some degree. And this can feel like doubt. In some senses it is: it is a questioning or re-evaluation of what had previously been believed. And if that previous belief had been important to us or remains important to those around us whom we trust, then the doubt can feel quite frightening. In response we may try to ignore it, reassert the old perspective more vehemently to try to force it from us or we may face it with boldness or humility to learn what lies the other side. This kind of doubt is the vulnerability of the hermit crab between shells.

So, how do we see Jesus responding here (to John, via his followers)? In short, it seems to me, pragmatically and sympathetically. There is no deriding the 'wobble', nor is there a forceful restatement of the right position and/or an exhortation to believe. To be sure there is that at one or two other points -but let's take those also on a case-by-case basis, remembering that here it is dealt with sympathetically, I think that there are different ways of responding to doubt because there are different kinds of doubt and we do ill if we treat all of them as if they are Doubt.

Jesus treats John's doubt as sense-making disorientation: events have overturned John's prior understanding of the Messiahnic script and he needs help to reorient faithfully. So Jesus draws John's attention to some salient facts about what he's doing, and does so using phrases which echo Messianic passages in Isaiah, but which also point to another area of 'messianic scripting' that doesn't involve nationalistic, other-punishment or violent fantasy-stoking which may have been the script playing in John's mind and now being doubted. Jesus does a bit of pastoral re-framing to help John re-integrate his experience as it is now in such a way as to keep him true to the important things now: 'blessed is the one who does not fall away on account of me'.

There's an implicit warning in there as well as encouragement to stay true. One might fall away because having hoped that Jesus were the Messiah, his following parts of the script that were previously not noticed or not weighed sufficiently heavily might cause one to throw over the whole plot rather than adjust ones expectations and understandings in the light of an expanded appreciation which reframes the former beliefs.

Then Jesus has to turn to the crowd who've been listening in on the exchange and drawing their own conclusion and perhaps finding their own doubts or skepticisms amplified and played back -perhaps even as they murmur to one another. So I imagine that 'Blessed is the one who does not fall away on account of me' is also said with the crowd in mind -to encourage and challenge them too. But with some further perspectives to supplement. He tells them, in effect, that those of them who went to see and hear John's ministry were right to do so and that John was indeed the fore-runner. This is a reassertion of the plot but with a further dimension drawn to attention: that the forces arrayed against them are the rulers and the interests of wealth-accumulation. Implicitly a reminder that they shouldn't be expecting an easy shoe-in to earthly power but rather powerful opposition. And, of course, we realise that this is also a prefiguration of Jesus' own life-narrative.

There are forms of doubt that can make us less likely to stay true to the plot when it contains suffering and misunderstanding by others. There are forms of doubt which enable us to put aside perspectives which would keep us from staying true because they are perspectives which would deter us, lead us to take mis-steps or even end up working against the God-plot and for the Powers-plot instead. In this latter case, doubt is part of the way of faith.

Resident Theology: On the Curious Claim That People "Like Jesus" (But Not the Church)

Quite: "If one actually reads the Gospels, instead of assuming nice pretty pictures of a blue-eyed baby Jesus giggling his guts out in celestial bliss, it is clear that the man from Nazareth -- who lived an identifiable human life in the early decades of the first century in occupied Palestine -- is certifiably not in any discernible accord with what American culture 'likes.' In fact, he seems to stand squarely opposed to much of it."
Resident Theology: On the Curious Claim That People "Like Jesus" (But Not the Church)

Jesus Loving & Laughing Exhibition

Too right: "Much Christian art (and theology) has concentrated on guilt and suffering. But Jesus came to bring joy to the world - not to make guilt-ridden wrecks."
And so it's good to hear of this and to see posted some of the pictures:
"This collection of paintings from artists from 16 countries gives their impressions of a laughing, loving Jesus who is a living presence"Jesus Loving & Laughing Exhibition:

Islam's version of Jesus on Tele

I thought initially that it might be a good way to learn about the Qur'anic picture of Jesus so I am with my ertwhile congregant "Philip Lewis, the Bishop of Bradford's aide on inter-faith matters", who is reported as urging

believers on both sides to take advantage of a 'worthwhile contribution to understanding a complex issue'.

But I wonder how many readers might be wholly or partly sympathetic to Patrick Sookhdeo's stance (Patrick is an Anglican canon and spokesman for the Barnabas Fund, which works with persecuted Christians and is a convert from Islam), he

accused broadcasters of double standards. ... 'How would the Muslim community respond if ITV made a programme challenging Muhammad as the last prophet?' The Koran's denial of Jesus's divinity was 'unacceptable'. 'On the last day the Koran says Jesus will destroy all the crosses. How can we praise that?'

While he has a point, I think that my rejoinder would be to say that if we would like Muslims to be open to considering religious perspectives not our own, then we should lead by example, perhaps pointing out that the ability to consider others opposing views is a strngth not a weakness. I wonder if Patrick is somethimes still in a Muslim mindset when it comes to such things?
TV airing for Islam's story of Christ | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited:

Anger, reason and the Christ

A lot of Christians are vaguely disturbed by the anger of Christ, for example in clearing the Temple. It may often be due to a misunderstanding or more likely a subunderstanding of what anger is and what sin is. And now research on anger seems to suggest some further potential benefits of at least some anger in addition to giving us energy to right wrongs.
"The research found that, surprisingly, anger made participants more, rather than less, rational and analytical in their reactions. The current research, conclude the authors, suggests that angry people can and do process information analytically but are often influenced by more mental shortcuts. Although it is not always the case, anger-induced action is sometimes the result of quite clear-minded and deliberative processing."
So apply that the the cleansing of the Temple ...
ScienceDaily: Anger Can Make You More Rational, Not Less, According To Recent Studies: