Jesus: My Lord, My Guru

My current read is The Story We Find Ourselves In (by none other than Brian McLaren -- I'm not obsessed, he's just an easy read and saying some things I need to hear at the moment). I'm about halfway through the book and he's talking about the "revolution of God", as a new way of describing how Jesus came to set up the "Kingdom of God" -- that it was a revolutionary way of acting, thinking, and was radical compared to 1st century Jewish culture.

Then he talked about Jesus as "Lord". "It doesn't mean so much 'master' in reference to a slave, but master in the sense of... a master of martial arts, for example, or a master crastmen or a violin master... A violin master is someone who can take an instrument of wood and wire and horsehair and play it so that it yields music more beautiful than anyone else can play. And for the disciples to call Jesus 'master' would mean... that no one else could take the raw materials of life -- skin and bone and blood and space and time and words and deeds and waking and sleeping and eating and walking -- and elicit from them a beautiful song of truth and goodness, as Jesus did." (121)

So I got to thinking about Jesus as my master, my guru. How when I look back at how Jesus spent His time on earth it is pretty different than how I spend my time. Last year I had an epiphany. There's that verse in 2 Corinthians 10 that talks about "taking every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ"", and I thought what if I (or we all) were to take every minute, every second captive, to really think about what we're doing at every moment and to "make it obedient to Christ". I guess another way of looking at it is to make every moment have "eternal significance", but that sounds like "Christianese" in some sense, though not necessarily. Carpe diem for Christ?

We all want to make the most of our time, but this is hard; it takes discipline. I guess that was what I was talking about in my It always happens on vacation post. And I get frustrated because I'm so far from where I want to be. But it's a journey right? We work at it the best we can, and maybe tomorrow I'll do better. And if I screw things up for a bit, I can try again.

The other hard thing for me to deal with is that making my time obedient to Christ, living my life as Christ lived, does not necessarily mean that I'll be downtown witnessing to the prostitutes (though, on the otherhand, it may). But if you look at Jesus' life as a whole you see a very different mindset than we Westerners have. Sure, he was a carpenter, but that didn't define entirely who he was. He didn't have a set agenda of where he was going to be or what he had to do. He let people bother him and interrupt his day. He didn't have to prove himself to anybody, but rather, in many ways, kept his (acts of) divinity quiet. And on and on I could go.

There is so much here that I'm not doing. But the first step is recognition, I guess. And it all starts at home. And about that... I realized that the commandment "Love your neighbour as yourself" presupposes that you actually know who your neighbour is... hmm... better get on that.