Being nice – Easter III, 8 April 2016

A Southern Baptist theologian, looking back on the teaching he received as a youngster at church, said what it amounted to was:  Jesus is nice, and he wants us to be nice too.  Certainly there is a widespread assumption that Christians are supposed to be distinctive by being nice.  Church Ministers are supposed to be very nice.  Recently after I had spoken my mind about something, a response came from some people who never go near the church from one year to the next, to the effect that I am not much of a Christian.  But perhaps the real problem with that Baptist chap’s memory of his early years is that he was taught that Jesus was always nice.  And that’s at least dubious.  The myth was typically reinforced by sentimental pictures on the walls or in books of Bible stories. 

The best evidence indicates that Jesus was a man of his time, a man of a violent and perilous time and culture, and that he was a complex person indeed.  We now know that every sanctified image of him -- whether it is the Sunday school picture, or the healthy hero Jesus of young fit manhood, or the cult figure built up by various “high church” devotions, or the authoritarian teacher of high protestantism – every image of him, as one of my finest teachers of long ago said, crumbles to pieces in our hands, is eventually found wanting and is rejected.  We make images and they become idols. 

The real point about Jesus, especially Jesus Risen, is that he eludes us.  That is the point of the strange events in the gospel records of the resurrection.  We do not define him or image him.  We do not recruit him to our cause, possess him…  He finds us, as he found the disciples at the lakeside, and he knows us already, and names us, and calls us. 

The reality about Jesus is miles away from domestic niceness.  Jesus confronts us.  He commands our love.  He commands our possessions – or at any rate the use we make of them.  He requires that we are peaceable, and that we follow justice.  He seeks our consent to daily inner change.  He deeply challenges the prevailing culture of self and of image and style, the worship of power and money and worldly success.  His followers come to understand that truth matters more than respectability or reputation. 

Perhaps it’s worth knowing that the word nice comes from the Latin nescius, which means ignorant, even foolish, stupid or senseless. The English language has taken it over until it means pretty, or normal (like a nice cup of tea), certainly inoffensive… and all manner of other derived uses.  None of that sounds like the call and the way of Christ to me. 

Our stillness and silence is at another level than convention and niceness.  Jesus meets us where we are, once we are paying attention and consenting to his presence.  The initiative is his – we simply dispose ourselves appropriately, as best we can.  So, to those of us able to set our literal minds aside for a while, our contemplative prayer is very much an Easter prayer.  It is a way we encounter the risen Christ, quietly, as it were at the lakeside, but in fact wherever we are.  He is injured, wounded, yet risen and alive in a way the secular mind cannot grasp.  And for us it is enough simply to be present.