Incognito Jesus

I met Jesus a while back. He thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt.

Turns out the Son of God is crazy as a bedbug and hasn’t been taking his medication. I’m not being blasphemous; I’m being biblical.

For a while now I have been spending some of my Sunday nights worshiping at a downtown ministry that caters primarily to the homeless. “The Station” was established by Tony Celelli, now President of the South Texas School of Christian Studies, back when he served on staff at the Second Baptist Church of Corpus Christi. These days my pastor Grover Pinson and Ryan Pflughaupt, one of our seminary students, run the place. I can’t say for sure what has led me there beyond the proximate cause of some very convicting presentations by our chapel speakers last semester.

Anyway, back to Jesus. One night a few months ago my younger son and I stood behind the counter serving soup when a tall, skeletal man swaggered up with a smile on his face and informed me, with a conspiratorial wink, that he was, in fact, our 26th President. I think he was also the target of a CIA conspiracy and just possibly one of the archangels. I didn’t quite take it all in because to tell the truth his rap rattled me and his smell so overpowered one of my senses that the other four had to stand down.

I found Ryan and in sotto vocce passed along the information. His face fell as he said, “Oh, that’s Uncle Riley. He must be off his pills.”

But it was Jesus.

Our Lord warned us that he would show up in the person of the physically challenged and the mentally damaged, the poor and the pungent, hungry and the crazy. Serious Christians through the centuries have taken Christ seriously at this point. C. S. Lewis tells the story of a European pastor who once saw Hitler in person. This man had suffered much at the hands of the Nazi dictator but when Lewis asked, “What did he look like?” the minister responded, “Like all men. That is, like Christ.”

Walter Miller, Jr., in his science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, describes an encounter between a scholar and a priest. The intellectual argues for the unredeemable corruption of humanity and illustrates his position by pointing out a peasant in the filthy street below his balcony.

Look at him! No, but it’s too dark now. You can’t see the syphilis outbreak on his neck, the way the bridge of his nose is being eaten away. But he was undoubtedly a moron to begin with. Illiterate, superstitious, murderous. He diseases his children. For a few coins he would kill them. He will sell them anyway, when thy are old enough to be useful. Look at him and tell me if you see the progeny of a once-mighty civilization? What do you see?

“The image of Christ,” the priest replies.

It bothers me when Christ insists on meeting me with a mental computer so infested with spyware that programming means nothing. I often feel that all I have to give is words, thoughts, intellect, so I find myself helpless before these particular demons. I turn to my Master and ask peevishly, “Why was I powerless?”

A dear friend challenged me on this point recently. She is Good Christian, but a swearing, drinking Good Christian. She reminds me of what Captain Peleg tells Ishmael about Ahab: “a good man – not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man – something like me.” My friend, poking gentle fun at the spotless cuirass of my evangelical piety, invoked the story of the Rich Young Ruler. “Wonder what Jesus would ask of you? Of me?” she mused. “You and I are contemplative enough to have little trouble giving away our (limited) material possessions, but wonder if we would part with our intelligence?”

I wouldn’t. In fact, I remembered a specific instance when I didn’t. I once participated in a “Walk to Emmaus.” If you’re not familiar, this is a weekend retreat ministry founded by the Methodists. Apparently participants are not supposed to talk about the program – sorta like telling people in advance how the magician really got the rabbit out of the hat. Well, I’ll avoid plot-spoilers. The point is (as I only realized later) that the whole thing is structured to minimize, and even completely efface, differences in intellect and education. So they put me in an environment where none of my reading and writing came into play. We had to make mobiles out of wire hangers and old magazines and perform dumb little youth camp skits. These were things that a high school drop out could do just as well as a doctoral candidate – AND I HATED IT! I went away sad that weekend because I had “many trophies.” Jesus might have been there, I don’t know – and I didn’t care. I just wanted out.

When Henri Nouwen left a career of teaching at Ivy League universities and became a chaplain at L’Arche, a community of profoundly mentally retarded men and women. He suddenly discovered that his vast intellect counted for nothing when a resident advised him not to offer another resident meat at dinner because “he’s a Presbyterian.”

Uncle Riley cum Teddy Roosevelt cum Jesus had little use for my knowledge of Greek roots or theories of atonement. He would end up being arrested for his own protection and sent to a hospital where they would fatten his synapses on pills until his personality pulled itself together. All I had was eye contact, a handshake, and a bowl of soup.

But somehow in that moment I heard Jesus speak through the words of one of his Old Testament prototypes. When Joseph’s brothers appear before him in Egypt he decides to mess with their repressed Freudian guilt. He tells them that ten out of eleven does not comprise a quorum. As Reuben later retails the conversation to their father Jacob, “The man solemnly warned us, ‘You shall not see my face unless your brother is with you.’”

The Uncle Riley’s of this world thankfully do not constitute the majority. Each one needs a staggering amount of care so we require a high ratio of the stable to the unstable. But these damaged goods do stand for the beloved sons and daughters, the children of God’s dotage by the spouse without spot or wrinkle. Next Sunday as the band strikes up the opening chords, look around you for Teddy Roosevelt. Unless our brother is with us, we will not see Christ’s face.

This entry was posted on September 3, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.