My 4 year-old son had all the power, standing in the middle aisle of the church 2 minutes before our service was supposed to start. “Where do you want to sit while you wait for mommy to come back?” He dithered. Equivocated. Listed four totally impossible options. The anxiety rises within me. What to do? Scream? Cajole? Beg? Everybody is watching now, the people to whom I’m getting ready to talk about God. I wish there was a simple answer. There wasn’t. That’s life.
When Jesus sits down to give the sermon on the mount, he says all sorts of paradoxical, counter-intuitive things. Like “happy are those who mourn” and “love your enemies.” And we look at him like he is upside down. Just give it to me straight, Jesus. Just tell me what to do. Give me an instruction, a principle, that I can take away and apply in every situation so that I never have to experience any tension or uncertainty or chaos. Give me something to stabilize me, to take away the anxiety of life, so that I can know, so that I can be sure, so that I can be right. And when he doesn’t? We lose interest. On to something more promising, the next thing, the next answer, the big show, the people who are necessarily like us in age, race, class, so that they don’t introduce any tension or uncertainty into our neatly packaged way of being in the world.
So maybe part of the reason Jesus looks upside down to us is because we are standing on our heads. We want principles, but he gives us paradox, not because he is being difficult, but because he knows that the desire for a principle is a desire to do life, to be human, without the presence of God. And he knows that that is impossible, that humans cannot flourish without him. So he says things that seem upside down, to help turn us right-side up; to force his people to carry, not his principles, but his presence, into the world. Knowing that ultimately those paradoxes find their resolution, their culmination, in the person of the God who once sat on a mountain, but now sits on a throne.
”Upside Down Kingdom” artwork painted by Hampton Watts.
