Whenever I go to a talk or a conference, I long to hear something I haven’t heard before, something that resonates with my mind and spirit and causes me to see in a new way. How rare it is, to hear someone put familiar ideas together in a new way! So often we just spin endless variations on the same old themes; perhaps a new understanding emerges with each iteration, but we stay within the same paradigm.
Well, Jesus broke the paradigm.
I remember when the phrase “paradigm shift” first came into currency. My reaction was, “If someone can tell me what a paradigm is, I’m happy to learn how to shift it.” I still have to look the darn word up. If you happen to share my ignorance, a paradigm is the prevailing system, model, way of understanding something. A new paradigm offers an alternative way of seeing or doing the same old thing, a vision that reveals to us new possibilities, new connections, new vistas.
Jesus proclaimed a new paradigm – and people could tell. “They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, ‘What is this? A new teaching—with authority!”
The way thinking and talking about God were done in Jesus’ community was by question and argument, not declaration. Rabbis didn’t teach, “This is how it is.” Rather, they asked questions about a text in Scripture, suggested interpretations, argued against other interpretations, suggested new variations on the interpretations, and looked for truth in the searching. No one interpretation was necessarily more “authoritative” than another, though some views drew more adherents than others.
Jesus did not open the text and say, “What if….?” He opened the scroll in the synagogue and said, “Today this has been fulfilled in your hearing.” He made declarative statements: “The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God has come near. Believe in the good news!” In modern language it might sound like, “Listen! God is on the move. God is doing a new thing. The realm of God has come near you, among you, even within you. Come and be a part of what God is up to!”
We have a challenge. For us this “new teaching” is over 2,000 years old, and has accrued the dust of hundreds of thousands of books in a thousand libraries and churches and stained glass windows. It seems irrelevant in a populace that increasingly draws its authority from its own experience or its favorite media outlet. For many of us, the Good News has become old, stale, two-dimensional – unless we hear it again with authority.
I believe we need to hear it again from Jesus, the Jesus we meet in the Gospels, the Jesus we encounter in our prayers and our ministries. We don’t need to read it in a book. We need to read it on the face of someone who wonders if anyone will ever love him, or feel it in the smoothness of a chalice as we share the wine at communion, or hear it from each other as we tell our stories of spiritual encounter.
And we need to hear ourselves tell it! There are a lot of people around us who aren’t burdened by the age of this “Good News” – because they have never heard it, and may not if we don’t tell it in our own ways.
Jesus’ teaching is still new. I pray we will continue to renew our ways of hearing, and telling, that “old, old story.”
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