Whenever I go to a talk or a conference, I long to hear something I haven’t heard before, something that resonates in my mind and spirit and causes me to see in a new way. It is so rare when someone brings a fresh approach to familiar ideas! So often we 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.
When the phrase “paradigm shift” first came into currency, I thought, “If someone can tell me what a paradigm is, I’m happy to learn how to shift it.” I always had to look the darn word up. For those who share my ignorance, a paradigm is a 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!” (Here is week's gospel passage.)
In Jesus’ community, thinking and talking about God were done by question and argument, not declaration. Rabbis didn’t teach, “This is how it is.” Rather, they asked questions about a scriptural text, suggested interpretations, argued against other interpretations, suggested new variations on interpretations, and looked for truth in the searching. No one interpretation was necessarily more “authoritative” than another, though some views drew more adherents.
But 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!” To modern ears it might sound like, “Listen! God is on the move. God is doing a new thing. The Life 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 millions of books in thousands of libraries and churches. It seems irrelevant among people who derive authority from their own experience or 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 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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