And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority…
Matthew 7:28-29
‘No one ever spoke like this man!’ This was the reason given by the officers sent to arrest Jesus of Nazareth when they returned without him. On other occasions, people were ‘astonished’ at his teaching and it is the same word used to describe their reaction to his miracles. For the two thousand years since, the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth has continued to influence people who expressed no religious allegiance to him.
A few weeks before beginning this series of Reflections, I came across a comment by a 19th Century theologian who thought that if more people knew what Jesus of Nazareth taught, more would be drawn to him. It struck me that most people today know even less about Jesus' ideas than people a hundred years ago or that he taught so much about one of the major moral issues of our time - the right use of money and wealth.
Jesus of Nazareth can speak reality and truth into financial issues, helping to distinguish right from wrong, because he speaks from ‘outside the box’. Not only the ‘boxes’ that make up the cloistered commercial environments where industry practice is distinct from what is generally acceptable in the rest of society but also from beyond the common boundaries of materialism and inauthenticity that define our consumer society.
I know this may seem unlikely. Christian belief is often presented as a blind leap in the dark: a leap in the dark because there is nothing really there; a blind leap because we can only fool ourselves that something is there by keeping our eyes closed. This illusion of self-delusion is fuelled by psychologists who assure us that religion is good for our mental and emotional health, even if it is not true.
Of course, to believe is, by definition, an act of trust but it is wrong to believe that it is necessarily irrational. The 20th Century philosopher, Francis Schaeffer, illustrated the difference between rational and irrational acts of faith in a short essay called Faith Verses Faith.
Dr Schaeffer lived in the Swiss Alps and he describes a group of people climbing to a rocky ledge just as fog closes in. As night falls, they know they will not survive until morning if they stay where they are and yet none of them know the way back to safety. If one of them jumps off the ledge, he may land in safety and find his way home but it would be blind leap that worked out well: luck or fate, depending on what you believe in. But what if the group hear a voice calling to them from the fog, one that said he had lived all his life in the area, could tell exactly where they were from the sound of their voices and knew that if they jumped off the ledge they would be safe? To jump, then, would be an act of faith but faith in a person, not faith in impersonal fate; a rational act of faith based on what they have good reason to believe is true. This faith would be an extension of what is rational, not a denial of it.
The issue, therefore, is whether it is rational to believe that Jesus of Nazareth could speak from ‘outside the box’. For the final three days of Advent, we will consider some of his comments that could only come from there.
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Copyright © All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans 2012.
Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
These Advent Reflections do not teach personal finance skills and where these skills are mentioned the issues have been simplified. Handling money and dealing with money problems and debt can be complicated and neither the author nor anyone else involved in the production of these Reflections is responsible for any action you take, or fail to take, based on what is written here.
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