Re-Judaizing Jesus or Re-Jesusizing Christianity

This week’s Time magazine has an interesting look at “10 Ideas that are changing the World.”  Along with developments in assessments of global wealth, the movie industry, customer service, cooking, geo-engineering, and other topics, Time suggests that a movement is afoot to ‘re-judaize” Jesus. 

Most people realize, I think, that Jesus was a Jew.  He was born, lived, and died as Jew under Roman occupation in what we now know as the first century AD (or BCE if you prefer).  But the truth is that for many Christians, Jesus’ Jewishness has been an afterthought or an answer to a Bible trivia question.  In other words, sure Jesus was Jewish, but what difference did that really make?

It turns out that it was hugely significant, as hugely significant as any of our identities are.  One of the awakenings of post-modernity is that each of us is shaped and formed by the communities in which we are born and live.  While we may come to reject some of the premises of our particular community of formation or we may come to some sort of change, to some extent we are each a product of the environment and culture into which we are introduced. 

Jesus was no different.  He was a Jew.  And as such, when we remember that he was a Jew, what he did and said can take on the meaning it had when he first said it.  The words Jesus used: salvation, Kingdom of God,  Son of Man, disciples, his yoke, the cross, etc. had meaning in their own context. 

Thanks to scholars and some pastors today, the full-bodied context of Jesus’ language, actions, and meaning is being recovered. 

The only thing I would question in the Time article is the description that we are ‘re-judaizing’ Jesus.  Jesus was always Jewish.  Maybe what we should be doing is judaizing ourselves.  If we are his disciples, and ‘disciple’ means something particular from its context—those chosen to follow and learn from a rabbi—then what it means to be a Christian may take a somewhat different shape than we may have thought.  Being a Christian is about entering into his world as much or more than welcoming him into ours.  Being a Christian is about being shaped by Him rather than molding him to fit comfortably into ours.   At the risk of continuing to make up unhelpful expressions, I think the real movement afoot is about re-Jesusizing Christianity.  This is the movement that has been in my own heart and head for some time now.  It’s interesting to see that others much sharper than me are leading the way in the same direction.

Here’s the link to the article:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1720049_1720050_1721663,00.html