Perhaps you know about Jack Chick, billed as the most widely-read comic book artis in the world. He does those little pamphlets about the need to turn your life over to Jesus before you burn in Hell. Charming guy.
Well, I'm not the first person to find one of his comics particularly perplexing. The story: missionaries are seated on the plane next to an evangelist. They excitedly tell him about the good works they've done for a benighted people, while he asks them how many souls they've won. They don't have ears to hear, and when the plane crashes they go to Hell.
Readers have commented on the implausibility of missionaries' doing all these kind things, teaching people to pray (apparently), and not converting a single soul. Well, in honor of Father's Day, I figure I'll give Chick and his sky-daddy the benefit of the doubt.
See, the tract is really a parable of the sort Jesus used, whose manifest content disguises an esoteric meaning. Remember that Jesus and his disciples were leftist revolutionaries for whom conversion is not about verbal acceptance of a creed or habit, but rather renewed life in perfect love. Not all who call Jesus Lord, but those who do the work of his Father, are the elect. And that work is feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless, and tending to the sick.
Now the missionaries in the story built schools and hospitals. Similarly, the Priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan no doubt gave generously. But Jesus demands perfection. The missionaries here, perhaps, are like the (unfairly maligned?) Pharisees of Matthew's gospel. Their gifts they write down on the debit side of their ledgers, while on the other side they reckon thousandfold recompense and eternal life.
They have no inkling that the gift that Divine Law requires of us--whether in the name of Jesus, or Paul, or Apollo--is perfect love. If we have faith, we will naturally give what we can, and we will give it in a loving way--unlike so many real-life missionaries, who build schools and hospitals while they exploit native labor and sexuality, support thuggish sectarian movements, and ally themselves with global political reaction.
Modern-day disciples of Christ are not those who hector strangers into repeating arcane formulae of the sort Jesus "Man was not made for the Sabbath" himself rejected, but those who treat their fellow men and women as brothers and sisters. As equals.
Chick is considered a purveyor of hate by the Southern Poverty Law Center for his bigoted attacks on (perhaps in this order) Catholics, Muslims, neopagans, Hindus, Buddhists, and Mormons (among others). But I prefer to think he is criticizing certain unloving attitudes exemplified by the stereotyped followers of these religions.
ReplyDeleteYou know, the way liberal Christians reconcile Jesus's vituperations against the Pharisees (forerunners of today's mainstream Judaism) with their assumption--regardless of the evidence to the contrary provided by e.g. Akiba and Hillel--that Jesus's message was a far more compassionate one than that of any other religious figure.
At least thinking through the Jesus-Chick comparison should get liberal Christians to answer the question, Christian love? Or love pure and simple?