There was a deeper reason why I asked the question of
Luke 8 in my recent blog.I asked who you identified most with in the passage.
LUKE 8Thank you to the brave/interested ones who answered.
I have recently been challenged about how I identify with this passage as well.
I have often identified with those that have been healed by Jesus- because on many levels on various occasions I have too been healed.
I am being invigorated to identify myself with how Jesus must have felt in this passage and others in the New Testament.
To to ReJesus myself as two Hirsch and Frost might say.
".. M.Scott Peck in Further Along the Road Less Traveled recounted the episode when Baptist theologian Harvey Cox was addressing a convention of Christian healers- pastors, therapists, nurses, doctors- that Peck was attending. During his presentation, Cox retold the story of Luke 8 of Jesus raising Jairus's daughter from the dead...
...Cox asked his audience of six hundred Christian healers and therapists to indicate which of the characters in the story they most strongly identified with.
The bleeding woman?
The anxious father?
The curious crowd?
Or Jesus?
What Cox found that around a hundred could relate to the desperate woman;
several hundred identified with Jairus, whose daughter was dying;
the majority identified with the perplexed group standing by.
And six- yes, six- people felt they could identify with Jesus.
Peck's point in recounting this story experience was to point out that there is something seriously wrong with Christianity when only one in every hundred Christians can identify with Jesus. Here was a story about Jesus the healer, told to healers, but none of them identified with Jesus. Have we made him so divine, so otherworldly that we cannot connect with him anymore? Peck suggests that this leads to the excuse that we can't really be expected to follow Jesus because we perceive ourselves way down here and Jesus way up there, beyond identification. Say's Peck,
"That is exactly what we're supposed to do! We're supposed to identify with Jesus, act like Jesus, be like Jesus. That is what Christianity is supposed to be about: the imitation of Christ.""
(Excerpt taken from ReJesus- A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church
by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch pg 18)
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