Who Our Neighbors Say Jesus Is

While preaching to listeners in Northern Ireland, I tried, in my sermon’s second point, to explain, illustrate, and apply how Jesus trained his disciples to listen and then put language to what their neighbors think and say about him. I wanted us to hear what it sounds like when we, as Christians today, try to do what Jesus asked Peter and the other original disciples to do. What it would be like to have heard Paul in Athens, saying to us, “as some of your own poets have said” (Acts 17:28). Jesus practices this listening himself when he says, ‘you have heard it said, but I say to you’ in his Sermon on the Mount.

Watch My Attempt in Real Time or Read My Notes

You can watch my attempt in real-time by clicking here, skipping ahead, and focusing from minute 16:18 to 27:18. Notice how I’m trying to locate both resonance and dissonance, what resembles Jesus as the Bible presents him and what doesn’t, with what we hear said about Jesus in this fictional story. If you skip ahead again and watch the last two minutes of the message, 37:20-39:58, you’ll see my attempt to highlight an important resonance, a clear echo of truth in the fictional story, a path upon which we can step together toward Jesus as he is, not in fiction, but in truth.

I’ve written my notes below to give you a sense of it (which differs slightly from how I said it in real-time). I try to highlight what I’m prayerfully trying to do within the notes, using the words “resonance” and “dissonance,” so you can see it.

What we’ve heard said

In his debut novel, The Gospel of Orla, the Northern Irish poet, Eoghan Walls, depicts a teenage girl who meets Jesus in the wake of her mother’s death. In this gritty fairy tale, we get a glimpse of how some of our neighbors might think of Jesus.

            – What do you want Orla? Jesus says. I bite my lip. – I want you to come with me to Ireland. There is a long pause. It is too long. So I say it again. – I want. I want you to come with me to Ireland. Come with me to Ireland and raise my mother back to life. He pauses. Then he speaks. – Ireland is very far away Orla. – Yes. But there is a boat we can take. I have checked it out the price and everything. I will pay the ticket. I will pay it.[1]

         [resonance]  We feel the deep agonizing question within ourselves as Orla begins to realize that Jesus could raise her mother and bring her back home to life. [dissonance] But something’s wrong. When Orla asks her many questions of Jesus, Jesus doesn’t seem able to answer them. The answers he gives about heaven, suffering, a good life, we wouldn’t recognize as followers of Jesus who know how the Bible presents him.

           [resonance] Like the true Jesus, this one is beaten whenever he seeks to speak of kindness or mercy to one’s neighbor. [dissonance] But Orla begins to recognize Jesus is vampire like. He gets burned if his skin meets the sun. He doesn’t know how to use an iPhone and depends wholly on the fourteen-year-old girl to keep him safe, alive, and relevant. He raises animals to life but they only remain alive if kept within his presence, and this is the choice it dawns upon Orla that she must make. If Jesus raises her mother to life, Orla realizes she must always remain with this Jesus. Considering the life this Jesus sucks out of her, she realizes is too much. In the end, she chooses to let this Jesus go. To get on with learning how to live without him. [resonance] In this case, we who follow Jesus as the Bible presents him, would join Orla in letting this sunken version of him go. She is right to seek a life, even of pain, without this vampiric version of Jesus. But, we’d want the Orla’s in our neighborhoods to know that her instinct to bring all of her most difficult and dreaming questions to him is right and good. That the true Jesus knows how to use an iPhone. Is not dependent upon a grieving fourteen-year-old to take care of him. Though he is one acquainted with grief, he is alive and powerful, able to hear her heart, carry her grief, and empower her through, not by taking who she is from her, but by recovering who she is as she was created to be.

What I’d Do Differently

Within the story, Orla questions whether this Jesus is the real Jesus, and then seems to conclude that he is, but not a person to be carried through life. Instead of saying in the sermon, “she meets the real Jesus”, it would have better matched the author’s puzzle about this within the story to have said, “she meets a person presenting himself as the real Jesus, and he seems to be.” I also, state that the author is not a follower of Jesus. I were better had I said, “gives no indication” or ‘as far as I’m aware.”

Someone asked, “how did you read the whole book in an afternoon?” My answer: I didn’t read it word for word but used the “how to read a book” training, which meant I (1) got it on kindle, searched every place Jesus is mentioned, and read the bulk of those sections. Then, I (2) read the beginning and the ending of the book, then (3) I searched online and read three reviews of the book from different sources.

What I Wouldn’t Change

That afternoon, prepping for this sermon, reading this short novel felt stressful and potentially “wasted time.” I wasn’t sure if it would yield the thing I was hoping to help our listeners and myself apply from Jesus’ words to his disciples. I already had a news story known to many Irish folk that I intended to mention in reference to the first point of my sermon. But, afterward, an older man, took my hand, looked me deep in the eyes, and said earnestly, “Many preachers who visit here will say, 'I don’t know if you say it this way over here,’ but tonight you talked like you’d been here and knew us. You are most welcome here any time.’”

This moment helped me more fully understand what our Lord practiced and taught his disciples and that Paul, too, spent time doing.

Accurately quoting another’s poets isn’t simply an apologetic move designed to help someone see the “yes” or “no” of the gospel from inside their cultural stories. Quoting the neighbors of another is also an act of neighbor love.

The time it takes. The listening it beckons. The learning we surrender to by doing it.

[1] Walls, Eoghan. The Gospel of Orla (pp. 90-91). Seven Stories Press. Kindle Edition.