YeKengalé

Jesus’ counterintuitive mind continues to fascinate the daylights out of me. From a cultural perspective, he was the ultimate contrarian. The kind of mind no matter how much studied you cant learn to predict.

Jesus becomes aware that his end is near in John 13, and starts talking about it (his death) clear through to John 17. He speaks of his own ending in terminology that would confuse the most astute Jesusologist. It certainly threw off Peter. He spoke of His ‘hour of Glory’. His own shameful death, the details of which he evidently was at least vaguely aware of, dragged on his emotional energy till the foreboding anxiety turned his sweat into blood.

But the only time he could unburden himself in conversation you heard him talking with poise and confidence about his hour of Glory, as if what was just around the corner was a superbowl victory. Yes it all makes sense if you just wait for three days. But that’s exactly what some of us are never able to do – see past the painful consequences of our own choices.

We bury ourselves in guilt or remorse or regret or anger. So many never come to their moment of glory…..being defiled and weighted down with some heavy burden that simply wont allow us to fly away home to Glory.

That’s the other thing that grabs my attention about Jesus’ contrariness. Obviously, it’s what you introduce into your system that affects it. You eat nourishing food, you are strengthened. You imbibe poison, yu grow sick and die. Only Jesus will develop some point of view to flip the script of the obvious. How can what comes out of a man defile the man himself?

The only way, is if we had to eat our words. There’s in fact a lot of psychological evidence that this is in fact the case. What we think and say about another does tend both to reflect upon us and influence our destiny. We do in fact eat our own words.

Just like any natural tendency, there are possible cases of interruption or delay, but as natural as is the reciprocal relationship between matter and energy, so too is the reciprocal relationship between the outward projections of the psyche and not just internal somatic formations, but even materially analogous circumstantial formations as well.

It may well be that the vindictive and rewarding God we have out-pictured in our theologies as something like a glorified Santa Claus watching to see whether we have been naughty or nice, is an infantile personification of a very natural psychological propensity to produce inwardly what is being projected outwardly.

For altogether different reasons than we may have been accustomed, it may indeed yield great benefit to ‘watch our words watch our words what they say.’ The Father up above looking down, may just be the wiring of our own built-in creative nature. Whatever you call a thing may not change the thing itself. But it could very well change you.