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A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Rev Lynne Gibson

Good morning.

I was browsing online when I stumbled across a small ‘plushie’ Jesus figure. It was being marketed as a comforting toy and a ‘bedtime companion’ for children. I could appreciate the sentiment, but there was something about a ‘cute smiling pocket sized Jesus’ which made me uncomfortable. Perhaps because a pocket-sized God tailored to meet our needs, seems to be a sadly inadequate representation of the Creator of the universe. Or perhaps because such a God, taken out when we need him to play with at Christmas and Easter, and put away again afterwards, is a little bit too close to the reality of God’s place in the world and even in the church today.

So what would the real Jesus make of this frazzled, fragile and failing world? As our slick logo puts it, ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ We don’t have to speculate – we can read it in the gospels, and so we know that he’s not the Jesus of some churchgoers, who gets left behind in the pews as they leave for the week ahead.

The Jesus of the gospels is not cuddly, cute or domesticated. He cracked a whip and overturned the tables of corruption and exploitation in the temple. He touched the untouchable, welcomed the ‘other’, the outsider – women, Samaritans and tax collectors. He loved not just neighbours, but strangers, enemies, and those who would betray him.

He loved to death and beyond, and calls each of us to love and welcome in his name those whom we meet along the way. If we are serious about following in his footsteps, it means standing up, speaking out and overturning the tables of oppression and inequity wherever we encounter them.
What Would Jesus Do? We already know the answer.

God who overturned tables and overturns our prejudices, send us out to build a kingdom of love, mercy and acceptance in your world, Amen