Jesus had a Platform

Last updated on: April 23, 2017 at 6:58 am by Anne Kennedy

Jesus had a Platform 2017-04-23T06:58:54-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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While I was lying around all week not thinking about anything of substance, an interesting conversation worked itself out on twitter about Platform. Not just Platform in general, which is basically a flat surface upon which you can stand in order to be heard, but the Platform that is required in the world of books and blogs. If you want people to read what you’re writing, you have to have a place to say it. And if you want lots of people to read what you’re saying, you need lots of twitter followers. Here is KSP with a sane summery of the whole debate. And here is Beth Moore advocating for more sanity.

The bit that struck me, in Beth’s piece, was this line, ‘Also trust your gut when you know you’re being advised to do something in order to build a following or sell a book that feels gross.’ Which is absolutely true. A person out on the trail of book promotion should not be pressured into doing horrid things (that’s a technical book promotion word) that are unsavory.

But it’s Sunday and as the line passed me by I thought, that’s part of the problem. I regularly ‘trust my gut’ and I would say only a fraction of the time does it pan out the way I want it to. When you’re looking over the landscape of your life–all your choices and plans and hopes and aspirations and desires and limitations and everything–the problem is that often what you Think will be good isn’t always good. What I think will lead to happiness doesn’t. The gut inclination of the human works some of the time, but often it is marred, you might even say broken. Look at twitter itself. There are a lot of people out there going with their guts, and sometimes it is amazing to behold.

What is interesting to me are the inclinations of Jesus in his earthly ministry. He did a lot of things. He talked to a lot of people. But he never got thrown off of What he came to do. He would occasionally tell people what he was here for. I’m here to preach, he said in Mark. That’s what I’m here to do. And the crowds, far from going wild, said, No, you’re here to give us free bread and healing. Later he said, I’m here to drink the cup of the Father’s wrath, to die, essentially. And Peter said, Oh no You’re not. You’re here to be king and to give me a nice life with lots of glory.

The inclinations, the desires, the conscience, the sixth sense, the ability to know if something is good or bad–some of the time that works for me, as a human person. But at the end of the day, that nebulous and hard to discern faculty often fails. I go out into the world to do the thing I want to do, and it turns out that the thing I want to do is a bad idea. It doesn’t go well. I am proved foolish in my endeavor.

The only way to have that gut sense work properly is to study and examine and be curious about the inclinations of God. And the best way to do that, of course, is to read the Bible. Over and over again. Which isn’t nearly as fun as twitter. God is pretty clear in the Bible about what our inclinations and gut level decision making are like. ‘Your ways are not like my ways,’ he says, ‘nor your thoughts like my thoughts.’ And by that he doesn’t mean that ours are better. Mine are higher, says God, higher like the heavens are higher than the earth.

We look up at God and can’t understand who he is and what his goodness is like and so decide to go with what we know best. Then we call whatever it was we did Good, whether or not it was. Which is why Jesus had to come and had to die and why we have to fix ourselves to him in his death. We have to distrust the very core of who we are and what we think is best and most sensible about ourselves. See, I made it all better by saying ‘we.’ We can do it together, and that will make it fun. Except that this kind of death is unhappily singular. The individual examining the substance of all her thoughts and feelings and hopes and aspirations and finding them to be low and worthless, and then looking to the cross for help, for rightly ordered desires.

What’s that nice Lenten refrain with the Decalogue? Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep your law. In modern parlance, sanctify my gut so that when I’m going with it, it takes me in the right direction.

For surely the cross was up there on a rock, and everyone could see it. If ever you wanted a platform, that one could not be rivaled. But dying is a sorry way to self promote, even if it’s the most life giving thing in the cosmos.

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