What's it all about?
Perhaps there are some truly bad people in the world. But even if there are, they are unlikely to be reading this. For most of us, the Apostle Paul’s statement is all too true:‘I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.’ (Romans 7:18-19)
As we grow up, we can become suspicious and self-defensive, or caught up in so much activity that we barely notice those around us or the wider community.
But Jesus did not tell us to try harder, nor did he impose new restrictions. Instead he made this counter-intuitive statement: ‘If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.’ (Luke 9:24)
The Messianic Pilgrimage
There is a loosely-connected international community of people who are passionate about God, and who are attempting to follow Jesus the Messiah in what we think of as a pilgrimage. This book is an anthology of thoughts related to it, many of which have been used online, encouraging people in diverse cultures to consider the Messiah’s claims.
The book suggests new ways of looking at what Jesus showed and taught in his life. The topics are divided roughly into ‘seasons’, each one focussing on different aspects of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. These thoughts do not add up to a programme, though it might look like that at first. There is no ‘Messianic Pilgrimage’ organisation to join. But, if you chose to, you can be part of this movement too.
There are a few bad people in the world but not many and none of them are reading this. They skip over pages like this because they already have decided that the only way to get what they want out of life is what we call the Dagger or DAG approach—Dominate, Attack and Grab.
Of course, we all have a little bit of that in us, but most of us do not let it turn us into aggressive, heartless Dagger people. Instead we take a normal, reasonable approach to life most of the time. All we want is to stick with the same default settings all humans are born with—the ordinary desires to manage our own lives, escape pain and enjoy the things we want to enjoy.
This is realistic. It doesn’t mean we will get our own way all the time. It means we expect reasonable freedom to set our own goals, boundaries and schedule and choose our own relationships and obligations.
While we do that, we would like to make a positive difference in the world too. We may not be as good as people like Mother Teresa who sacrifice their whole lives for others but we admire them and lean as far as we can in being like them.
We could be a lot more like them if it weren’t for those nasty Dagger people. Our big problem in life, as we learn at about the age of two, is that even though there are only a few real Dagger people in the world, everybody has a Dagger streak in them.When people show that streak, inflicting pain on us or interfering with what we want to enjoy, we learn to fight back. We exclude them from our group, retaliate against their attacks and guard our things more the next time. We call this growing up, gaining adult levels of suspicion and self-defence.
The change we would love to see in the world would be for people in general to suppress their Dagger streak more, and maybe even for some of the Dagger people to get a total personality makeover. Oppression and crime would drop. Cheating and abuse would die down to manageable levels. We wouldn’t have to be so defensive all the time: A better world would arrive.
But Jesus says our analysis is all wrong. According to him the real problem with the world is not the few Dagger people or even the Dagger streak in the rest of us. It’s the whole approach to life that masses of normal people see as realistic, grown-up and good.
What’s wrong with growing up?
The so-called grown-up approach to life has adult levels of suspicion and self-defence, but as we all know, it isn’t perfect. It involves inflicting pain in order to teach other people not to inflict pain on us. Sometimes this fails or even backfires.
We retaliate to teach people a lesson, but they are such slow learners. Oppressors don’t want to learn they are oppressive. Racists don’t want to stop denying their racism. Prisoners can all tell us why they don’t belong in prison. When ordinary people occasionally act like Dagger people, they usually find an excuse for it.
If we retaliate against people when they don’t think they did anything wrong, they think we are the Dagger people. We know they are wildly misjudging us and our motives because all we are doing is self-defence. When we remind them that they deserved our retaliation, they get even more upset with us. This goes into a downward spiral of accusation and counter-accusation and it produces the world as we know it.
Self-defence turns out to be a full-time job. We don’t have time or energy to do even half of the good we would like to do for the world, and the little good we get done often gets undone by the Dagger people. We settle for managing our own lives in our own interests, including other people’s interests as far as possible except for the real Dagger people, whom we condemn and exclude. The world is what it is and we are stuck in it with each person and group trying to make the best of a bad situation, looking out for their own welfare.
But are we missing something? Is our ‘realistic grown-up’ view actually unaware about a way this could all change? Suppose the human default settings we were born with, the ones that were reinforced in pre-school, the ones that look justified and mostly harmless, the ones we take for granted about our own welfare—suppose there was a way they could be flipped to a position that would change the world as we know it into a world that would be better for everybody.
What way? Clue me in.
You may not like the sound of this, but it is not our idea as writers of this book. It is the high risk, counter-intuitive approach to life that Jesus summed up in this amazing double oxymoron, ‘If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.’ (Luke 9:24)
Many people have no idea that Jesus ever said any such thing. When they first hear it, they are unsure what he meant by it. What life was he talking about? How do we hold onto it or give it up for his sake? What does it mean to lose it or save it?
The life we lose is the unaffected life, the one we just described as the ‘grown-up’ life, each looking out for our own welfare as best we can and using as much self-defence as necessary. To give up that life for the sake of Jesus means to get connected to the main thing he was always talking about—his call to join him and his band of pilgrims travelling from our old life to our new one.
If we accept his call, we embark with him on the Messianic Pilgrimage, a journey away from our human default settings through unexplored territory into the territory he rules. This is a long pilgrimage of discovering in our daily experience what Jesus meant by losing and finding life, moving from darkness to light, from the world as it is to the world as it will be.
Don’t expect an easy pilgrimage!
From our first step on this pilgrimage, we are leaving our old life of self-management and self-defence behind. We stop making our own calculations about how best to avoid pain and enjoy our lives. We stop trying to develop and defend our own little kingdoms. We stop living like people who are clueless that there even is a Messiah who is on the move and who is calling us to move with him.
In other words, pilgrims fall in love with the resurrected, living Jesus, with his pilgrimage and with other pilgrims. This is life’s most important change—from clueless to clued in, from managing life in our own interests to letting the Messiah give us our assignments as part of his campaign for a better world.
Our pilgrimage of discovery is our new life, or the start of it. The pilgrimage leads to the ultimate life that will be ours when we see the Messiah face to face instead of only through his Spirit or in visions. But we already are getting more and more connected as we walk along with the Spirit and our fellow pilgrims, all of us connected, all trusting the Messiah to lead us into a new life that really is life.
Don’t expect an easy pilgrimage. The Messiah’s route may take us into a lot of pain, suffering and undeserved disgrace. Some pilgrims may give up because the Messiah’s path is too painful for them. They turn their backs on the Messiah and resume managing their own lives so they have less pain. But the true pilgrims see the journey through to the end, and they discover that the pilgrimage is worth it, the Messiah is reliable and the life we discover beyond the pain is far more soul-satisfying than the life we had when we were focused on avoiding pain.
So life comes down to one huge question: Do we trust Jesus enough to let him lead us on his Messianic Pilgrimage even though it may be very hard? If we do, we swap our current self-managed life for a new connected life, led by the Messiah’s Spirit one day at a time. Jesus the Messiah promises it will be our best swap ever. Why bet our life against him?