The Lion

By Richard

These few thoughts are written for a friend of mine, Jennifer, a woman way smarter than I am and able to smell the BS in almost every arguement.

One of the reasons that I am convinced that the Gospels are authentic is because they portray Jesus as an untamed lion, wild and dangerous.

The “liberals” (as we called them) are all about taming the lion; removing his teeth and claws, making him into a circus act that jumps at human command. The “fundamentalists” are all about caging him in. Trapping him in inside their clever theological systems. Peering at him through the iron bars of their rules, tacky bumper stickers, sickly Christian music and warped sense of politics.

Your feelings are on the right track. I think you sensed that something is wrong on both sides of the equation. But the trouble with open discussions is that both sides are wrong, and discussions between two wrongs don’t make a right. Both end up making the lion into some kind of sorry human pet.

But there is another way. We need to listen to the roar of the lion himself, who calls us to meet him barehanded on the open savannah without a place to hide. The lion who asks us to bear our soul that he might rip open our pride and pour in his forgiveness and grace. The lion who calls us to lose our life that we may find it.

All I can say is read and reread the Gospels. Look for the danger in his words. See how they tried to tame him and cage him, and then get rid of him, when all else had failed. Discover the confusion of his friends as they fought to understand his great “unknown-ness” - read their honest yet unpolished accounts. Allow his voice to tear open your soul, for I believe in that moment you’ll realise that He is the One! For no human could have created a lion that we must kneel before, or run from, or hide from, or, worst of all, try to tame or cage so that we can get close to him on our terms. The fact alone that in the Gospels he is untamed, wild and dangerous, speaks volumes – these are honest accounts not interpretations (for humans would have tried to tame and train him). They would have polished away his dangerous tendency to drive us at away. The Gospels are definitely not tracts designed to increase the popular vote.

Meet him on the savannah. Approach him barehanded! Be warned he is dangerous! But be of good cheer. He asks us to give up the shortness of prideful independence so that he might replace it with an eternal, life-giving, dependence on him.