A Lenten Reflection - I Love Jesus

Today's readings and quotes in the reflection are from, I Dream A World, by Brian Lanker – Cicely Tyson's portrait (pg 26).; The Song of Solomon, chapter one; and the Gospel of John 14: 15-20.

Cicely Tyson – a black woman, born in New York City on December 19, 1933. I don't know if she's a Christian or even if she believes in a higher power. The first chapter of the Song of Solomon also contains no reference to God. So why did I choose these passages for today's reading? Why did I feel compelled by them and want to share them with you? This question has been brewing inside of me.

I spent a good amount of time this week meditating on this Lenten journey of ours and on the fact that this is Black History Month. My goal was to use one of the gospels and reflect chronologically on what might have been a few weeks prior to Jesus' arrest and subsequent resurrection. I wanted to present one gospel writer's version of the events intact. I became quickly frustrated. The week between what we call Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday is packed, in all four gospels, with the teachings of Jesus. I wanted to use those, but then I would have to jump back for Palm Sunday to the Triumphal Entry section. That was the opposite of what I was trying to do. Plus, none of this attended to my wanting to celebrate Black History in an integrated way. I thought and prayed and finally realized that I needed to let go of my plan.

I started to think about why I cared about the execution and resurrection of Jesus. Why would I want to devote the next five weeks anticipating his torture and then the following week celebrate his resurrection? Those questions are easy to answer for me – I want to do those things because I love him. I love Jesus. It sounds so naive, doesn't it? The only reason that I call myself a Christian is because I love the one that I call Christ.

Through the gospel narratives, particularly the Gospel of John, I fell in love with Jesus. But it was not in these writings where I found something compelling to express this love to you today. Where, I thought … where can I find this kind of love in the Bible?? … this passionate feeling of abandon that I have for Jesus? Where else, but in the Song of Songs … the Song of Solomon. This poem expresses the kind of love that we are all invited to share in with Jesus and that I believe is reciprocated by Jesus.

I remember the first time I read this book. I was 15 years old. I had been reading the Bible for a few months … trying to grasp what faith was about and who I am and all those types of questions. I had been "born again" and "spirit-filled" and now I wanted to get "grounded in the Word." This is Pentecostal language … It means that I had had an experience with The Holy – an experience which touched my emotions, spirit, body, and intellect: my emotions because it felt so good to be loved by Jesus; my spirit because I had a transcendent experience; my body because I was speaking in other tongues and dancing in celebration; and my intellect because I was inspired to learn more. So here I was … alone in my room reading this Holy Book that I was sure God wrote as a perfect manual for us to live by and I begin to read, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant …” I wondered if my parents had ever read the Bible and if they had, why were they letting me? I was at once embarrassed and enthusiastic. I read on waiting for the Holy part to happen. It never did – at least not in the way that I expected. Since I had a foundational belief in the Holiness of the Bible simply because it was The Bible, I knew that somehow this too was Holy, but it went against everything I had been taught about sex and love and passion. Reading this book of scripture soon became a secret and seemingly illicit joy of mine.

What I learned from this book was the joy and holiness of passion and its various expressions. The struggle in this poem for the lovers to be united spoke directly to me as a young person transgressing the boundaries of gender and falling in love with my friends who were girls rather than the boys I was dating. The Song of Solomon is filled with the lovers transgressing boundaries such as race and class. There is also no justification for their love. The poem doesn't defend the love between these people – they simply love each other with abandon. There are those in the poem who object to the lovers being together, but that seems to serve only to fan the flame of passion between the lovers all the more.

This poem also taught me the Holiness of equality across gender and racial boundaries. The Shulamite woman and her Beloved live in a world of gender and racial inequality, but the love that is expressed throughout this poem is not like the love expressed in other parts of the Bible where the man is dominate and dark-skinned people are subservient. In this poem the dark-skinned woman – the woman who is black AND beautiful – has agency. Her beloved belongs to her as much as she belongs to him. The daughters of Jerusalem be damned for their jealousy. The Beloved adores the Shulamite woman not because she serves him well, but because she is beautiful and because she loves him. This black woman is portrayed as strong, intelligent, beautiful, and passionate. She is equal to her fairer-skinned lover. This equality enrages the others in the poem. They may see it as an undeserved honor bestowed on her by one above her station, but this is not true. The equality between the Beloved and the Shulamite woman is due to them being equal essentially. They are intrinsically equal.

In the piece from I Dream A World by Brian Lanker, Cicely Tyson expresses her devotion to portraying black women who have made positive contributions to her heritage. She did this, she says, because of the "negative images that were being projected of black people throughout the world." She made a choice to live her message and she gives us a charge to do the same. She wants us each to "take a small piece of this huge thing" before us and "work it regardless of the color of the yarn," just like her mother had her and her siblings do with whatever embroidery project they were working on. We are to do this for the sake of "harmony on this planet." Is this so different from how Jesus lived and from what Jesus calls us to?

My passion for Jesus is because he followed his path against the cultural and political tide of his time and on behalf of others who were oppressed. He spoke up on behalf of others to his own peril. We might say that Jesus followed his call unswervingly. He started a revolution, not a religion. It is for this that I am in love with him. His revolution consisted of encouraging people to not be afraid … even to their own peril … or of our own peril. Jesus empowered people to heal and be healed, to love and be loved, to follow the one he called the Father and to live into Holiness as opposed to following the leadership of the religious leaders of the day who were more interested in their hierarchy than their connection or relationship with God.

Jesus, Cicely Tyson, and the Shulamite woman and the Beloved expressed their passion through the way they lived their lives. They especially expressed this through their bodies. Jesus expressed his love and commitment through his and our bodies – he fed people, healed people, and was tortured and executed because he wouldn't modify his message or his actions. Cicely Tyson, too, used her body as an actress to portray black women that she wanted us to know about – going against the grain of negative stereotypes. She put her whole self on the line, just like Jesus. The Beloved and the Shulamite woman expressed their love and passion in their mutual love-making disregarding the judgment from others who saw their union across racial and class lines to be deplorable. All of this is holy. It is integrated holy work of our whole selves.

All of Jesus suffered when he was tortured and executed – his mind, his spirit, his emotions, and his body. He committed all of who he was to what he believed was the right way to live as a human being in community with other human beings and in relationship to The Holy. Today we call ourselves, as the Christian church, the body of Christ. We get this expression in many places in the Bible. We are the body of Christ. You can hear teaching everywhere that we are the hands and the feet of Jesus in this world. I agree with that … but I also say that we are the heart of Christ, the mind of Christ, and yes, even the spirit of Christ. As we follow the teachings of Jesus and the example of Jesus we become Christs in his stead, continuing in his tradition. I think this is at least part of what is meant when Jesus says in the Gospel of John,

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees her nor knows her. You know her, because she abides with you, and she will be in you. I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”

We are all integrated with the one Jesus calls the Father – who I call the Holy – with each other, with the Advocate, and with Jesus. I am speaking to us as people who follow the teachings of Jesus the Christ. Christianity, is my primary tradition, and so I speak in these terms, using this language which so often has been the very language of oppression that I believe we need to address and counter.

I am looking through a portal of time where in a few weeks we will be ritually remembering the torture and execution of Jesus, this man who I profess to love – this man who committed himself to healing and speaking truths against the oppressive system of his day. I want to learn how to follow that man. I believe we have been offered a courage that we can tap into through the Advocate. I believe we have been told that we don't have to fight this fight alone, but that we are connected to each other and outside of time to Jesus himself. Then if that's true, I believe that we also have a connection to the resurrection of Jesus. There's where we usually pin our hopes.

Cicely Tyson, and the Beloved and the Shulamite woman, I believe, can teach us how to live in all three places at the same time. The three places are – the passion and love of following Jesus, the torture and execution of Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus. In the words read today we hear stories of passion and commitment, of oppression, and of hope that leads to, well, winning. Isn't that what resurrection really is ... winning? But is the winning what gets us through the pain in the middle? It isn't for me. It's the love and passion at the beginning that gets me through the hard stuff. The promise of winning when it looks like I'm losing is not very motivating for me. But love based purely on love itself - that will move me ... sway me ... change me.

I want to end with a quote from Cicely Tyson.

"This constant reminder by society that I am 'different' because of the color of my skin, once I step outside of my door, is not my problem - it's theirs. I have never made it my problem and never will. I will die for my right to be human - just human."