Spiritual Hiccups - Loyalties

I've long been fascinated by the Gospel of John.  When I had to take Greek as a seminary student, John's gospel was the one New Testament book that I could sit down and read using my rudimentary language skills.  Yet despite being written with a grammar school vocabulary, the artistry of this gospel is nothing short of amazing.  John's use of irony (the real kind, not the way the word is most often used today) requires readers to stay on their toes lest they miss an important point.

Never is this more the case than in the events of the Passion.  As Jesus' trial before Pilate unfolds, the Roman governor speaks the truth about Jesus, calling him king, while the chief priests speak the Roman party line, warning Pilate not to be an enemy to the emperor.  At the height of this, when the priests cry, "Crucify him!" Pilate asks, "Shall I crucify your king?"  The priests respond, "We have no king but the emperor," and it is hard to miss that they have just pledged their allegiance to Caesar as king rather than God.

Of course they are not alone.  Jesus' disciples have mostly chosen self preservation over any loyalty to him.  Peter, who had insisted that he would lay down his life for Jesus, has denied even knowing Jesus in order to save his own skin.

A lot of us Christians like to imagine that we would never have joined in the calls to crucify Jesus.  Maybe we would have fled like the disciples, but nothing worse than that.  And that naturally raises the question of where our loyalty to Jesus lies along the continuum of all our other loyalties. 

Most of us have quite a few loyalties: our family, our school, our town or community, our church congregation, our country, our way of life, and the list goes on and on.  Much of the time we think of this as no problem at all.  We presume that loyalty to Jesus goes well with loyalty to family or nation.  Yet Christians with different values and politics (and loyalties?) often find it necessary to envision very different Jesuses to keep this lovely harmony of loyalties in place.

The fact is that Jesus says more than a few things that I prefer to ignore.  I'm not real big on crosses, even the metaphorical kind.  I tend to look out for number one a great deal of the time.  Never mind what Jesus says about giving myself away for the sake of the gospel.  Truth is, at times my loyalty to Jesus is rather conditional.  It depends a lot on how things are going for me at that moment.

And so I suppose it a very good thing that Jesus' loyalty, that God's love for humanity, is a little more absolute.  So says the cross.

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