When Jesus came near to Jerusalem and saw it, he wept and said: If only you had known the things that make for peace. —Luke 19.42
* * *
My friend and I meet for lunch. We comment on the weather. We catch up on our children, grandchildren, and bodily ailments. We bemoan the travails of old age, the pathos of our favorite sports teams, and the mind-boggling complexity of smartphones and smart TVs.
My friend and I roam across a variety of topics, carefully tiptoeing around the elephant in the room. We have a tacit agreement not to speak of the elephant. But alas, the elephant stomps over, shimmies its rump against our table, and shits.
And that gets us going. We go round after round—decrying, deriding, readjudicating the elephant—until we inevitably slip into the slough of despond.
At our last meeting my friend got so dismayed he blurted out: Let’s change the subject, for God’s sake! Let’s talk about Jesus!
(My friend is Jewish.)
Really? Jesus?!
Yes. Anyone but that damn elephant.
Okay. I’ll tell you one of my favorite Jesus stories and then you tell me one of yours.
Deal.
I told him about Jesus confronting Zacchaeus, a wee little man, with wee little feet, and wee little hands whom everybody looked down on because he had used his civic powers to defraud people of vast wealth and make himself filthy rich.
One day Jesus took him aside for a private conversation. A few hours later Zacchaeus publicly confessed his sin, repented, and promised that he would give back four times the amount he had wrongly taken and furthermore he would give half of what remained to the poor.
Jesus put his arm around Zacchaeus and said to the stunned crowd: Today salvation has come to this house.
(Note to evangelicals: That is what salvation means!)
What’s your story? I asked my friend.
The Good Samaritan. The Samaritan overcame his racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry to tend to a battered, wounded, forsaken person belonging to a group he had been taught to despise.
And then, as I recall, Jesus said that’s what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.
(Note to Christian nationalists: That is what Jesus said!)
As it turns out, there’s more than one way to ignore the elephant in the room. This is one: Talk about Jesus.
Your turn.
