Saturday, February 8, 2014

Jesus the Trickster

Saturday, February 8, 2014


This past weekend Pastor DeWayne Davis of All God's Children Metropolitan Community Church here in Minneapolis presented a sermon in which he focused on the topic of how people think of Jesus.  He specifically drew a parallel between the hero of the Lord of the Rings (namely a hobbit...someone perceived to be 'less than', 'weak', etc) and Jesus (someone also perceived to be and treated as 'less than', 'weak', etc).  He alluded to discussions he has had with other ministers about what kind of Jesus they believe people 'need'.  Based on what Pastor Davis said it appears the yearning of many Americans for macho-man masculinity is still alive and well.  Plenty of people seem to believe Jesus should be presented in a masculine and strong way; a loving, compassionate and/or forgiving Jesus is somehow perceived as too feminine and passive.  Such qualities appear not to be in keeping with macho conceptions of what it means to be a man that prevail in American culture today.  Yes indeed, we have a long way to go.  Distorted conceptions of masculinity still reign in many people's hearts and minds.

Archetypes fascinate me.  I have realized in the last few years, and most especially since I began this blog and began to reassess the future direction of my life, that archetypes are something I want to better understand.  Though my academic training did not have a strong emphasis in psychology I have nonetheless picked up some meaningful knowledge through my studies in other disciplines including mythology, anthropology, philosophy and theology.  Our world is replete with archetypes.  Some particularly evocative archetypes or personality types may include the following: warriors, teachers, heroes, kings, servants and lawyers.

In exploring archetypes we can find meaningful ways to better understand ourselves, other people and those complex and ever evolving realities of daily life, culture and so forth.  Gender and culturally produced and perpetuated conceptions of what it means to be a man or woman are one realm in which we can see hints of deeper archetypes whose origins may date back centuries or even millennia.

Given that my personal development was significantly influenced by being raised within the Catholic Church I can say that my understanding of who Jesus is reputed to be often caused me some amount of confusion and even discomfort.  It's not that I thought that any of Jesus' behavior was uncalled for, excessive or morally wrong.  Instead I often found myself feeling a bit unable to imagine Jesus as both fully man and fully God.  If he was as human as any of us wouldn't that mean that we could identify within him all the qualities, both good and bad, that we observe in humanity at large?  Wouldn't anything we feel within our own hearts be something we could imagine Jesus himself experienced?  And wouldn't any archetype we believe in be something we could imagine Jesus could potentially embody?

I myself do not feel I need a more 'masculine' Jesus than the one that was presented to me.  In fact my greatest hangup had nothing to do with how we imagine masculinity and femininity.  Instead, I struggled more because Jesus was never really rendered as a trickster.  I find the trickster archetype fascinating.  And I have come to believe that if everything we observe in the Cosmos is truly an expression of some deity (who many understand and name as God) then it follows that Jesus is most certainly a trickster...among many other archetypes.

Yet I have rarely heard Jesus described in such a way.  Have you ever heard Jesus described as a trickster?  If so, what was the context?  Some might perceive calling Jesus a trickster as an insult meant to denigrate who they believe he is.  Others might find such a portrayal to be without merit based on the stories of Jesus' life they have heard.

I still can vividly remember the first time my experience of Jesus began to seriously conflict with what I had been taught to believe about him.  I was twenty-three years old at the time and doing a thirty-day silent retreat in Gloucester, Massachusetts.  I was undertaking this retreat as part of my training as a novice member of the Society of Jesus (also known as the Jesuits).  The thirty-day retreat was created by the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius of Loyola.  Ignatius experienced a profound transformation in the course of his life after a cannonball unexpectedly injured him and cast him out of his formerly familiar life in which his primary fascination was being a knight in 16th century Spain.  Ignatius melded the warrior/knight archetype and his appreciation for the glory of royalty with his Catholicism to form a religious order unlike any other.

A follow up to this posting was written later in the year.  Look for that posting on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2014.







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