20-8 Finding Meaning in Everyday Experience

Like most Jews, He would have prayed the shema (" The Lord our God is one" ) upon rising and going to bed- just as He had a garment like that of the Pharisees, with the traditional tassles hanging from its edge (Mt. 9:20; 23:5). Yet He thought about what He prayed. When asked which was the greatest of the commandments, He replied that it was the fact that God is one. He saw the unity of God as a commandment that elicited action; and He says [note His grammar] that this plus the command to love our neighbour is the [singular] great commandment (Mk. 12:31). And He again combines these two commandments in Lk. 10:27,37, saying that to love God with all our heart is parallel with loving our neighbour and showing mercy to him. He quoted two commandments as one, so deeply had He perceived that we can't claim to love God without loving our brother. How had He worked that out? Perhaps by daily reflecting upon what to many was merely a ritual saying of words. And we too read and have pass our lips, ideas which can work radical transformation in us if only we will put meaning into the words and reflect upon them. He speaks of giving His shalom [peace] to us, not as the [Jewish] world gives it; each time He called out shalom  across the street or to the guys at work each morning, He meant it. And He perceived that it would take His death on the cross to really achieve what He was giving to them in His words.  

This way He had of finding meaning in everyday experience is reflected in His parables, most of which have an element of unreality in them. By doing this, Jesus was telling stories which had the hearers feeling comfortable, because they were set in such well known homely contexts, but then He shows how in the midst of ordinary life, there is something arrestingly different. 

All this reflects how although the Lord was supremely 'separate' in the ways that true holiness require, yet He perceived spiritual prompts in the ordinary things of every day life. Recall how the disciples rebuked those who wanted to bring children to Jesus (Lk. 18:17). Yet He saw in them the qualities of those who would be in His Kingdom. Those kids weren't 'spiritual' in themselves. They were just Palestinian kids with well meaning mums. Yet, the Lord explained, that was no reason to disregard them. They should be seen as reminders of spiritual qualities which should be in us all. And this was how He perceived everything in His daily round of life. He raised everything to an altogether higher level. It was, for example, customary for Semitic peoples to greet each other [as it is today] with the words 'shalom!' or 'salaam!' ['peace']. But there was little real meaning in those words. The Lord said that His peace, His 'shalom', He gives to us, not as the [Jewish] world gave it. Likewise He told His disciples to say " Peace be to this house" (Lk. 10:5) when they entered a home. Yet this was the standard greeting. What He surely meant was that they were to say it with meaning.  

Jesus focused on the essential whilst still being human enough to be involved in the irrelevancies which cloud the lives of all other men. Just glancing through a few random chapters from the Gospels reveals this tremendous sense of focus which He had, and His refusal to be distracted by self-justification. In all of the following examples I suspect we would have become caught up with justifying ourselves and answering the distractions to the point that our initial aim was paralyzed.