I think this might be a draft or sketch for the huge painting above the altar in the Lutherkirche. Jesus is at the doorway of a second room. His teaching takes us up and beyond the bubble worlds we settle into — the TV politics-entertainment worlds that reinforce our thinking. This doorway is at the top of three steps. I'm reminded of the three steps the priest climbed at the start of the old Mass of my youth.
Psalm 122:1 (a Song of Ascent) says, "I was glad when they said to me, 'Let us go up to the house of the Lord.'"
Perhaps the artist is symbolizing the going up of a heart-mind to Christ's new teaching. The young woman right up front in the painting seems to be paying the greatest attention. I wouldn't be the first to suggest that women are more spiritually open than men. And of what does that Christ teaching consist?
The Rev. J.B. Philips wrote in his book, "Your God is Too Small" (1952)
"The truth taught by Jesus Christ is the right way to live. It is not primarily a religion, not even the best religion, but God Himself explaining in terms that we can readily grasp how life is meant to be lived."
Christ's "right way to live," is often difficult, requiring honesty and self-knowledge.
Barbara Brown Taylor is an Anglican priest who has referred to herself as a "Spiritual Contrarian" which means, "I say things you're not supposed to say."
Perhaps she had in mind those who want to reduce Christianity and the following of Christ's life-way to simply being "nice" — or however laudable — simply following the Stations of the Cross on the church wall and calling it a day. She writes:
"He did not need people to go to Jerusalem to die with him. He needed people to go back to where they came from and live the kind of lives he had risked his own life to show them: lives of resisting the powers of death, of standing up for the little and the least, of turning cheeks and washing feet, of praying for enemies and loving the unlovable. That would be plenty hard enough for most of them."
