Thinking With — Not About — Jesus
Monday’s Compass| The Dust of the Rabbi | May 18
For new readers: The Compass is a newsletter on spiritual formation, and “The Dust of the Rabbi“ is one of its recurring series. In the ancient world, a rabbi’s most devoted students followed so closely behind him that the dust of his walking settled on them. They wore it as a badge of belonging. This Monday series isn’t commentary on Jesus, or a system built from his teaching. It’s the practice of following closely enough to still be surprised by what we see.
Sometime ago I picked up a little book by one of my biblical theology professors: Let’s Start with Jesus: A New Way of Doing Theology1. I’ve written about that moment before here on Substack. It is 176 pages — small-ish by the standards of theological books written by theology professors. I admired the author as my professor. He was a rigorous thinker, committed to challenging his students to think deeply about their faith. I left his lectures intellectually stimulated and invigorated to learn more. His example of thinking honestly and openly about God, not being fearful of digging into any of the challenges and questions surrounding faith, intrigued me. I felt up for the challenging example he had set as professor/pastor of a group of theological students.
Discovering his book, written 20 years after those classes, confirmed something that had been growing in me since sitting in his classes. It is one thing to think about Jesus from a distance, even if you are committed to him. But it is entirely another thing to be invited into something so intimate and real that Jesus tells us, “Everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).
I’ve tried to imagine this: they first got to watch him think with God. They saw him go away from the crowds into silence and solitude on a hillside. They heard him say when he returned from those listening sessions, “The things I taught were not from myself. The Father who sent me told me what to say and what to teach” (John 12:49). He wasn’t performing theology. He was reporting a conversation.
And then, at what would be their last meal together, he told them, “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (verse 15). If there is a more explosive sentence in the Bible, I’m not sure what it might be.
The invitation is more than thinking rightly about God. In a world with ideas about God hardly worthy of his majesty, learning to think rightly about him is necessary work. But it is like the trailhead, the start of a long trek toward a promising destination. The deeper invitation, the one that has been pressing on me for years now, is to think with Jesus. About justice. About life. About truth. About me. About the things sitting in front of you this week that you don’t quite know what to do with.
So how does a person actually begin to do that?
I think it starts with recognizing what most of us were taught Bible reading was for. We were taught to mine it for doctrine, for principles, for ammunition in arguments we were already having. And there is a place for that. But there is something prior to all of it that we mostly missed. When you read the words of Jesus slowly, something else is available. Not just content. The tone of his speaking voice. The texture of how he thinks. The cadence of someone who is never in a hurry and never at a loss. He said his sheep know his voice, not his propositions, not his outline points. His voice. Scripture read slowly is how we learn to recognize it.
This is why the old practice of Lectio Divina was never really about speed or coverage. It was about acquaintance. You read a short passage not to finish it but to hear it. You linger where something tugs at you. You let a phrase sit in you the way you let a piece of music play again before you move on to something else. Over time, slowly, you begin to notice that you know something about how he thinks. The same way you know, after years with someone you love, how they would respond to something before they say a word.
Silence is part of this too, and it is the part most of us resist longest. We are so formed by the noise of culture, its pace, its anxieties, and its metrics for what matters, that we bring all of that into our reading and our praying and wonder why it feels like talking to ourselves. This is why multiple thinkers about the deeper life report to us who live in the virus of noise and hurry that there is no more important practice than silence. As daunting as this can seem at first, the great news is that silence is not emptiness. It is the practice of refusing to let culture be the loudest voice in the room. It is how you begin to hear someone else.
And here is where it gets both simple and demanding. You start bringing things to him. Not just personal things, though those too. The news you read this morning. The conversation that left you unsettled. The cultural moment that everyone is shouting about. You bring it into his presence the way you would bring something to a friend whose judgment you trust more than your own, and you wait. You back away from the strong things you think and you find some space to wonder what he thinks. Slowly, you start to realize you are thinking it through with him. Sometimes, something almost magical happens: you reach an awareness that you are leaving with something that you didn’t start with. And you know that even though you appeared to be the only person in the room, the mutuality of thinking with Jesus was the source that sparked the newly arrived conclusion.
I’m speaking about this in glowing language. But in reality, this is harder than it sounds. We are all prone to using Jesus to confirm what we already think. Thinking with him requires a willingness to be surprised, even corrected.
This is what formation is actually for. Not to make us more articulate about Jesus, though that may come. Not to make us more confident in our positions, though clarity is a gift. Formation is the long process of becoming someone whose first instinct when something confusing or broken or unjust shows up in front of them is to think it through with him rather than reaching for the nearest cultural script.
That is what the next several weeks here are going to be about. Not a program. Not three steps to better spiritual health. Something older and more demanding: the slow practice of thinking with Jesus about your life, and learning to offer that same presence to the people around you.
It turns out the world is full of people waiting for someone to think with them rather than at them.
In His Grip,
— Gene
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