If you’re looking for holy scriptures that present a single, unadulterated, and righteous perspective, I’m afraid you’re going to have to look elsewhere than the Bible of Christians and Jews. But I’ve come to believe that these contradictions are not flaws. They are features. They are essential to how scripture goes to work on our common life over time.
When Christ promises that he comes to bring us life in abundance, that promise is not lopsided. He comes to open our eyes to the world and its deep need, to our neighbors and their pain, to the abundance of work that must be done for justice. And he comes to show us how to dance, how to look up and see the beauty of this amazing world, to remind us to gather with friends around a table and tell stories and laugh until we cry.
Jesus wants to become fully immersed in our lives. By waiting in line, he honors the norm of the community – the community in which he wants to be fully enmeshed. He wants to be an abiding presence and a change agent within us. He wants to be a companion, waiting in line with the rest of us.
From the beginning of Jesus’s story, it’s clear that, in spite of Israel’s hope for a messiah who would deliver them definitively from the circumstances of their lives, we see their savior and ours caught in the same world that they and we are caught in. Redemption, the story tells us from its onset, will not come by way of a conquering hero or by one who transcends the limits the rest of us live confined by. Redemption, whatever it is in this story, will come from within those confines.