Only Jesus

I’ve only watched, as far as I can remember, two Super Bowls in my whole life. I did not watch the most recent one. But, because I found Facebook friends talking about it, I watched one of the advertisements that was aired along with the game this year: a Jeep ad featuring Bruce Springsteen. Because I am, just as I am for football, fairly oblivious to pop culture, I did not even know it was Springsteen in the ad until I read more about it later.

However, what prompted me to watch was a brief image from the 2 minute video that I found deeply offensive to me as a Christian. It was a chapel at the front of which was the silhouette of a  map of the United States overlaid with the stars and stripes of the American flag with a cross hung on top of it. While others found the ad’s call for the nation to come together “in the middle” appealing, I was repelled by the juxtaposition of the symbol of the Savior with the symbol of an earthly nation.

Our Gospel text for this Sunday is Mark 9:2-9. In it, Jesus is transfigured on a mountaintop and there meets Moses and Elijah while Peter, James and John look on. Peter’s somewhat reasonable response is to try and capture and prolong the moment by building three shelters, one for each of the august spiritual giants who stood before him. But then a cloud envelopes them, and a voice speaks of only one of the three, “This is my beloved Son, listen to him!” The transfiguration narrative concludes in verse 8, “Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.”

That text about Peter’s proposal and how it ended speaks to me of what it means to build tabernacles, shrines, or chapels in which something or someone is held up or portrayed in a seemingly equal role alongside Jesus. God tells us to listen to His beloved Son, and when the clouds are dispelled, only He is there for us. It’s a mistake to attempt to live or portray the situation otherwise.

Yes, there was overlap between the Law and the Prophets and the work that Jesus the Son of God came to do. That’s what the holy conversation between Jesus and His Jewish predecessors demonstrated. As a book by J. R. Briggs, The Sacred Overlap, points out, there are many ways in which God’s people live in overlapping spaces between what may be perceived as competing realms, grace and law, grace and truth, joy and suffering, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world. That’s a helpful reminder not to be fooled into the fallacy of false dichotomy, of either/or thinking which excludes and drives away the very people for whom Jesus came into the world.

Yet when the overlap becomes an overlay, so that two different realms, two different masters, as Jesus put it, become conflated and confused, then something is amiss. Our commitment to “only Jesus” is in danger. In chapter XXV of The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis has his senior devil encourage his junior to tempt his “client,” who has become a Christian, toward “Christianity And.” “You know–,” says Screwtape, “Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform.” The hope of the devils is that by allying faith in Jesus with some other cause or person–and giving the two equal importance–that faith will be watered down and eviscerated of any real power.

So I think of God the Father’s call to listen to His beloved Son, and the simple statement that when it came down to it the disciples were left with “only Jesus.” Then I think of all the ways I am tempted to water down my own faith by making secondary commitments and allegiances into primary ones, to make them equal to my commitment to Jesus. And I pray that I may learn to be content with “only Jesus.”