“Back
where I come from. . . .”
We’ve
all heard the phrase. We’ve probably even used it. It is a cultural meme that
introduces controversy. The words imply that the speaker is about to question
the prevailing patterns of behavior by setting them against an outside
standard.
Southerners
use it on yankees who fail to offer a woman a seat on the subway. Yankees use
it on southerners who end sentences in prepositions.
Rednecks
use it on city-slickers who think verbal badinage won’t result in a
butt-kicking. City-slickers use it on rednecks whose fingernails aren’t clean.
Anglos
use it on Hispanics who don’t respect their privacy. Hispanics use it on Anglos
who don’t understand community.
And
Jesus uses it on Pilate, who doesn’t understand. . .well, hardly anything.
“My
kingdom is not of this world.” All the standard translations render it so,
understanding Jesus to say that his reign takes place elsewhere – in Heaven,
maybe, or Oz or Narnia. But the
preposition is tricky and can show origin as well as nature. “My kingship does not derive its
authority from this world's order of things,” reads the Complete Jewish Bible.
And Jesus proves his claim by the fact that he told his troops to stand down:
No good using a hammer to write a symphony; no good using a sword to bring in a
kingdom that holds no territory.
“Back
where I come from,” Jesus smiles slyly at Pilate, “we don’t win wars that way.”
But Pilate misses the smile, because they’d busted Jesus’ mouth up until the
swelling hid his teeth.
And
this world continues to miss the Lord’s subtle grin because our trusty weapons
have marred his countenance. We have bruised him in the person of the poor or
the other or the enemy and vandalized our only hope of seeing the truth. We
relegate the Kingdom of Heaven to the ether, and fail to realize that it is, in
fact, the Kingdom FROM Heaven: not something we go to but something that comes
to us.
“Back
where I come from,” Jesus lisps through a split lip and two missing teeth, “we
love our enemies. Back where I come from, we turn the other cheek, and then the
other, until we whiplash ourselves into genuine forgiveness. Back where I come
from, those who die on crosses, not those who crucify others, are the winners.”
And he leaves unspoken the obvious conclusion: “And the Kingdom of Back Where I
Come From is coming here.”
And
That’s the Truth,
Doug
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