The Interruptible God

One of the many remarkable things about Jesus of Nazareth is the abundant evidence that his life was shaped by spiritual disciplines. From childhood on, Jesus’ life was built around weekly observance of the sabbath and annual pilgrimages to the temple. The Gospels report that he would regularly rise before dawn to pray. Before his public ministry began he spent forty days in none other than solitude, silence and fasting.

Yet the same Gospels that report Jesus’ rhythm of spiritual disciplines also reveal a remarkable ability to improvise and change plans on the spur of the moment. Jesus would spot a tax collector in a tree and invite himself over to dinner, stop to listen to a blind beggar calling from the side of the road, and allow a perfume- and tears-laced interruption by a woman of ill repute during a formal dinner at the home of a Pharisee.

We might think that Jesus’ openness to interruptions and changes of plans was much like the impulsiveness of powerful people like Steve Jobs. And in one sense, it was—Jesus was never bound by the narrow expectations of others. But when we examine Jesus’ changes of plans more closely, we discover an unmistakable pattern: Jesus’ changes of plans almost always took him in the opposite direction of his own privilege. The purpose of every one of Jesus’ improvisations was the restoration of image bearing in places where it had been lost. He exercised his power to interrupt in others’ interests, never his own.

Perhaps the most remarkable story of Jesus’ interruptibility is narrated in the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Mark, as Jesus is on the way to the house of Jairus, a synagogue ruler whose twelve-year-old daughter is dying. Jairus has all the markers of power in his society—his gender, his position, a house full of servants—but has been brought low and powerless by the illness of his daughter and has come humbly to Jesus. A miracle in Jairus’s house would surely be an asset to Jesus’ Galilean ministry, and as they make their way there Jesus and Jairus are surrounded by the large crowd that could be expected to gather when a charismatic visitor and a local leader were in the same place, brought together by a crisis.

Yet the story is decisively, and from Jairus’s point of view it seems fatally, interrupted by another person whose description compresses nearly every marker of disempowerment: “A woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse” (Mark 5:25-26 niv). She is a woman; she is chronically ill with an illness that would leave her perpetually “unclean” and cut off from the community, while also preventing her from childbearing; she has suffered and lost everything. Jairus had approached Jesus and boldly (though humbly) fallen at his feet; she sneaks up from the back, not daring even to call his name. And while we know Jairus’s name, her name we do not know. All we know is that her faith draws “power” from Jesus, causing him to stop, search and listen to “the whole truth,” and at last send her off with the tender words, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering” (v. 34).

This daughter’s healing comes at a great cost for Jairus’s daughter. During what can only have been a long and patient conversation, “those from Jairus’s household” arrive to tell Jairus that the child has died. The interruption has saved one anonymous daughter, but seemingly has doomed another prominent one. But Jesus now presses on, ignoring the resigned fatalism of Jairus’s servants, and arrives at the house of the powerful man—only to close the doors so that no one but the parents and three disciples will see the ensuing miracle. The resurrection of Jairus’s daughter takes place out of sight, and the parents are enjoined to say nothing about it, so that the crowd outside might well suppose that she had merely recovered rather than been resurrected. The anonymous daughter is healed publicly; the prominent daughter is healed secretly.

No story shows more clearly Jesus’ utter disregard of human privilege—disregard, not antipathy or distaste. He is swayed neither by Jairus’s prominence nor by the woman’s poverty, but by the faith and desperate need of each one. Jesus is not a strategic political calculator, currying favor with the local leaders; nor is he a revolutionary, ostentatiously undercutting the powerful. He is a restorer of daughters, known and unknown, socially central and socially marginal. And while he is indifferent to human power, he is so exquisitely aware of his own power to restore health (which is simply another way to say flourishing image bearing) that the slightest faithful brush with his cloak brings him to a halt, not content to have power flow anonymously and disconnectedly, searching out relationship with the ones who seek him.

Over and over in the Gospels, Jesus interrupts his agenda for those who have nothing to offer him but need everything from him. And over and over, as behind the closed doors in Jairus’s house, he ensures that when his agenda is interrupted by someone who could benefit his cause, any potential accumulation of privilege is averted. When crowds gather in Peter’s hometown after the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, Jesus and the disciples sneak off before dawn; when the throngs who were miraculously fed seek to make him king by acclamation, he gets in a boat and crosses to the less receptive side of the lake. When the woman enters Simon’s house to break a jar of pure nard over his head, he interprets her lavish offering: “She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial” (Mark 14:8 niv). Jesus has no need to stockpile power or impulsively grasp at what he wants or needs; he knows as deeply as a human being can know that “the Father had given all things into his hands” ( John 13:3). Living in the reality of infinite abundance, he can steer his course ever more directly toward the abyss of powerlessness from which no one has ever returned, stopping only to restore the true image in anyone who asks.

This improvisational, interruptible life that was Jesus’ can be ours as well; it is, in fact, the surprising result of the spiritual disciplines. By gradually confronting and weaning us from our god playing and its associated undercurrent of scarcity—by making us into the kind of spiritually poor people who fall down at Jesus’ feet and reach for his cloak—the disciplines form us into the kind of people who interrupt our agenda for others rather than interrupting others for our agenda. They make us people who have a holy indifference to worldly power and a passionate commitment to using the power we have been given, which is everything we need and more, to restore the image of God in the world. So ultimately, the spiritual disciplines—the disciplines that lead us away from power into deserts both literal and spiritual, that are designed to tame whatever other kind of power we have acquired—actually have a great deal in common with the disciplines that lead to power. They are the path to flourishing, not just for us, not just for the “something special” that each of us secretly hopes for, but for a world groaning to be made new.