TComposer Johannes Brahms had an inferiority complex, Tom Allan explained on CBC Radio one afternoon. Apparently Brahms idolized Beethoven. Beethoven set music on a new course; Brahms felt that his best efforts could never measure up to Beethoven’s standard.
Of course, Beethoven may have felt the same about Mozart, the genius who preceded him. And perhaps Mozart drew inspiration from Bach. And Bach -- who knows? Perhaps Vivaldi or Telemann. And they in turn looked back to Corelli or Buxtehude…
But none of them gave up composing music because they feared they couldn’t compare with their predecessors.
The same holds true in every human endeavour I can think of -- with one exception.
Einstein couldn’t have defined relativity without Newton. Who devised calculus to better apply Galileo’s observations of planetary orbits.
Among painters, Da Vinci set the stage for Rembrandt, Rembrandt for Van Gogh, Van Gogh for Monet and Picasso.
Stephen Hawking couldn’t do physics without the trailblazing of Richard Feynman, Neils Bohr, Max Planck, Ernest Rutherford, Marie Curie, and James Maxwell.
And every writer of English owes a debt to Shakespeare and Milton.
Every one of those people took what their predecessors had done, learned from it, and pushed on beyond that boundary.
But not in religion
The sole exception seems to be religion. Where, for some reason, it is considered heresy, blasphemy, sacrilege or worse to believe that Jesus -- or the Buddha, or Mohammed – is not the ultimate example.
Yet Jesus himself said – if I take the gospel of John at face value – that his followers would do even greater things than he had.
And in fact, they have.
At the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus declared his intentions: good news for the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed.
If that was his manifesto, he failed. Over three years of public ministry, he restored sight to a fortunate few, but he didn’t end blindness. He healed some people, but he didn’t get rid of sickness. Or poverty. There’s no record of him freeing prisoners – not even his friend and mentor, John the Baptist. And in the end, he increased the number of victims by one: himself.
Jesus proclaimed his message to a few thousand people, in a radius of perhaps 100 km. Billy Graham preached Christ’s message (as he understood it) to 210 million people, in 185 countries, over 58 years.
Jonas Salk’s vaccines have nearly eliminated polio. Only two countries still have any new cases – Pakistan and Afghanistan. Smallpox has been eradicated forever.
Corrective lenses and ophthalmic surgery have enabled millions to see.
Surgeon Paul Brand developed a technique to reduce the crippling effects of leprosy for thousands of sufferers in India. Leprosy, more properly called as Hansen’s Disease, constricts hands into useless claws. Brand gave his patients usable hands again.
After one of his lectures, a woman asked if he had witnessed any miracles.
“Every day,” Brand replied.
“No, I mean where God did the healing,” the questioner persisted.
“God works through my hands,” said Brand.
Given all this, why do Christian churches still talk about Jesus as if he were an unattainable ideal, an example mere humans cannot hope to emulate?
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Copyright © 2017 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved.
To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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YOUR TURN
Last week I lamented that my column about not believing in hell had generated very few letters. Sheila Carey pointed out that I had my columns mixed up – I had already printed seven letters about hell. “Maybe no one cares about Lent,” Sheila suggested.
I seem to have been in what a radio interview called “brain fog.”
About last week’s column, on whether snow can feel pain, Ted Spencer wrote, “Remember the pedantic twit? That’s me. Water can certainly die: a growing plant takes water and carbon dioxide, and makes all manner of sugars and starches and stuff your mother never explained to you, and the result is neither water nor carbon dioxide. They’re gone.
“Dissociate the water into gaseous hydrogen to run your city bus: the water no longer exists. It will exist again when it burns, but the mated-for-life hydrogen and oxygen aren’t. They’ve found new mates. Water going into a supernova is most unlikely to come out as water; there’s a pretty good chance that even the oxygen, after dissociation, won’t come out as oxygen either. The hydrogen’s good to go.”
Ted actually made a connection back to that “hell” column: “Heaven and Hell: H2O and CO2 intertwingle and make organic stuff. Organic stuff burns and makes H2O and CO2. Maybe hell is being fossil fuel. Maybe heaven is waking up after the in-cylinder big bang and finding that you’re water again.”
Laurna Tallman also took my musings and pushed them farther: “Your meditation on pain is incomplete in terms of our present knowledge of plants. Evidence exists that plant matter shrinks from cutting and pruning, responds to music with root growth, is enhanced by prayer, and can be destroyed by thought. Today, we test these interactions in scientific experiments, but humans have been observing such relationships for millennia. The fig tree ‘cursed’ by Jesus withered. Christians learned to pray for the harvest.
“As a gardener I learned to become sensitive not just to seasons but to times: when I could plant early and how long I might outstay the first frost for a bigger crop. The mechanization of agriculture has separated human attention from that level of discernment.
“I know much more about animals from having kept pets, including any stray in various country settings who showed up at the door. The common motif -- about a butterfly on the far side of the planet -- is more familiar to me as the cat meowing at me that I brushed aside impatiently who died on the road an hour later.
“Thanks for the reminder that we have so much yet to learn.”
Margaret Carr suggested, “Please go to Baxter Black on Google and scroll down to ‘A Vegetarian’s Nightmare.’ I think it ties into your column.”
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PSALM PARAPHRASES
March 25 is apparently the annual Feast of the Annunciation, a fixed date not tied to the moveable Lent/Easter cycle. That’s because it comes exactly nine months before the date traditionally assigned to the birth of Jesus, December 25. This year, Annunciation happens to fall on a Sunday, and the Vanderbilt Divinity School’s website on the Revised Common Lectionary recommends Psalm 40:5-10. It does seem like something Mary might have exulted, after being told she would bear the child of God.
5 The richest returns come from God.
You can't begin to count your blessings!
6 God does not want us to wear frowns or long faces;
God wants us to find childlike joy in shining drops of dew,
in whispering pine needles, in warm mud between the toes.
7, 8 Our delight becomes one with God's;
Our personalities blend.
9 So I will not keep silent;
I will proclaim my good news privately and publicly.
10 I cannot keep it to myself.
For paraphrases of most of the psalms used by the Revised Common Lectionary, you can order my book Everyday Psalms from Wood Lake Publishing, info@woodlake.com.
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YOU SCRATCH MY BACK…
• Ralph Milton most recent project, Sing Hallelujah -- the world’s first video hymnal -- consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at www.singhallelujah.ca
• Isabel Gibson's thoughtful and well-written blog, www.traditionaliconoclast.com
• Wayne Irwin's "Churchweb Canada," an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. <http://www.churchwebcanada.ca>
• Alva Wood's satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town are not particularly religious, but they are fun; write alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
• Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at twatson@sentex.net
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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My webpage is up and running again -- thanks to Wayne Irwin and ChurchWeb Canada. You can now access current columns and about five years of archives at http://quixotic.ca
I write a second column each Sunday called Sharp Edges, which tends to be somewhat more cutting about social and justice issues. To sign up for Sharp Edges, write to me directly, jimt@quixotic.ca, or send a note to sharpedges-subscribe@lists.quixotic.ca
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