Tender Mercies: Jesus a Protestant? – by Ruth A. Tucker
Bless the Lord who crowns you with tender mercies (Psalm 103, NKJV).
Is Jesus a Protestant? I smile at the question. Yet as a child I certainly assumed that if Jesus came back, he would feel right at home in the little country church my family attended. We were unsophisticated—so poor our preachers had to moonlight with full-time jobs. Like Jesus, we lived out our religion through the seasons, not according to a liturgical year, whatever that was.
We sang the songs that Jesus knew. Savior like a Shepherd Lead Us and Pass Me not O gentle Savior, Hear my Humble Cry. He was in the garden while the dew is still on the roses. And he walked and talked with us in places just like those in Palestine.
Jesus would have been at home in our humble farmhouses and would have understood planting and harvesting. This Jesus I came to know as a child still lingers in my subconscious. He’s walking the dusty roads, sometimes along the Yellow River where he stops to watch a baptism or talk to someone fishing over the bridge. He fits right in with my family on a sunny Sunday afternoon, picnic basket and tablecloth spread on the grass along the banks of Oak Lake. He watches with pleasure as the five of us kids tiptoe into the chilly water to swim.
The Jesus and geography I knew as a child is in many ways the same Jesus and geography that Wendell Berry so powerfully portrays in his fiction. Berry’s novels are set in a simpler time in rural Henry County Kentucky. Though the terrain is very different from that of Palestine, Jesus would be very much at home as he would be in rural northern Wisconsin in the 1950s.
And, yes, Jesus is a Protestant. We know that from Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. Jayber is a small-town barber and part-time church janitor, a job that requires him to be present on Sunday mornings: “I still walk up on Fridays to clean, as I have always done, and on Sunday mornings I go up to ring the bell and sit through the service.”
The church like all little churches of that era is denominationally affiliated and affirms correct doctrines. Jayber sits in the back row. He’s there but he’s not an insider. He’s not a member. It was the same with my own family. We attended regularly but never joined up, never got baptized, never signed a doctrinal statement. Jayber speaks our own words as an outsider:
I am not sectarian or evangelical. I don’t want to argue with anybody about religion. I wouldn’t want to argue about it even if I thought it was arguable, or even if I could win. I’m a literal reader of the Scriptures, and so I see the difficulties. And yet every Sunday morning I walk up there, over a cobble of quibbles. I am, I suppose, a difficult man. I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant the man at the end of the Protestant road.
And here we learn from Jayber that Jesus was an ultimate Protestant too. “Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans.”
Jesus outside the temples, inside the houses of sinners and publicans, bringing with him no organized religion, no creeds and confessions, no doctrinal statements or covenants to sign. Bringing with him tender mercies.
Excerpted from Ruth Tucker’s new book, Tender Mercies: 52 Weekly Meditations, available at our book page, www.ptm.org/books.
Plain Truth Ministries | Box 300 | Pasadena, CA 91129-0300
