Something New

It is very difficult to explain to anybody born after 1955 or so exactly what was so special about the Beatles. I know that a lot of younger people have listened to Beatles music and appreciate how good it is. I’ve heard young people say how Beatles music makes them feel good inside. Some young performers have even been strongly influenced by the music of the Beatles. And of course, it’s a little hard to explain exactly why everybody went nuts every time they performed. I’m sure you’ve all heard that the screams were so loud that the Beatles themselves could not hear what they were playing. These were the days before floor monitors. It really was impossible for any of them to step outside their houses. Fans were always camped out around their homes. That is why the four of them ended up living on huge estates out in the country. The reason it is so difficult to explain is that there has been no experience like that since.

You see, The Beatles were a totally different type of sound than anything anybody had heard. Moreover, they were a different type of band. They were a completely new experience. There was a Beatles sound, and it was a different sound. The Beatles changed the world of music, but they also changed the world of fashion, and of art. They changed the way people approach art. They just changed everything. They changed the way we looked at things. Sometimes, most times, when something completely new comes along, it forces you to stop and take notice.

Today, young people can appreciate the music of The Beatles, but they can’t appreciate the profound way they changed the world, because the world has already been changed. They were born, and grew up in a different world than the world into which I was born. When these young people came along, the changes were already made. Just as I grew up in a world that already had television. I can’t know what the world was like before TV. I can’t know what the world was like before the automobile and airplane. I take those things for granted. It must have been momentous for the people who lived in the early part of the twentieth century when those things were invented. It must have rocked their world.

And sometimes we don’t see the real importance of what Jesus taught and said, because we grew up in a world that already takes much of what he said and taught for granted. We don’t realize how revolutionary his words were. And sometimes we even miss the message of his words because we take parts of his teaching so for granted that we fail to notice the message for what it was, and we look for some different message in the words. And for this reason a lot of churches have misinterpreted the message contained in many of the stories Jesus told. Take for example, this story from the Gospel According to Luke.

Jesus is talking to a crowd of people. He is warning them about the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. The word Pharisee comes from the Hebrew, Parush, which means detached one. The Pharisees are the roots of contemporary Judaism. They are the beginnings of what would later be the Rabbinical Judaism as exemplified by the Talmud. The Pharisees were constantly trying to catch Jesus is some kind of blasphemy to justify arresting him. To that end, they were always asking him trick questions that would be difficult to answer without somehow saying the wrong thing. You know, “Is it not true you used to beat your wife?” sort of questions.

Jesus warned that the Pharisees kept to the laws of Moses, but failed to understand the commandments of God. While he is talking about the nature of the divine, some people try to get Jesus to condemn the Romans. This could have been the Zealots, revolutionaries who saw the potential Jesus had to stir up anger towards the Romans and incite revolution, or it could have been the Pharisees, who would have loved to hear Jesus speak out against Rome in order to use those words against him later.

The people tell Jesus how the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, had a certain group of people from Galilee killed and their blood offered with sacrificial blood and offered to the Roman gods. Rather than comment of the Romans, Jesus uses the report of this misfortune to attack traditional Jewish beliefs about God. He says, “And YOU think, because these Galileans suffered in this way that they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? By no means! I’m telling you all, you’re all going to die, just as they did. And those eighteen people who died when the tower at Siloam fell on them, do you think they were more guilty than the other people of Jerusalem? By no means! And I tell you, you will all die, just the same.”

And after this cheery news, Jesus goes on to tell one of his famous parables, “”There once was a person who had a fig tree planted in his orchard, and when he came in search of fruit on it but found none, he said to the gardener, ‘For three years now I have come in search of fruit on this fig tree but have found none. (So) cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?’ He said to him in reply, ‘Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not you can cut it down.’”

At the time, it was the belief in Jewish thought that God rewarded the righteous with wealth and good fortune, and that He punished the sinners with bad luck. So in traditional Jewish thought, those people killed by the Romans, or those people killed by that falling tower (there is no historical record of either of these two events) had suffered their fate because they were sinful in some way, and so were being punished by God.

Jesus is telling the people that if God were going to punish people based on their imperfections, then we’re all in a lot of trouble. Jesus reminds his followers that all of us are going to face death one day. His story of the fig tree is reminds them that even this barren tree is given further opportunity to give fruit. It is clear to Jesus that the very wicked seem to go about without any particular harm coming to them, and that good people often suffer. This is obvious to him, and it should be clear to everybody that this has nothing to do with the will of God. Things happen the way they happen. That’s all. Suffering is not the fault of those who suffer.

Now to us, this sort of goes without saying. We take this way of thinking for granted. But to the people in the ancient world, this was a radical thought. Both pagans and Jews believed that people suffered because they had made God, or the gods, angry in some way. This new way of thinking was an earth-shattering experience for them. It went against everything they had ever thought or believed. In other words, this idea rocked their world. And to many of them, at that moment, it opened their eyes. They suddenly saw that the rich and pious weren’t people to be admired. Those people weren’t the chosen ones of God. And then they listened as Jesus went on to teach that it was the people who served others, who showed mercy, who shared their wealth, that were the real chosen of God. He taught it was the poor and weak, the sorrowful, whom God loved, people like themselves. The people had once thought they were poor and downtrodden because they deserved to be. Now, they began to look at the world and their place in it in a different way.

Many Christian preachers will take this thirteenth chapter of Luke and use it to tell their flocks that it means to repent of their sins because one day they will die and then be judged. They take those comments by Jesus about the murdered Galileans and the people killed in the tower accident and use them to warn the congregation of the need to repent. They see the story of the fig tree as a reminder that they had better bear fruit before the owner decides to “cut them down”. But Jesus isn’t saying that at all. He’s saying that his listeners were no better than those people who were killed. God didn’t love those poor people any less. He’s not warning them that God is going to get them if they don’t repent, he’s reminding them we all eventually meet the same fate, regardless of whether we are sinners or saints. God doesn’t cut us down.

We fail to see how revolutionary were the words of Jesus because they don’t seem to us revolutionary any more. We’ve grown up in a world that more or less takes that attitude for granted. We can read the words of Jesus and appreciate them for what they are, but we don’t see them as the new, world changing message of love and redemption they were. And although we can never really know how shocking that message was, if we learn to see it in that light, we can appreciate the power behind it. And then the words of Jesus don’t sound so old and over spoken.

Sometimes there are songs that we’ve heard so many times, to which we’ve become so accustomed, that we no longer notice what good songs they are. “Over the Rainbow”, for example, I’ve heard so many times over the years, that it had become cliché. It wasn’t until after my friend Paul died (it was his favorite song), that I listened to it with new ears, and took notice of what a well-crafted song it is. No wonder it has lasted so long. And even thought the message of Christ is two thousand years old, and we’ve heard it over and over, it still resonates. And we still need to hear it. Bad things happen to everybody. God is not punishing us. And yet we still have people who think themselves somehow holier than others. We still have people, even people who claim to believe in Jesus, who tell us that God is punishing us with storms, or war, or disease. There are some who would tell us that God is punishing the homosexuals with AIDS. Bullshit!!! If God is punishing sinners, then we’re all in trouble, especially those who sit in judgment of others.

John Lennon was right. There was a time when The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. It was the truth, too, no matter how the world reacted to it. But that wasn’t the fault of The Beatles. It was the fault of organized Christianity for letting the teachings of Jesus become mundane. It was because people had forgotten just how revolutionary the message of Jesus was. It still is.