Essay
Creed
Joy
10 min read

Dreaming a world

When we dream a life, we dream a world. One of love, peace and joy. Such flourishing is a life led well, going well and feeling as it should.
Marketer stall traders and customers reach out arms and hands to exchange fruit and money above piles of produce.
'It is in the context of this whole world at peace that the true value of material goods becomes clear.'
Renate Vanaga on Unsplash.

Dreams are rarely modest. They don’t stay neatly in the compartments we make for them. Let’s say you have a dream job. Well, if you dream of working as an engineer or a baker or a teacher, you are also dreaming of clients, ingredients, or students and a school. Or maybe you have a dream home. Well, that home can’t exist in a vacuum. It requires a neighborhood, various political communities, a natural environment, and countless other people.

When we dream a life, we dream a world.

When Jesus preached, he announced a transformed world. When Christians dream a world, his is the world we ought to hope for. Jesus called it the “kingdom of God,” which is just to say, the world as God would have it be. That, however, only gets us so far. What kind of world would God want, after all?

Almost two-thousand years ago, some Christians in Rome were having trouble agreeing about this. Trying to help them out, Paul, the travelling preacher wrote them a letter. In it, he offered a “definition” of this ‘kingdom of God’. The Roman Christians were in danger, he thought of placing too much weight on a minor question about what food they should or should not eat. In response, Paul advises them to permit various different eating practices in their community: “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink,” he says, “but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

A life worth dreaming, Paul is saying, is not merely about the means of life— what keeps us alive – things like food, drink, money, safety, health, and the like. Flourishing includes these things, but it orients them toward life led well (righteousness), life going well (peace), and life feeling as it should (joy).

If we look at each of these three things in turn, we can glimpse a compelling vision of what it means to flourish and what kind of world we might dream of (and live towards) today.

Life Led Well: Righteousness

Righteousness, to be honest, is a strange word. It has a rather musty aroma to it: overly formal and more than a little out of date. These days, we hear it most often in the context of self-righteousness, which is decidedly not part of leading one’s life well.

So what on earth does Paul mean by it? Paul was writing in ancient Greek, and the word he uses could also be translated as “justice.” It’s an important word in the Jewish scriptures that Paul read. It means something like being in step with God’s law, which had been laid out in God’s agreement, or covenant with God’s people. This covenantal relationship is, according to Paul, the context in which our lives flourish. To lead our lives well is to act in line with the good intentions of this covenantal relationship. This is what “righteousness” means for Paul.

We might do all sort of impressive things, even things that look like moral heroism, but if we do them without love... they’re deeply flawed.

When Jesus was asked how to sum up the law that defines righteousness, he answered: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. So a “righteous” life is a life of love. Whatever we might do, Paul says, if we do it apart from love, it lacks value. We might be a religious virtuoso with all sorts of nifty spiritual gifts, but if we lack love, we are “nothing.” We might do all sorts of impressive things, even things that look like moral heroism, but if we do them without love, Paul insists, they’re deeply flawed.

Some of the most famous words ever written about love give us an idea of what love looks like in practice:

“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

This kind of love isn’t just any kind of love. It’s God’s kind of love. It’s the love that God has shown over and over again in faithful care for the world and in particular for God’s people. It’s the love, above all, that we see in the life of Jesus, who was willing to die for us as an expression of love.

God’s love is faithful even in the midst of the world’s brokenness. This fact offers a profound sense of assurance. God is for us. And “if God is for us,” Paul writes,

“who can be against us?” If God gave God’s own Son for us, what would God not give?

“Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

To be sure, the love of God does not guarantee that our lives will go well. Jesus faced misunderstanding and violent opposition. If we love like he did, we could face the same. In Jesus, the power and wisdom of God’s love looked like weakness and foolishness. Ours should too. In Jesus, the cost of love was death. We ought to be prepared for the same.

In a fully flourishing world, none of that would be the case. Love would not suffer but dance with joy. But our world is not yet fully flourishing. (Obviously.) Love, however, spans the gap between the world we have and the world we hope for because it’s how we should live on both sides of the divide. To love well is—always and everywhere—to lead one’s life well.

Life Going Well: Peace

Paul defines life going well as peace. Peace is primarily about right relationships, which are the most important of life’s circumstances. They’re the context in which the value of other circumstances (food, money, etc.) becomes clear. For Paul, life is going well when we live at peace with God, with one another, and with the whole creation.

The foundation of life going well is peace with God.  Against all the odds, God has made this peace for us, having “reconciled us to himself through Christ.” Ultimately, when Christ’s purpose is fully realized at the end of all things, the world will be filled with God’s presence and become the home of God, entirely at peace with its creator. This fundamental peace flows in and through all the relationships between creatures. We and the world come to be at home with one another when God is at home among us.

Captives should be set free. Needs should be met. Honor should be extended to those on the margins, in fact to everyone.

Paul thinks this kind of peace should start to show up here and now among those who have taken up Jesus’s way of life. In this community, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Unity in diversity and mutual belonging are foundational principles for the way of life Paul advocates. Captives should be set free. Needs should be met. Honor should be extended to those on the margins, in fact to everyone. This is how the Church is supposed to live. All too often, history shows us, it does not.

The good news is that Jesus’s peace is not trapped in or dependent on the church. Ultimately, it extends beyond the bounds of the human community entirely. Full human flourishing is bound together with the full flourishing of all humanity and the entirety of the creation.

It is in the context of this whole world at peace that the true value of material goods becomes clear. As part of a world loved by God and destined to be God’s home, the fruit of the creation and the products humans craft are valuable. And because they are valuable, it is important that they be equitably distributed. This is an essential component of true peace, one that is plainly lacking in our world today.

Because of the unjust distribution of material goods and the broken relationships it reveals, peace is not always possible, or even good. It would be wrong to live fully at peace with a wealth-obsessed vision of life or within an economic system where some starve while others waste nearly as much food as they consume. While we ought to pursue genuine peace, we ought to beware of false peace.

In this life, all is not at peace—and it will never be. Flourishing life in this world is lived for the sake of a peace that we will never find in its fullness this side of a renovation of creation that we cannot bring about for ourselves. Nevertheless, we should live as peacemakers. We should work to reconcile ruptured relationships among humans, between humans and God, and between humans and the rest of the natural world. We should also accept that we may be hated precisely because we are peacemakers. Sometimes leading our lives well results in our lives not going well.

Life Feeling as it Should: Joy

Paul offers us a vision of flourishing in which (1) a life led well is one of righteous love and (2) for life to go well is for there to be peace. How would it feel to live such a life? One word could never sum it up completely, but Paul’s best shorthand is joy.

Joy is an emotional response to something that we recognize as good. We don’t simply rejoice in the abstract; we rejoice over something that we take to be good. In the context of a fully flourishing life, joy is the “crown” of the good life: joy is the appropriate response of the righteous person in a world at peace.

Solidarity like this requires us to resist modern tendencies to weep over those who rejoice (Instagram’s FOMO) and rejoice over those who weep (Twitter’s schadenfreude). In a broken world like ours, not all joy is worthy of the name.

This world, however, is not at peace. Consequently, there is much over which we should not rejoice. Love must regulate what gives us joy: love, Paul writes, “does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.” Our emotional lives, Paul is saying, ought to be indexed to the truth of the world as it is. In short, it is more important to feel rightly than to feel good.

Another person’s suffering, for example, should elicit compassion, not joy. “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep,” Paul writes. Solidarity like this requires us to resist modern tendencies to weep over those who rejoice (Instagram’s FOMO) and rejoice over those who weep (Twitter’s schadenfreude). In a broken world like ours, not all joy is worthy of the name.

There is, however, an omnipresent cause for good joy, even in this life: God. Even when life’s circumstances are plainly not as they should be, there is still God, whose loving presence can and should be the cause of joy. That’s why Paul can command joy: “Rejoice in the Lord always.”

How does Paul expect us both to “rejoice always” and to “weep with those who weep”? Note that the command is to rejoice always, not to only rejoice. In this life our joy often must be mixed with sorrow. Rejoice in God, but lament over injustice. Rejoice in God, but weep with a neighbor in pain. Even our joy over genuinely good aspects of the world—the small joy of a sweet wild strawberry or the large joy of reconciling with a long-estranged friend—ought to be tinged with sorrow over the fact that this precious thread is not yet woven into a tapestry of fully flourishing life. In the world as we know it, joys are also always longings. They reach for a world in which they would extend into an unending web of joy. Our joys, Paul insists, ought to be as immodest as our dreams. They ought to reach for a whole world. 

To sum up: in this world, flourishing life is

  1. always and only a life of love,
  2. always but not only a life of joy
  3. neither always nor only a life at peace.

In the end, all three are woven together, but in this life, in which there are circumstances with which it would be wicked to be at peace and over which it would be evil to rejoice, love must come first.

When we dream a life, we dream a world. A world of love, peace, and joy, in harmony with one another. This is the world Jesus’s life summons into being. It lies beyond this immature and evil-stricken world. And yet it summons us. We hunger for it.

Paul affirms this hunger. It is a sign that we were indeed made for more than the lives we experience here and now. And yet it also points to the fact that some foretaste of that life can be discovered here. In little pockets of peace in communities marked by love, there are yet grounds for joy. Grounds that help us see every good thing around us as a gift from God.
 

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Interview
Art
Culture
S&U interviews
11 min read

How to look at our world: Aaron Rosen interview

In a visual culture how we gaze becomes more important.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Head and shoulders of a speaking man.
Aaron Rosen.
Lisa Helfert.

As a writer, curator, and non-profit leader, Aaron Rosen is respected internationally for his work in the public humanities, interfaith dialogue, and the visual arts.  With his book What Would Jesus See: Ways of Looking at a Disorienting World he brings a fresh lens to the Gospels, informed by his varied experiences, as well as his life as a practicing Jew married to an Episcopal priest.  

He began his career teaching at Yale, Oxford, and Columbia Universities, before becoming Senior Lecturer of Sacred Traditions and the Arts at Kings College London and Professor of Religion & Visual Culture and Director of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, DC.  Currently, as Executive Director of The Clemente Course in the Humanities, a national non-profit in the US, he is involved in delivering transformative, free college courses to low-income adults.   

Having particular expertise in art and religion, he has also curated dozens of exhibitions around the world, including an international Stations of the Cross initiative.  Together with his wife, Revd Dr Carolyn Rosen, he is founding director of the not-for-profit Parsonage Gallery in Maine which explores ecology and spirituality.  He is also arts editor for Image Journal and author or editor of a dozen books including Art and Religion in the 21st Century, Imagining Jewish Art, and Brushes with Faith. 

These varied and, in many cases, boundary-crossing experiences have led Aaron to a range of interesting perspectives on the question of Jesus as a visual thinker.  Interfaith dialogue features significantly in his experiences and has necessarily been part of his relationship with Carolyn.  He thinks the seeds of What Would Jesus See are found in aspects of the journey they have been on together:  

‘I always joke that when my wife married a Jew, she converted from Catholicism---just not to Judaism.   A bit more accurately, after we were married, Carolyn was received into the Church of England by an Anglican priest, Rev Edward Bailey, a sociologist who had presided over our interfaith wedding.  So interfaith dialogue was a part of our relationship, and Carolyn's spiritual journey, early on.  Once Carolyn became an Anglican/Episcopalian, the opportunity to become a priest opened up in a way that of course wouldn't be possible in Catholicism.  From the moment Carolyn could become a priest, in my mind she started to become one.   

I say in my perspective because there was still a whole period in which she had to prove herself to the church.  I never doubted she would make an amazing priest, but she had to overcome a lot of obstacles.  Perhaps the most egregious was when a priest assigned to guide her in the process told her that she doubted Carolyn's commitment to Christ--and especially mission--because she had married a Jew, and still not managed to convert him! The same priest came to our house to interview us together, and proceeded to tell me that she knew a lot about Jews, including how "they celebrate Passover every week."  Needless to say, this person was not exactly an expert in interreligious dialogue!  But Carolyn and I stuck it out together and she was able to move forward in the process.  In an unlikely turn of events, I found myself as a Jew advocating to Christians why my wife was the ideal ambassador for Jesus!  Telling this story, I think the seeds of the current book were sown then, even if I didn't realize it.’ 

‘I was at the art fairs in New York City this fall and people asked me about my latest book, some people were rather gobsmacked I'd written a book about Jesus!’ 

With What Would Jesus See, Aaron is participating in a long tradition of what Susannah Heschel has called ‘reversing the gaze’ i.e. Jews (including artists) looking at Jesus in order to provide an unexpected window on identity.  I asked him what he has gained personally from being part of this tradition and how he has been able to open up those insights more broadly: 

‘I do see myself within a surprisingly long tradition of Jews looking at Jesus, and often quite sympathetically.  Many people might expect that Jewish artists, writers, and theologians would simply reject Jesus since--whether he intended to or not, and indeed probably not--he led to the founding of Christianity.   But Jewish thinkers and creatives have actually been obsessed for centuries with exploring Jesus' identity as a Jew, often casting him as a sort of role model, whether ethically or creatively.  As a scholar of art and religion, I often return to the example of Marc Chagall, who felt deeply in the most traumatic points in his life that only Jesus could really understand or symbolize his anguish as a Jew and an artist; a feeling which gave birth to Chagall's masterpiece, The White Crucifixion.  When I set out to write this book, I wanted to introduce and participate within this tradition of imagining a Jewish Jesus.  And I wanted to do so in a way that could speak to Jewish and Christian audiences, but also those who stand outside of those traditions.’ 

He ends the book by saying that, in its writing, he had been surprised by the unpredictable and subversive nature of Jesus.  Interestingly, the book’s reception has also revealed ‘that Jesus is more subversive in some contexts than others’, as when ‘I was at the art fairs in New York City this fall and people asked me about my latest book, some people were rather gobsmacked I'd written a book about Jesus!’ 

As a result, he's not getting us to look at Jesus so much as to look with Jesus.  For today's generation of visual thinkers this is an approach that may resonate strongly. 

We discussed some of the underpinning approaches he has utilised in writing and structuring the book including ‘reception exegesis’ and ‘relating the given to the found’.  I asked what he meant by reception exegesis and how it impacts the way he explores the Gospels: 

‘I have always been fascinated by primary texts and images.  So, I have a sort of canonical impulse, you might say.  But one of the dynamics that interests me most about canonical materials is that they refuse to remain static and contained.  They imprint themselves constantly on new communities, and of course have their meanings changed dynamically in that process.  When it comes to the Gospels, I am interested not only in how these scriptural texts speak to us, but how they do so through the prism of reception.  For example, the great painter Caravaggio left such a powerful imprint on our imagination, it's hard to visualize the story of the calling of St Matthew without thinking of Caravaggio.  And then even Caravaggio's images have themselves been reinterpreted again and again, quite interestingly, for example, by contemporary artists from minority communities.  So, the process is never-ending and recursive.  I certainly don't offer a survey in my book--there are plenty of great commentaries that do--but my readings are informed by such histories of interpretation.  Recalling your earlier question, I am probably helped in this process by the interpretive freedom that comes from being a Jew.  I am far less burdened by policing 'original' or dogmatically correct meanings of the New Testament than some Christian writers.’  

Regarding relating the given to the found, he said he needed to give credit ‘to a dear friend and one of my favourite Christian theologians, Ben Quash, who wrote a book called Found Theology’. A key insight from this book is found where Quash writes, “In God, human beings are constantly invited to relate the given to the found”.  Quash then elaborates further: “The givens come alive only in this indefinitely extended series of encounters with new circumstances, and the Christian assumption ought to be that no newfound thing need be construed as a threat to what has been given, for we have to do with the same God both in the given and in the found."   

Aaron loves this insight ‘because it takes the ground away from the kind of conservative Christianity I often encountered growing up in America, which was animated by a fear of what was new, and the assumption that it was somehow anti-Christian’.  He says: ‘Ben invites us to look instead at how new realities can instead propel Christians back to earlier revelations.  I also think that Jesus himself was open to this process.  With a Christian theological lens, one might say he finds the very realities which he himself gave the world as its creator.  Now of course as a Jew I don't personally see Christ as that ultimate or first giver, so to speak, but I appreciate the beauty and productivity of this kind of Christian thinking.’ 

In the book, Aaron applies Jesus's unique ways of seeing the world to key challenges facing society today and, as he does so, utilises a fascinating breadth of examples drawn from his varied experience. These include art (such as the example of Chagall), current events (where he looks at transgender issues, among others), and popular culture (including #LogInYourEye).  His invitation to his readers is to use their own imaginations to explore with him how Jesus saw, what he saw, and why that is important for us today.  Among the aspects he examines are Jesus's eye for spectacle, his strategies for attentiveness, and his tools for discerning truth amid the flurry of false appearances.   

He argues that the way Jesus looks at people and the world is radically different because, “Few people in the history of the world have understood as clearly and intuitively as Jesus that the way we look at people is intimately entwined with how we treat them”.  He suggests that paying attention, discerning truth, and recognizing others summarize the vision of Jesus – “At the core of his short ministry was a recurring call to look at the world — and especially its most disadvantaged denizens — with new eyes”.  As a result, he's not getting us to look at Jesus so much as to look with Jesus.  For today's generation of visual thinkers this is an approach that may resonate strongly. 

 

There are some people and communities of course who are exemplifying admirable empathy.  But there are so many groups who simply cannot conceive of suffering except on their own 'side.' 

He summarises these aspects of the book as follows:  

‘In the book, I suggest that there are three main ways in which Jesus invites us to practice looking:  with attention, discernment, and recognition.  I certainly accept there might be other ways of approaching the topic, but to me these categories help capture the primary ways in which Jesus looks at his world and especially the people in it.  I'm probably not spoiling the plot if I say that Jesus certainly attends to every aspect of sight with a spiritual proclivity (does he do anything that isn't spiritually inclined?).’ 

In the chapter on ‘Paying Attention’ he notes Simone Weil’s suggestion that paying attention to the present moment - in ways similar to that of Jesus and the creative experience of artists and poets - equates to prayer.  He also notes in the book that “This emphasis on attentiveness, and its myriad challenges, runs through non-Western religions as well” as “Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism are replete with stories that affirm the importance of mindful contemplation”.  Since publishing the book, he has found himself continuing to reflect on some of the questions he raises, and that's been especially true of the chapter on paying attention: 

‘Recently, I've learned more about collectives and organizations specifically devoted to increasing and refining our dulled capacity for attention, like the Strother School of Radical Attention, whose faculty are especially attuned to the intersection between spirituality and creativity.  I've also witnessed the power of prayerful attention in my work leading The Clemente Course in the Humanities.  When I was sitting in on one of our courses in Harlem the other day, it struck me just how closely students listened to one another as they read their creative writing assignments.  Not just because they were being polite or wanted good grades.  They understood the spiritual importance of listening, and creating a space for their peers to reveal deeper truths.’   

At the heart of Jesus's ministry, Aaron suggests, is a call to look at our world--especially those who are most disadvantaged--with radical empathy.  He suggests that we are living in a time when our eyes have grown weary and unfocused, and, perhaps surprisingly, Jesus offers us the chance to see the world with renewed vision, focused particularly on those who need us most.  As a result, he asks us to imagine what Jesus would see if he looked at the world around us today.  

With that in mind, I asked why it is so essential in the exceptional times in which we live to highlight the way Jesus’s vision provides strategies for radical empathy: 

‘It's hard to see anything happening right now in the world and not think it would benefit from deeper more energetic empathy!  Right now, the world is riven by so many disturbing, tragic conflicts, but the one that seems to divide the most people and communities is the Israel-Hamas conflict.  There are some people and communities of course who are exemplifying admirable empathy.  But there are so many groups who simply cannot conceive of suffering except on their own 'side.'  Now I want to be very careful not to suggest that Jesus is somehow the answer to everything that ails society, especially in a complex conflict involving multiple religions and cultures.  But certainly some of his tactics, like taking time to pause, look, and deliberate, would be beneficial to all.’ 

 

Aaron Rosen, What Would Jesus See: Ways of Looking at a Disorienting World, Broadleaf Books, 2023.

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