To the Editor:
I believe that the ongoing conversation about Noah Riner's convocation speech is a good thing. Our community needs to talk more about the issues he raised both deliberately and inadvertently.
I would like, however, to push the conversation in a new direction by observing that in his address Noah invited us to do two things that appear to me very difficult to reconcile.
First he recommended that we imitate Jesus, especially his character. Second he invited us to turn to Jesus as a savior, to pray that he would redeem us from our sins. These are two very different injunctions and I would argue that trying to do both things will involve many contradictions.
Imitating Jesus might mean more than rebuking hypocrites, attending to the poor and infirm and preaching purity of life. It might also mean worshiping God the way he did, praying as he did and studying Holy Scripture as he did.
We learn from the gospels that Jesus studied Torah in the synagogue (Luke 2:41-43). He read in Hebrew and Aramaic. Like most Jewish boys, he studied with a rabbi and learned to worship God in a synagogue and in his home; he may well have recited the shema -- Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God the Lord is one -- every day.
When he taught his followers to pray, he followed Jewish formulae; he even warned against praying "as the Gentiles do" (Matthew 6:7). And of course he never invoked the name of Christ or prayed in Jesus's name.
In short, Jesus worshiped the God of Israel as Jews of his day did. Were we to imitate Jesus's religious and spiritual life, we would not be worshiping and praying as Christians do today; we would be worshiping as Jews do.
And maybe that would be a good thing for Christians to do, to learn to worship as Jesus did. For that matter we should learn to worship as Muslims, Buddhists and Jains do, too. And vice versa. In a world where nothing is certain, one thing feels pretty certain to me: if we spent more time worshiping together with people whose beliefs differ from our own, it would be much harder to for us to condemn each other for misbelief or unwittingly to offend each other with our certitude.