I remember in the mid-nineties the short-lived fad of Magic Eye images - posters that presented a pseudo-3D image if you'd stare at it long enough in the right way. It was fascinating just watching people try to get the images to work. They'd stare and stare at this jumbled morass of pixels trying to bring the image into focus. When it happened, when someone "got" the image hidden in the picture, it was quite apparent. You'd watch the confusion and frustration transform into this sense of amusement and a slight puzzlement of why it was so difficult to see in the first place. It was as if they'd discovered oil in their backyard or at least a twenty hidden in a pocket of their newly washed jeans.

I think that if you're a Christian for any length of time and you're at all serious about the gospel stories, about what Jesus said and did in life as well as death, about the way in which he talked to people and loved them and honored them, then I think a time comes in your journey when you start to realize that you've been staring at the image for a long time but not quite seeing the picture. What I mean by this is that we come to Jesus with a perspective that we've inherited, particularly those of us in western Christian contexts, about who he was and what he was all about. And, sure, we think Jesus was radical and that he made the religious people very angry and, if we're feeling especially pious, we'll admit that yes, we too probably would have been somewhat irritated with him. After all, he did spend time with some unsavory characters and he made a big mess of all those nice tables in the temple, and nobody likes a grouch. And in the process we manage to read right past what Jesus was really all about and why the religious leaders really did have to kill him. I think we miss the reasons behind his death, and as a result, we allow something far more insidious to happen to him, participate in it enthusiastically in fact, something that is the worst fate that can befall a prophet.

Prophet I say, and mean in the Old Testament sense, for that is what he was. Today when we think of a prophet we either think of some neo-Pentecostal travelling preacher or some mangy-haired, wild-eyed, bug-eating freak of a man who speaks in riddles and occasionally drools. But to be a prophet is first and foremost to be a person of imagination. It means to be able to imagine past The Way Things Are to see, just a hint perhaps, of how they might be if only we were to follow God for just a bit. Imagination is a dangerous thing, perhaps the most dangerous thing of all to those whose positions, whose lives are built on the structures that are dependent on The Way Things Are. Brueggemann calls this the "royal consciousness," others refer to it as the establishment, The Man, or Microsoft, depending on your particular context. The problem with imagination is that it involves hope, and hope requires one to believe that things are not all fine at this present moment, which is exactly what one cannot believe and remain content with The Way Things Are.

So, if one wants to silence a prophet, how does one go about doing so? For a long time, it seemed that the prevailing method was to simply kill the imaginative one. The problem with this approach is that too often the ideas of the prophet didn't seem to stop with his or her death - they had a disconcerting way of continuing on. So the truly ingenious person who wanted to silence a prophet would not do so by killing him or her - rather, coopt the message. Make it work for you. Turn it into a brand, and sell it on every streetcorner. Prophets are silenced, not through death, but through assimilation.

And this is what we have managed to do with Jesus, I think. Jesus has ceased to be the prophet who calls us to imagine greatly with him what the Kingdom of God might look like if it were unleashed in our lives. Instead, we've fashioned a new Jesus™, one who just wants to live in our hearts and not in our neighborhoods, one who is content with being accepted instead of being followed. It's hard to tell, really, whether we've created Jesus™ in our image or recreated ourselves in his, or perhaps some bizarre mix of the two. But the reality is that the end of this path is a faith that cannot challenge us to sell all that we have and give to the poor, to love our enemies, or to take up our crosses (unless they are gold-plated and coordinate nicely with our watch). We cannot imagine past The Way Things Are; in fact, the dirty truth is that too often we are the ones whose lives depend on maintaining the status quo, the ones who need to have prophets silenced because of the nagging voice of hope that intrudes on our consciences.

But every now and again, someone gets it. Someone stares at the picture long enough to realize that there is something else lurking in the blurred pixels. You can see it in their eyes, in the slight tilting of the head, in the puzzlement that turns to amazement as the image begins to clear and something surprising emerges. And, if you're like me, you begin to wonder why you didn't see it there before...