Close your eyes. Imagine Jesus.
Not the handsome Jesus of Hollywood, ivory icons, and stained-glass windows. Not the distant Christ who reigns above history. Not Trump and MAGA's Constantinian Lord.
Imagine Jesus riding with us in a jeepney: squeezed between workers rushing to a construction site, vendors carrying baskets to market, students counting coins for fare, farmers wondering if the harvest will be enough.
In Sunday's Gospel Reading, Jesus asks, "Who do people say I am?" The disciples answer: John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. They name people who spoke truth to power and carried the burdens of their communities. Prophets did not stand above the people. They stood among them.
Through the lens of jeepney hermeneutics, Jesus is not found in comfort but in companionship, in solidarity. Jesus rides where the poor ride; waits where the unemployed wait; listens where the forgotten speak.
Like Miriam, who sang liberation at the sea, and like the prophets of old who challenged kings, Jesus announces God's dream for a world where dignity is not a privilege of the few. His question is not only "Who do people say I am?" but also "Which Jesus are you following?"
The Jesus of privilege and entitlement who blesses the status quo? Or the Jesus who stands with the dispossessed, who calls the rich to sell everything they have and to give all the proceeds to the poor, who insists that love of God cannot be separated from justice for the oppressed?
If Jesus were riding our jeepneys today, would we recognize him? Or would we pass him by because he looks too ordinary, too poor, too political, too much like the people whose struggles we would rather not see?
Perhaps the first step of discipleship is to open our eyes and find the Prophet from Nazareth among the least of our siblings. Where he has always been. And where he is waiting for us to join him.
*Art, based on the work of Tom McElligott for the Episcopal Ad Project. Updated 2018 by Rev. Emmy Kegler
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