In 2014, I spent a week speaking in South Africa. Because my family joined me for the trip, I rented a car—a decision that caused us all a great amount of stress. South Africans drive on the left side of the road, and their cars are right-hand-drive. The adjustment proved to be more difficult than I expected. Sometimes my gaffes were harmless, like flipping the wiper stalk rather than the turn signal at almost every intersection. Others were more dangerous—like turning into oncoming traffic or navigating narrow roads with 100-foot drops into the Great White-infested South Atlantic. Unlike driving in the U.S., which for me is intuitive and usually uneventful, driving in South Africa required my full attention and triggered real anxiety.
My struggle to drive in South Africa illustrates how powerful and formative culture can be. Decades of driving in the U.S. created deep neural pathways in my brain and muscle memory that bypassed my conscious decision-making. My brain and body just assumed how to drive, and even as I worked to counter these intuitions, they kept coming back at surprising moments. Likewise, a lifetime immersed in American consumer culture, or within a particular tradition of the church, will deeply shape how we engage our faith, read Scripture, and understand God. Very often, the faith assumptions we carry are invisible to us until we are extracted from our culture and the "rules of the road" are changed.
For example, Mark Allen Powell in his book What Do They Hear?: Bridging the Gap Between Pulpit and Pew, shares an experiment he conducted with 100 American and 100 Russian students. After reading Jesus' parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15, the students were asked to retell the story with as much detail as they could remember. Only 6 American students recalled that after the son had spent all of his money "a severe famine struck that country" (Luke 15:14). However, 42 Russian students recalled the detail about the famine. Why the difference? The Russian students were mostly from St. Petersburg, where a 3-year famine during World War II caused nearly 700,000 people to die from starvation. The Americans, by contrast, were unfamiliar with famine and therefore more likely to miss the detail in Jesus' story.
Cultural and historic differences also fundamentally changed how the Russian and American students interpreted the parable. While American's saw the prodigal son's primary sin as wastefulness—he squandered his wealth on self-indulgent desires, the Russians identified the son's sin as self-sufficiency—he left his father's home believing he'd be fine on his own. Perhaps not surprisingly, the capitalist Americans emphasized the son's personal responsibility while the more socialist Russians emphasized the son's communal dependency. Both groups read the same story, and yet saw different details and made completely different applications. Why? For the same reason I flipped the wipers rather than the turn signal in South Africa—we are all so deeply shaped by our cultural assumptions that they operate without us even being aware of them. That is why, in the eternal wisdom of Master Yoda, "You must unlearn what you have learned."
The power of cultural formation, and the blind spot it creates in us, help us understand why Jesus' disciples were so slow to grasp his message. In Jesus' final conversation with them on the night of his arrest, he repeatedly and clearly identified himself as equal to God the Father. And yet, their questions revealed they still did not get it. "Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me?" Jesus said to them. "How can you say 'Show us the Father?' Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?" (John 14:9). Before we write off the disciples as irredeemably dense or sinfully stupid, we must remember their cultural conditioning.
These men were all steeped in Jewish monotheism. The oneness of God was central to their culture and often the most obvious demarcation between Jews and polytheistic gentiles. The disciples had no framework for conceiving of a trinitarian God that would allow them to easily grasp Jesus as equal to God, or accept God as becoming an incarnate man. With his words in John 14, Jesus wasn't just asking the apostles to drive on the opposite side of the road. He was calling them to drive in another dimension altogether. That's why we should forgive them for not making the switch quickly. And it's also why we should be grateful for the Holy Spirit. As Jesus said, the Spirit would help them (and us) recall and understand all that Jesus said. Like the disciples, we have our cultural blind spots, but the Spirit works to renew our minds, and to help us unlearn what we have learned so that we can more fully grasp the wisdom of the mysteries of God.
John 14:6-14 (NIV)
6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”
8 Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”
9 Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. 11 Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves. 12 Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. 13 And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.
Romans 12:1-2 (NIV)
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. 2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
From Ignatius of Antioch (c.107)
Father, make us more like Jesus. Help us to bear difficulty, pain, disappointment and sorrows, knowing that in your perfect working and design you can use such bitter experiences to shape our characters and make us more like our Lord. We look with hope for that day when we shall be wholly like Christ, because we shall see him as he is.
Amen.
