By Ajung Sojwal

As a migrant from an Eastern worldview to the West, I have had to confront some of the stark differences of people’s approach to Jesus’ life and work as portrayed in the gospels. It is only after being immersed in this highly individualistic and consumeristic culture of America that I began to feel this existential need to claim Jesus’ life and work in the context of his indisputable Eastern worldview. This has meant that I have had to unshackle Jesus from the “Western missionary” interpretation of Jesus that got peddled to “pagans” in foreign lands where my ancestors got “saved” overnight.

This Evangelical burden to save the world has become more and more problematic for me over the years and this is also where Jesus has become much more the teacher and less the Lord. Not that I don’t believe in Jesus as Lord, but the connotation of Jesus as Lord has been highjacked by nationalistic aspirations of the Christian right in this country making Jesus more of a bouncer guarding the halls of political interest groups. 

A teacher within an Eastern worldview, where Jesus must rightfully be located, is about transformation not information. An Eastern worldview sees discipleship as a life-long journey of being guided and shaped not by information gathering from the teacher but by practicing how the master/teacher lives, works and relates himself/herself to the world around. This is the reason why following Jesus can never be about doctrinal mastery but about a life-long process of learning to relate and to engage in the world as a child of God invited to love unconditionally and recklessly.

The entirety of Jesus’ curriculum for me as his disciple has been to love God and to love neighbor; everything else is commentary. Embracing Jesus as teacher has led me to see that the Eternal Word of God incarnate in flesh and blood amongst us is really the commentary of an uncontainable divine love that begs constant exploration within human relationships. For instance, the abstract of “God is love” gets experienced and realized only in my ability to be present with the one who is in pain, in my care to listen to the other, in my willingness to forgive, in my courage to stay in the difficult conversations, in my decision to love even when betrayed and in my commitment to trust in the process of learning at the feet of Jesus to transform me, my relationships, and, someday, the world around. 

It is a wonderfully liberating thing to see myself as a disciple of the One who embodies God’s unfathomable love in whose company I begin to realize proficiency isn’t the point; rather, learning to practice that love, failing often, and, still finding the teacher with me working toward that love to inhabit me. 

Ajung Sojwal is the Priest-in-Charge of All Saint’s Episcopal Church, Palo Alto, CA. Ajung and her husband moved to the Bay Area after serving for many years in churches in the New York, Connecticut and New Jersey area. Ajung is passionate about conversing and learning to engage in community as the incarnational Body of Christ in a suffering world.