The Imagination of Jesus

This morning, I stumbled across an interview with Barbara Brown Taylor.  It ran in Issue 97 of Image, which appeared in Summer of 2018.  In some ways, it didn't tell me much that I didn't already know about Taylor's life and her views on the larger world.  But then I got to the end, which blew me away.  I'm putting a paragraph break that didn't exist in the original:

"In my view, Jesus changed lives because he was able to change the way people imagined their lives. He dared them to imagine the stranger as neighbor, the child as teacher, the enemy as mirror, the deity as loving father. He helped them imagine lepers, women, and Roman centurions as exemplars of faith. He asked them to imagine that the most important person at the table was the waiter, and that the end of the line was the place to be. At the moment I cannot think of a single story he told that was not intended to change the way his listeners imagined the world. 

I believe the arts can do the same thing. They can break my heart, rekindle my courage, wreck my prejudice, give me second sight. If they can do it better than most sermons can, then that’s because they give themselves to me unconditionally. They give me the best they’ve got and then they trust me to know what to do with it. If you think about it, that amounts to having huge faith in the power of the human imagination. Of course this artistic channel is also unregulated, and that scares some Christians I know. They worry that the human imagination will cook up something evil or unorthodox, transmitting it in ways that are difficult to police. One of the great things about Image is that it provides readers with a safe-enough meeting place for faith and the arts. If it were entirely safe, it wouldn’t be a powerful place, but since it’s willing to take risks, it is."