“We live in a world where nuance is in short supply” — Trevor Noah
I have this sort of pop out three-window area thing in my house that’s perfect for plants. So we have a bunch of plants, and last year I was so good at taking care of them. We had this one. I named it Jim. Something was wrong with him. He had this sort of white chalky stuff on his leaves, so I did some research and made this concoction and sprayed it and did surgery on it in the middle of my living room and prayed over it and loved him back to health.
I love the idea of plants in my house. There was a time last year when I told my husband I would be the plant caretaker. Then they started dying. Because I am horrible plant mom. I love the idea being a plant mom. But somehow I don’t love taking care of plants.
It’s like I literally want the forest but keep forgetting it’s made up of trees.
That’s the core of today’s episode about nuance. How details change the big picture.
I’m thinking of nuance as a skill. A practice. A spiritual posture, if you will. I want to propose the idea that Jesus, by embodying and fulfilling the Law of God — all that God required for mankind, is nuance.
But first we need to talk about what nuance is.
I love this definition of nuance. It actually came from Irma, my AI assistant. Nuance is love with depth perception.
But what if we started thinking about nuance as a skill?
What if we started looking to love people with depth perception?
I used to think I wanted to be in full time ministry in a church. I thought discipleship programs were my jam. I loved planning programs. I loved the fun of gatherings and being up front and teaching and leading and grouping people together. I was much more comfortable sitting in a cubicle planning ministry than I was being called to actually visit someone in a hospital who just lost a baby or who just found out they had cancer. To sit with them and listen to them and just be. Like Jesus.
I believe, however, I did more effective ministry with those few individuals I sat with in moments like that than I ever did planning big events or putting together programs from my cubicle. And please hear me when I say that I do believe real ministry does happen from cubicles in the planning for some people.
But for me, to say I loved ministry meant I had to love people. And I’m not sure I actually did.
There’s a nuance there. A big one. And it matters.
We can take take this to the Pharisees and the teachers of Law during the time Jesus was on earth, and I think it’s pretty easy to see. Those guys spent their whole lives dedicated not just to learning but to protecting the law. They memorized it; their lives literally revolved around it. They spent their whole lives protecting the Law of God. But most of them got lost in the weeds.
The Pharisees loved the idea of Law. They loved the structure and the clarity and the boundaries. They loved protecting it. But then somewhere along the way, they stopped seeing the people the Law was for. They lost the nuance - the trees - and started tying to guard the forest instead.
So then Jesus showed up. And He didn’t throw away the Law. He embodied it. He showed us what the Law looked like alive and relational and full of mercy. He became the Law fulfilled.
Jesus is nuance. He refuses to choose between truth and love. He holds both. He is both.
When Jesus healed on the Sabbath, He didn’t break the Law, He revealed the heart, the spirit of the Law. When He touched the leper to heal him, He didn’t ignore the Law about purity, He restored a person and revealed the heart of the Law — love! When He ate dinner and hung out with tax collectors and people our parents wouldn’t have wanted us hanging out with when we were in high school, He wasn’t making bad decisions, He was proclaiming the good news to the people who needed to hear it the most.
Everywhere Jesus went, He showed us what God had always been like: holy and compassionate, truthful and full of love.
He is the Law with a pulse. He is the Word of God inside skin.
And if that’s who Jesus is - then you and I are not too much or too complex. We aren’t wrong for having layers. You’re not too much for a God who literally sees every tree and still loves the whole forest.
Nuance is the difference between loving an idea and loving the people the idea was meant to serve. And that’s exactly where the Law went wrong in the hands of the Pharisees — and where Jesus steps in as its embodiment, its fulfillment, its nuance with skin on.
I don’t understand it fully. But I want to explore it. Because I think it goes deep. I think it’s who Jesus is. And it makes sense why so many of us have felt so wrong with faith that only made room for black-and -white answers. Because without nuance, you’re not allowed to feel hope while you feel afraid. When faith is made black-and-white, you’re not allowed to grieve and be grateful at the same time. There’s no room for “too much” without nuance.
But Jesus lives the nuance. He is love with skin on, all bendy.
And this is where the Pharisees come back into the story for me. Because they loved the idea of the Law. The structure, and the clarity and the boundaries. They protected it with all they were. But somewhere along the way, they stopped seeing the people the Law was meant to serve. For the Pharisees, there was no nuance because they didn’t have the Spirit of Jesus to color it.
And that’s why this matters. Because without Jesus the Law of God and all His ways are just things He says to do. And ways He says to live. Just flat pieces of paper or whatever.
But Jesus is the actual life.
Without Him, the Bible is just a bunch of words and church is just a place to go.
And that’s why this matters right now.
Because I think somewhere along the way evangelical church and the tenets that formed its traditions lost the nuance of the body of Christ. Church is not just a place to go. The Church of God is actually the Body of Jesus Christ. In this conversation about nuance, then, the church itself is full of all the texture and color of all the nuance that is Jesus.
But somewhere between fighting culture wars and learning to wield our Bibles as the Sword of the Spirit we lost the nuance and forgot to let Jesus bring the life. I think somehow we let the large idea of church and Christianity get so general and big that we forgot it’s actually the nuanced that makes the church the actual Church. And maybe this is why we don’t know how to disagree with each other anymore about stuff like politics. Because there’s no bend, just rules.
And I think that’s why nuance is sort of a skill to be practiced. Or maybe a discipline to practice. Because it’s awkward and undefined, really. I can’t spell out for you exactly what it looks like in each circumstance to follow His ways in every single situation. To delight in His ways at all times. To listen for His Spirit. And that’s the nuance.
I can tell you a couple of things I’m doing to practice, though.
I’ve started getting quiet in the morning. Sometimes that means not immediately grabbing my pen to write in my journal but instead just sitting there quietly and listening.
For this season during Lent I’m practicing not streaming TV shows at nighttime but instead reading.
Every morning, I ask God to search my heart.
What about you? What ways can you think of to practice building a discipline of nuance?
I would love to hear them!
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