The Jesus I Want To Know

We have a lot to overcome if we want to really think about the man. We know the ending of the story, and we are surrounded, haunted, by icons, carvings, paintings, stained glass windows, songs, movies, plays, theories, arguments, books,sermons, even rock operas, about Jesus. Most of this is about a divine Son of God.
When I was a very young child in the Baptist church I was taught some wonderfully simple and beautiful stories of Jesus. As I got a few years older as a child I was introduced to Jesus as a perfect, more than human Son of God. I really didn’t think of him any longer as a real man, and the only picture I had of him as vulnerable was in the manger. But even there he was always quiet, or always sleeping, never crying or pooping in his swaddling clothes. And of course I know why. We were supposed to know that he was different, not like any person who had ever been born before, or since. My point here is, as I said before, It’s hard to think of Jesus as fully human too.

One so-called Jesus historian, John Dominic Crossan, has helped me at least to feel okay about asking questions that I would maybe ask about a human in history, but not a Son of God. Questions like what was the social and political context of his life? What did living in Nazareth, under Roman occupation, and under Herod Antipas tell you about life? You wouldn’t ask this about God would you? God is the source of the context, not a figure woven into it. Or is He? If Jesus was God in the form of human being, then that means he hungered, thirsted, bled, cried, ate, got sick, defecated, perspired, slept, maybe snored, got angry, got scared, just like we do. In my earlier years I think I sensed that it wasn’t proper to think of Jesus in those ways. I know adults who still feel that way. They see him with reverence and as part of the Holy Trinity. He is too perfect, too divine to think of as a human being. But at least sometimes I like to think of him as human, because otherwise, in my mind, he’s the quintessential goody two shoes, the perfect child or student, who always made straight A’s and always knew what to do and say; walking around Jerusalem and Capernaum spouting platitudes; nothing like me. And if he was nothing like me, how could he really understand or teach me? But he was like me. So he knew, and still knows.

Another central question seems to be, what do we get from Jesus, not just what does he expect from us? He apparently taught in the form of parables, stories that were an old oral tradition in those days. In telling those stories, it wasn’t like a minister giving a homily or sermon, in a church with a congregation politely quiet and with no two way exchange. There would have been dialogue, questions, reactions, laughter, anger, people saying phrases in response like “That’s crazy!” or ‘Now, wait a moment. What do you mean by that?”, whispers like “You know, he’s right!” or “He’d better be careful what he’s saying. It’s really going to offend some powerful people, and then there will be hell to pay!”

That is why I prefer reading the Bible to seeing movies about the Bible. Movies about divine figures tend to make them one dimensional, greater than reality, super stars. I really don’t want my Jesus to be a super star. I want him to be enough like me that I am able to identify with his joy, his sorrow, his frustration, and his pain. This makes Jesus a fleshed out real being for me, not just a pretty Sunday School painting.

No. I don’t think Jesus was a real life human with the exception that he was the divine son of God, complete with special effects. I think he was a real life human who God chose to connect with my humanity like no other leader or prophet or teacher had ever been able to do. I think he made mistakes, I think he changed his mind, like the story of the Canaanite woman tells us, and I think he got really really terrified when he realized he was on the verge of being abandoned, arrested, beaten, tried and crucified for insurrection and blasphemy. I think he was a Jewish mystic who, because of his close relationship to God, could heal, transform, and bring people back to life who were thought to be dead. If that makes him the Son of God, then I’m okay with the term. And he didn’t do his teaching, healing, and debating in a church building with a cross on top of a steeple. He did these things in the countryside, people’s homes, on the dusty hot roads, near the shore of lakes, and on the sides of hills, and in hometown synagogues or the great Temple itself.

In other words, he lived his life, his mission, out there, in the real world, the ugly world, full of thieves and prostitutes and lepers, and homeless beggars, and crazy, screaming people, some of whom had no power in the culture and weren’t even Jews. He might as well have been in Harlem, or Watts, or Calcutta, or New Orleans, or Gastonia. But he was so close, so close, to his God, that he called him Papa (Abba). And he loved the Psalms and the laws of Moses so much, that he couldn’t help but confront the culture he lived in when he saw these laws twisted, watered down, broken, or ignored. He couldn’t ignore the sick, the dying, the marginalized, the ones cast out. He would rather be with them because he knew that’s where his Father’s justice and love would be. And he couldn’t resist being close to his Father. God and everything God loved, which was everything in the world, was irresistible to him. He saw the holes in life and he went around filling them, empty stomachs, empty hearts, empty souls. And he kept doing it until they started punching holes in him. They killed him, and put him in another hole. And he filled that one too. He filled it until it couldn’t hold him. It still can’t. He simply won’t die. And that’s the part of him that wasn’t like me. He did everything he did from pure, unadulterated love. And he wants to give that to me too. That’s the Jesus I want to be more like. That’s the Jesus I want to know more about. -RSP