Jesus

Even though I am a Christian I haven’t always been sure what I think about Jesus or what he means to me or to the world. This may sound contradictory. Christians are followers of Jesus, right? Whatever that means.

Over the past number of years I have become confused by the “whatever that means.” There are so many interpretations of what it means to be a Christian. These can be a distraction from who Jesus was and what his coming meant and means. I look at them all and say, not this, not that, or I don’t know, and pretty soon I find myself saying well Jesus doesn’t really matter that much to me right now. The Holy Spirit, the Creator God, and the Christian community are much more important in my life these days.

I don’t disbelieve in Jesus. I have just become intellectually and spiritually lazy about the second person in the Trinity. I have set him aside for a long time without feeling I had to decide one way or another what I think about him or, more important, how I might need to adjust my life accordingly. Jesus has become background, not the focus of my conscious thought. Jesus is the assumption I share with other Christians. Jesus is our backstory. Jesus lived, died, and (perhaps? probably? does it matter?) rose again, but what matters now is what is happening now.

So it’s been a revelation to reread John Howard Yoder and discover that I do know what I think about Jesus after all, and that what I think about Jesus has been, all along, the foundation for how I want to live in the world.

This controversial, brilliant theologian evidently influenced my thinking about Jesus at a very early age because rereading The Politics of Jesus is like going home after being away for a very long time. It’s all familiar but the outlines are sharper, the emotional impact more intense.

I have a terrible memory. I am, in fact, a champion forgetter. I need to forget and rediscover important ideas periodically to freshen them up. And although I have heard echoes and variations of all this in countless sermons over the years, here are some words that rang clear and true as I read them:

“Jesus was, in his divinely mandated (i.e., promised, anointed, messianic) prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships.” p. 52

He was “announcing the imminent implementation of a new regime whose marks would be that the rich would give to the poor, the captives would be freed, and the hearers would have a new mentality if they believed this news.” p. 32

Jesus calls us to “an ethic marked by the cross, a cross identified as the punishment of a man who threatens society by creating a new kind of community leading a radically new kind of life.” p. 53

Whether I even remotely lead this radically new kind of life; contribute in any way to the new age, the new kingdom he proclaimed; or suffer the slightest inconvenience (let alone crucifixion) for doing so--this is the Jesus I follow.