When I was 5, if you asked me who Jesus was, I’d tell you that he was the spooky guy in two places in my great grandmother’s living room. On one side of the room was a painting of the last judgment, with people standing next to their 1938 Plymouth on top of Hoover Dam, watching all the dead bodies flying up out of the cemetery to meet Jesus up in the clouds. On the other side of the room was Jesus’ face in a weird concave piece of china or pottery or something; this Jesus had a face with eerie eyes that would follow you wherever you were.
When I was 5, that’s who Jesus was. When I was 5, God was a close personal friend of Pastor Todd at the Evangelical and Reformed Church, someone my Gramps and my Daddy would call upon in times of upset and disaster, like losing a fish or hammering a thumb, and the “great and good” guy we intoned at mealtime, and the one we asked our “soul to keep” at bedtime, even though I hadn’t a clue about what that meant and I had absolutely no desire “die before I wake.”
When I was 5, good little boys didn’t talk like Gramps and Daddy did when they lost a fish or hammered their hand. And when I was 5, the whole point of church seemed to be to learn how to live so that if I died (which I had no intention of doing) that God wouldn’t let me burn in hell, but would take me to heaven to live with him and the guy whose eyes wouldn’t stop watching me in my great-grandmother’s living room. When I was 5, Mrs. Kramer, my Sunday School teacher, said that the most important thing was “love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
When I was 19, if you asked me who Jesus was, I’d tell you that he lived a long time ago, and that he was like a cross between a medicine man and a flower child who did marvelous things that no one understood, who always made the people in authority uncomfortable, and who was killed by the people in authority just to keep his mouth shut and their thumb on the people. When I was 19, Jesus was the peacenik revolutionary who was misunderstood and oppressed and who did great things in spite of it, and who ended up getting killed for it, just like all the really good people, like Medgar Evers and Dr. King and RFK and all the rest.
When I was 19, that’s who Jesus was. When I was 19, God was remote, distant, OK but irrelevant, someone I more than occasionally enjoined like my Gramps and my father before me. A “watchmaker” God was the way Thomas Jefferson and John Locke talked about it, and, rational college man that I was, that seemed to be the only thing that held up under critical examination.
When I was 19, all people with lots of money were evil and all people who were poor were victims of oppression. And when I was 19, the whole point of church seemed to be to work for a day the oppressed got their chance to be in charge, and that the church was remarkably backwards in catching on to that. When I was 19, the most important thing, it seemed to me was to “love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Now nearly four decades since I was 19, if you ask me who Jesus is, I’ll tell you that Jesus is the model for faithful living, that his way of making himself available and his way of giving himself away is what John’s gospel means when it says that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life.” I’ll tell you that God is the creative, loving energy behind and in and beyond everything that is, that God is in the “seeking and finding” business, that God makes God known to us in so many ways, but mostly in glimpses—of a child whose life we can touch, of a person on the “edges” of life struggling with what comes next, of a celebration of new life and new hope, of a person who needs help. I’ll tell you that, while God doesn’t revel in some of the petty ways we hurt each other, God doesn’t give up on us, either, and I’ll tell you that if you want to know God, you ought to pay close attention to Jesus. I’ll tell you that that’s what I think it means to understand that Jesus lived and died so that we might have life. I’ll tell you that I don’t think it’s all as mystical and mysterious or as rigid and unyielding as some of us have been told. And I’ll tell you that I don’t think Jesus or God have any ego problems that need constant stroking by people purporting to be faithful, and that the biggest deal is not whether or not we make an intellectual and verbal declaration of how Jesus is our Lord and Savior and then go on and do any fool thing we want with our lives, but that we take Jesus seriously enough to live and love the way he showed us.
Because, you see, whether at 5, or 19, or 119, the heart of the whole matter is what Mrs. Kramer, my Sunday School teacher, said that Jesus said that the most important thing was “love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
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