The following will be included in the forthcoming book, Who is Jesus to You? from Quoir Publishing (2024)
Who is Jesus to me? I love the question, but it’s also unfair in so many ways. First off, whose Jesus are we even talking about? The real-world Jesus has proven rather difficult to pin down, though we assuredly know he walked this earth. Precisely who he was as an historical figure—let alone a theological one—is a different story. Bart Ehrman and other agnostic scholars may not think too highly of those who suggest Jesus-the-person never existed, but that doesn’t mean they are going to affirm all, or even any, of the theological statements made about him. Then there’s folks like Mark Driscoll, whose Jesus definitely fights in the UFC, carrying with him a perfect record, all by knockout. On the flipside, the Jesus of James Cone is first and foremost a liberator of the oppressed, not a Rambo-type alpha-douche with the commitment to make someone bleed. Alisa Childers would have you believe Jesus walked with John Calvin before cooperatively founding “historic Christianity” in the mid-1500s, while Richard Rohr’s Jesus is the splitting image of St. Francis of Assisi (give me the latter over the former any day!). The point being: there are as many Jesuses as there are Christian denominations, and many are on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to just about every issue under the sun.
As far as I understand things, I’m not sure the question “who is Jesus to you?” really matters—not to me or Jesus. I don’t say this to be inflammatory or incendiary, though I’ll admit the statement comes lathered in rhetoric. Because here’s the rub: the Jesus I read about in the four Gospels never gave two shits about what anyone thought of him; he cared about whether you cared enough to follow him.[1] He didn’t do this for his own ego, like some orange-tinged despotic wanna-be dictator today’s American rightwing Christians sycophantically follow. Jesus asked folks to follow him because he was convinced his blend of other-oriented love and passion for radical economic justice was the best way to live and move and have your being in this oftentimes fucked-up world. And while Jesus did this in his decidedly Jewish context, it was a forward-thinking interpretation of his faith, one that all of us should consider more closely, given how much love and justice are missing from today’s world.
Because if that is our working understanding of Jesus—as a mystical, love-drenched spiritual sherpa with a penchant for economically-motivated iconoclastic rabble rousing—then to me Jesus is a foundational figure that should be held in the highest regard. Don’t misinterpret me, though; I’m not saying we should idolize and worship the guy. Jesus never wanted to be deified anyway. In fact, when the crowds gathered around him, he often disappeared faster than a 111-year-old Hobbit pulling a birthday prank (if you don’t understand the reference, that’s on you).
Today, however, many Christians have channeled the inner Missy in all of us—flipping it and reversing it. They opt to worship the man rather than follow him. They sing their songs, hum their hymns, and aggravatingly clap on the ones and threes—white people, am I right?—but they don’t imitate him. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret: none of us do. Have y’all read your Bibles lately!? We aren’t blessing those who curse us, giving our jackets to thieves who steal our hoodies, nor are we selling all that we own to give the money to the poor. Hell, I own the publishing company whose name is on the back of this book, and we are making a profit off the fact that you have it in your hands. Those profits are, in part, going into my bank account so that I can do my best in providing for my family. And while there is nothing wrong with that, it is verifiably capitalistic. The problem? Jesus wasn’t a capitalist (sorry to break it to you, Dr. Peterson). I’ve described the earliest Christians as voluntaryist communists—meaning: they lived without self-ownership over any of their goods or services, sharing everything they had, and did so voluntarily, without coercion or influence from the State. None of us are doing that, and I really don’t blame anyone. Given my American lifestyle, I’d be a hypocrite if I did!
That doesn’t mean I am a staunch capitalist myself. As a longtime social worker, I believe we should have way more social safety nets; but the point in the illustration is that no one I know is following Jesus literally. Perhaps the fringe Christians who live in those weird intentional communities are closer in this regard, but I bet even those folks are missing the mark in some way (are most of them not creepy AF?).
Does that mean we write Jesus off as an impossible leader who had insufferable demands? I wouldn’t be so hasty. Just because idealism has its limitations doesn’t mean we abandon all hope in the message. We probably aren’t willing or able to donate everything we have, but we can certainly do more with our resources. If we vote, we can vote for candidates who care for the poor, not just those who play lip service to the cause. If we engage in the economy—and all of us do—we can choose to patronize companies and agencies who are forward-thinking in their approach to equity and equality. And we can assuredly be more humble, peaceful, empathetic, slow to anger, and compassionate in all our dealings, economic and otherwise. Any Christian who argues against this point needs to seriously rethink what they mean by “Christian” (sorry to judge, but I’m looking at you, Trumpers).
As for me, I no longer self-identify as a Christian. I like much of what Jesus taught (except for when he called that woman a “dog”). I think most of it applies today in some way. But I can’t say Jesus is the only way to God, or liberation, or societal justice, or peace. He certainly understood what that way was, however, and for that, I revere him bigly.
I admire all bodhisattvas, though.[2] Anyone who puts their own needs and desires behind the needs and desires of the less fortunate among them has my utmost respect. Jesus did this, just as all bodhisattvas do. But no bodhisattva would want to be worshipped. That would be absurd. The ego needs worship; the enlightened don’t.[3]
That’s the foundational problem with most people’s gods today—they need praise. Which means, most modern gods lack something. They are not unlike so many of the archaic gods throughout history—the gods who demand sacrifice, who demand servitude, who demand that we fall prostate and kiss the ground they metaphorically walk on. Not for nothing, but that’s how just about every Christian interprets the famous biblical phrase, “every knee should bend [ … ] and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”[4] It’s as if Jesus gets the fix he’s been jonesing for, which lead him to skull-crushing his now docile enemies into oblivion—the same way Joel smashes the heads of the infected from The Last of Us. And don’t get me wrong: Joel is a bad-ass, and TLOU is one of the greatest video games of all time. But Jesus is not Joel, no matter how much that would make Driscoll, Bickle, and Locke cream in their pants.
The Jesus I read about in the Gospels, and indeed from the apostle Paul, lifts people up when they bow their knees, inviting them into a new way of being. In the scriptures, everything gets flipped on its head. As Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew: “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”[5] Again, most of Christianity has spun this back to the “traditional” way—the way of the powers and principalities. The Jesus of Christianity too often basks in the glory of the praise heaped upon him, while the Jesus of history, so far as we’re able to tell, desired none of that. Perhaps that is why Christianity so often falls for the promise of shysters, hucksters, and grifters. Their Jesus looks just like the strongmen throughout history who know how to take others for every last penny they have. With promises of being made great again, they swoop in and undermine everything Jesus came to set right.
It really is a sight to behold, and just goes to show you that anything—literally, anything—can be molded, manipulated, and mangled into whatever a person wants. It reminds me of one of the fake advertisements we did for Apostates Anonymous—bendable, pliable Jesus. If you’re a gun-toting, closeted gay white nationalist, then why not have a savior to join you at the MAGA rallies? Hate for women to have the right to abortion? Then maybe your Jesus sits on the far-right Supreme Court alongside that beer-guzzling assclown Brett something or another. Or, perhaps even worse yet, maybe your Jesus looks like he’s coated in flaming-hot Cheeto dust, just like your modern messianic madman. When it comes to human ingenuity, the possibilities are endless.
But back to the real Jesus …
Though he is a bit of a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, there are a few things I’m confident of. First, Jesus wouldn’t be a big fan of gun-totin’. In fact, to those who like to open carry inside their favorite Starbucks, he may say, “those who live by the gun, die by the gun.”[6] Jesus also wouldn’t care if people are gay, straight, bi, poly, pan, trans, or any of the other letters people identify as. And if he did, maybe I’d show him Paul’s words: “There is no longer gay or straight; there is no longer cis or trans; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”[7] Okay, so maybe I altered Paul’s words to have them fit our modern context, but you get the point: it’s antithetical to the message of both Paul and Jesus to use any categories such as these to create dividing lines among humanity.
And yet, here we are …
Sometimes all I can do is throw my hands up. I mean, fuck it—maybe I am wrong about who Jesus is, and thus, Jesus can’t mean anything to me. Maybe Jesus is a Trump supporter. Maybe he backed the insurrection. Maybe he supports the billionaires who exploit our planet. Maybe he is a proponent of the patriarchy, and misogyny, and xenophobia. Maybe he grabs women by the pussy. Maybe he supports revenge tours. Maybe he despises the poor, and makes fun of them behind closed doors. But to tell you the truth, I can’t believe that. Somehow, millions and millions of Christians can, but I can’t. I’ve met people who are like this; I’ve known narcissists. And the guy I read about in the Bible I’ve had since I was an evangelical youth isn’t one of these. The fascistic-adjacent, white-nationalistic apologist is not to be found in either the red letters, or the black ones for that matter. Instead, I find a radically-subversive activist who denounced exploitive systems, condemned judgementalism that lead to oppression, and toppled top-down hierarchies, replacing these things with leadership “from below” (to use Martin Luther’s language). In other words, for the Jesus I read about, service replaces praise, humility supplants arrogance, and empathy and compassion unseat rigid doctrinal certitudes.
The irony in all this is that as I’ve distance myself from Christianity—and explicit mentions of Jesus in my daily life—I’ve become more enamored with the concepts the man himself talked about. My care for the disenfranchised, the poor, the suffering, and the marginalized, has only increased as my Christianese has decreased. It’s like those basic supply and demand graphs we learned about in Econ 101. As supply decreases, demand increases. Likewise, as my supply of Jesus has decreased, my demand to care for the things he cared for has increased. Call it stupid irony or call it intentional on God’s part, but whatever it is, I’m yet again reminded of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.
In this parable—and as I’ve pointed it out before in an article for Patheos[8]—Jesus doesn’t care if you know his name or not. In fact, the goats—those who are punished for their deeds—know his name, but are in the wrong because they know and do not do. On the other side, the sheep—those who are being rewarded for their actions—don’t even know the name of Jesus. And yet, they do good by him by aiding the hungry, the thirsty, the foreigners, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned.
In truth, I used to be terrified by this parable because at the end of it, the goats go to eternal hell (or so I was told). Now, I see it in an entirely different light. Parables are meant to shock the listener, not to be used as proof of where people go when they die.[9] There’s a warning here, but not something akin to burning alive for all eternity. But for sake of argument, if it is the latter, it’s the Christians who experience this—those who praise Jesus on Sunday morning, but don’t do anything he asked Sunday afternoon through Saturday night. In other words, if they want hell, they get to have it by their actions and deeds, not their words and beliefs.
But again, I don’t believe in all that fire and brimstone bullshit any longer. Both heaven and hell are experienced right now, and what happens when we die will work itself out in the end. I’m not certain of this, of course, but I am confident. God is good, and all will be well. We can thank Jesus for this, but we can also thank all the bodhisattvas who came before and have come after. Anyone who does good by their fellow human, without needing a quid pro quo at the end of it, is a saint in my book. Obviously, it’s not quite the book of life spoken about in Revelation, but for what it’s worth, it’s a good book.
So, as I close, allow me to reiterate that who Jesus is to me both doesn’t matter and matters greatly. As mimetic beings, we will imitate the models we look up to. So, if our Jesus is more like Rambo than Gandhi, we will end up caring more for bullets and bombs than feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. At the same time, however, while Jesus cares that you choose the latter over the former, he doesn’t need to be the reason you do this. But in doing it, whether you like it or not, you are choosing Jesus.
Cool, right?
As for me, I will continue to do what I can for the sake of my fellow human, and in the end, I think that will be more than enough for the one who came to serve humanity rather than be served by her. If I’m wrong, and Jesus is just like the Christians I’ve sucker-punched all throughout this essay say he is, then it would have been better for us to leave him on that old rugged cross. If that offends you, then be patient. Your Jesus will get me in the end, as mine forgives him for not knowing what he is doing.
[1] See the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats from Matthew 25.
[2] For a detailed description of a bodhisattva, see my essay “Following Jesus: The Way of the Bodhisattva,” in Sitting in the Shade of Another Tree.
[3] Ironically, a bodhisattva is typically thought of as one who puts aside their own enlightenment for the sake of others. However, I believe that in doing so, they in fact become enlightened.
[4] Philippians 2:10–11.
[5] Matthew 20:28.
[6] See Matthew 26:52.
[7] Galatians 3:28, remixed.
[8] See “If Anyone Goes To Hell, It’s the Christians,” located at: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/allsetfree/2018/05/if-anyone-goes-to-hell-its-the-christians/.
[9] Shout-out to fellow co-host Dr. Katy Valentine for teaching me this.
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