My college-aged child has just had to write a paper for a class she is taking on the Bible. She is not going to a Christian institution. It is our local SUNY–very affordable, especially since she is living at home, and well-rated, apparently. She signed up for the class with some trepidation. The school is full of religious people, but on the whole, students and professors tread very cautiously around matters of faith. This is the first paper for the class, and, because she is a stubborn kind of person, she chose to write on the three verses somewhere in II Kings about the boys being torn asunder by two bears for mocking Elisha’s bald head. For days she has been trying to square the goodness of God–academically, of course–with human perversity, though who is being perverse, who is the victim, and what is even going on has been a tight knot to untangle.
I thought it was pretty funny that while she was doing that, over in the next room, the “He Gets Us” campaign struck again. I don’t have the wherewithal to go digging up the advertisement, played during the Super Bowl, because I only saw it at around 3 am when I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep from a nightmare. I’m sure a couple strikes of the keyboard will produce it if you are curious. Basically, there is some appropriate mood music and many AI generated tableaux of different people washing other people’s feet. A police officer, for example, is kneeling and pouring water over the feet of a young African American, a priest washing the feet of a gay man, a Karen is prostrate before a young woman outside a building emplazoned with “Family Planning Clinic” while the group of pro-lifers holding signs look elsewhere. At the end the screen goes dark and the words “Jesus Didn’t Teach Hate. He Washed Feet” appear in an excessively epic way, as if your mind will be blown because you had never thought of that before.
Matt, my dear husband almost immediately tweeted this:
He Gets Us: “Jesus doesn’t teach hate”
Jesus: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
Many people in the thread underneath his post seem, how shall I put it, overwrought. The problem, as always, turns on what a person thinks words like “love” and “hate” mean. If you think that love means never having to say you’re sorry, well, the Jesus you encounter in the Bible will appear hateful to you, because saying sorry not only for the wicked things you do, but the wicked person you are is the very bedrock of the Christian faith. Any Jesus that says you might be allowed to have your feet washed by him without having first to say you are very very sorry and don’t deserve to touch his feet let alone ever to be in his presence isn’t the real Jesus. The real Jesus, for the unrepentant sinner, is more like Elisha and the 42 hellions. As it says somewhere else, God will not be mocked, nor made into some cheap AI generated substitute.
Of course, the greater and more pressing thing to note is that some people are allowed to hate other people. “Love is Love” doesn’t mean the brotherhood of mankind. “Love is Love” means that people who believe in penal substitutionary atonement and things like that should kneel down and admit defeat because they are, in themselves, so hateful. It is the pure, hateful subversion of real love.
Also, I feel like it deserves to be said, we aren’t “the hands and feet of Jesus.” I know that Christians have a tradition of washing each other’s feet on Maundy Thursday, because our Lord Christ commanded us to love each other has he loved us. But that doesn’t turn any of us into Jesus. You can’t go around washing people’s feet and exepct them to understand the nature of Jesus’ sacrifice for sin by the pouring of water alone. You have to explain with words to someone what you’re doing and why. And that is because Jesus does “get us.” He understands whereof we are made, that we are poor, sinful, and wretched. That we were taken out of the dust, and that, because of sin, to the dust we shall return. But because he loved us–Oh how he loved us–he came to pay the penalty for that sin in his own blood, so that we might live forever. If you’re going to wash someone’s feet, it is hateful to do it if you don’t also explain to the person with dirty feet, and worse, a filthy soul, that he or she will be going down into Sheol unless his or her soul is washed by the blood of Jesus. The extent of his knowledge of the human person was so profound, he came in person to both show us and tell us what we were like.
It’s not complicated. But it takes a lot more courage than just firing off a lot of quick, heretical, AI generated advertisements. Have a nice day! And check out my substack.
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