At Best Buy yesterday, looking at the Nintendo Wii, one of the salespeople pointed out that in Wii Sports, one of the characters you can box against looks like Jesus. What do you think?
Many Christians, while they might disagree, can at least just barely tolerate the desire (expressed in a particular song) that someone might want to punch St. Paul in the head. But if one says the same thing about Jesus, that will be crossing a line. Yet one reason is presumably precisely a failure to embrace Jesus as fully human. In many people’s imagination, if one threw a punch, he would suddenly vanish and reappear three feet to the left, or become incorporeal, or blind his would-be sparring partner with a flash of blinding light.
I am not even slightly interested in punching Jesus. Or Paul, for that matter. But I think a similar attitude pertains for many people when it comes to the words and teaching ascribed to Jesus. One can disagree with Paul, but most people want to believe (as the same song says) that they are following Jesus and doing everything he said.
If you can’t or won’t go so far as to say you “disagree with Jesus”, is there anything about which you would acknowledge that you have a different point of view? I’ll leave open whether “Jesus” in this question is the Jesus of historical research, of the Gospels, of the creeds, or whatever. For me, there are plenty of things that could potentially be mentioned, but one that came up in my Sunday school last week may be the best example. In spite of having spent a significant amount of time in a Pentecostal church, and in spite of having at one point had a very Frank Peretti view of the world, I no longer am persuaded that personal supernatural beings like demons exist. A key event that persuaded me was when a colleague at Bible college, who thought he was under “demonic attack”, came to understand his experience in psychological terms and found help and healing. Jesus, on the other hand, almost certainly really believed that such beings existed.
This may turn into a discussion of angels and demons, and that’s OK. I know there are readers with experience of other cultures where such things are far more taken for granted, and I’d welcome their input. But I also invite other comments on the general theme of this post. What, if anything, do you disagree or have you ever disagreed with Jesus about?
Before concluding, let me make one final point. If one believes that Jesus was human and shared the worldview of his time, then it is simply impossible that anyone today will view the world precisely as Jesus did. And so it seems that in a very real sense, not disagreeing with Jesus is not an option, even for Christians. Following Jesus today cannot mean believing everything Jesus believed and doing everything he did or taught others to do. It can only mean finding core themes and emphases and finding ways of applying them and living them in our very different world.
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