On the impossibility of a domesticated Jesus

Five years or so ago, I posted a brief comment on a piece of Fr. Andrew Greeley’s in the Chicago Sun-Times titled “There’s no solving mystery of Christ”; the original is no longer available on the Sun-Times website, but fortunately, it can still be found here.  I say “fortunately” because, while there is much on which I do not agree with Fr. Greeley, in this piece he did an excellent job of capturing something profoundly important:

Much of the history of Christianity has been devoted to domesticating Jesus—to reducing that elusive, enigmatic, paradoxical person to dimensions we can comprehend, understand and convert to our own purposes. So far it hasn’t worked. . . .

None of it works because once you domesticate Jesus he isn’t there any more. The domestic Jesus may be an interesting fellow, a good friend, a loyal companion, a helpful business associate, a guarantor of the justice of your wars. But one thing he is certainly not: the Jesus of the New Testament. Once Jesus comforts your agenda, he’s not Jesus anymore. Consider Bush’s “political philosopher.” His principal statement on that subject is, “Render to Caesar things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s”—a phrase that preachers for a couple of millennia have delivered with tones of triumph in their voice. Jesus had neatly dispatched his adversaries.

The preachers don’t explain what that ingenious phrase means in politics. . . . Where does one find the boundary between Caesar and God? Jesus didn’t say, and he still doesn’t. He won the argument, indeed deftly, but he leaves to his followers the challenge of how his dictum should be applied in practice. No easy task.

Or his challenge, “Let the one without sin throw the first stone.” Does that mean we don’t denounce any sins? Or that we should take a good long look at our conscience before we take up the stones? Or that if we are confident of our own sinlessness, we can start throwing the stones?

Jesus did not issue any detailed instructions, save perhaps “by this all shall know that you are my disciples, that you have love for one another.” And that really isn’t detailed at all. Nor is the instruction that you should love your neighbor as yourself. All of these sayings seem vague, slippery, disturbing, dangerous. Jesus is as obscure now as he was in his own time: as troublesome, as much a threat to the public order. . . .

One is tempted to demand of Jesus: “Who do you think you are to challenge us with your paradoxes, to trouble us with your weird stories, to warn us that you are not a reassuring traveling companion, but a messenger from a God who is even more paradoxical, even more difficult to figure out, even more challenging.”

If Jesus makes you feel comfortable with your agenda, then he’s not Jesus.

Or as I’ve been told St. Augustine wrote, “If you think you understand the nature of God, that which you think you know is not God.”  What we can truly know about God is limited to what God has revealed to us about himself; unfortunately, we’re always trying to go beyond that, sometimes out of an honest desire to understand, and sometimes out of a desire to make God be what we want him to be—which is the essence of idolatry.  Jesus doesn’t accept that; he will not be tamed, or made to conform to our desires.

This is not to say that everything we know about Jesus is wrong, or that it’s impossible for us to know or speak truth about God, because those statements are clearly not true.  It is, however, to say that if we think we hear Jesus saying what we want him to hear, we need to stop and consider the possibility that we’re really only hearing our own wishful thinking, and then go back and take a long second look.  If we believe in a Jesus who only challenges those who disagree with us, who only makes our opponents uncomfortable, then we’ve gotten him wrong.  In the Gospels, many people received comfort from Jesus, but no one was ever trulycomfortable with him; the closer his friends got to him, it seems, the more he confounded them.

The basic principle here is that we’re all sinners, we all have sin in our hearts, and therefore Jesus confronts all of us with our sinfulness and calls us to change.  He calls all of us to give up things that we deeply do not want to give up, to set aside our own desires and goals and plans so that he can give us his own, to make changes that we’d rather not make; he loves all of us just the way we are, but he doesn’t affirm any of us just the way we are—he loves us too much for that.  As such, whenever we hear the challenge of God, we need to look first to our own hearts, without exception, to see how his challenge is for us before we ever think to apply it to anyone else.

Jesus didn’t come to confirm us in our agendas and tell us we’re doing just fine as we are; he came to upskittle our agendas entirely and call us to a radical new way of living.  As Fr. Greeley says, “If Jesus makes you feel comfortable with your agenda”—whether that agenda be political, personal, professional, or what have you—”then he’s not Jesus.”  After all, if you’re the one setting the agenda, then you’re setting the course and expecting others to follow you, and Jesus never offered to follow us; instead, consistently, he said, “Follow me.”

As a final note, I would be remiss to post on this without noting that my friend Jared Wilson (of The Thinklings and The Gospel-Driven Church) has a book coming out next month addressing this same concern, titled Your Jesus Is Too Safe:  Outgrowing a Drive-Thru, Feel-Good Savior.  I’m looking forward to reading it.