It's (Not) All About Jesus

 

As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. Jesus did not let him, but said, “Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” Mark 5:18-19

 

One problem I have with Christmas is that to me, the Incarnation makes God seem more distant, rather than closer.  I have never thought of God as an old man in the sky watching us from a distance.  If God exists at all, then He is everywhere – around us, and within us.

We are often told that Jesus is the one who shows us what God is really like – that everything Jesus is, God is.  The trouble with this is that to me it implies that since Jesus, as a human being, was by definition limited – he couldn’t be everywhere at once, and couldn’t be as emotionally close to everyone he happened to meet during his time on Earth as he was to his close friends – then God is also limited.

If you look at it like this, the Incarnation replaces a God who is always with us because He is everywhere with a God who spend a few decades years living on Earth once, a couple of thousand years ago, and will come back one day to judge us.  It replaces a God who knows exactly how it feels like to be each of us because He is in us, sensing with us everything that we experience, with a God who knows some of what it is to be human because He has experience of living as one specific human.  Worst, it replaces a God who loves each of us as deeply as if we were the only one, because He is love and it would be a contradiction of His nature not to love everyone, with a God who had a group of a dozen close friends, and interacted briefly with plenty of other people for long enough to heal them but then told them to go away.

I used to wonder why Jesus, who told his disciples that they must ‘deny themselves’, still asked people what they wanted, and healed those who asked to be healed.  I noticed that most of the people whom he healed were not the same people whom he called to be his disciples, and I wondered whether asking people what they wanted was a test, in which anyone who was selfish enough to ask for healing was judged unfit to be a disciple. 

As my therapist pointed out to me, it couldn’t be precisely like that, because Mary Magdalene was both someone Jesus had healed and one of his disciples.  But all the same, there were plenty more people whom he healed and then didn’t allow to become his disciples – even if, like the demon-possessed man in Mark Chapter 5, they actually asked to be allowed to go with him.

Perhaps part of the problem is that there is a tendency for Christianity, particularly evangelical Christianity, to equate ‘disciple of Jesus’ with ‘Christian’.  Some tracts put it roughly like this: ‘Jesus’s disciples were ordinary, fallible people like you.  They got things wrong sometimes.  They got scared sometimes.  But nevertheless, they left their homes and families to travel around with Jesus.  They saw him face to face, listened to him and had conversations with him.  So what’s stopping you from doing the same thing, and having a personal relationship with Jesus in exactly the same way that his disciples did?  If they could do it, so can you!’  The obvious reason – that we don’t live in 1^st-century Judea – is conveniently ignored as irrelevant.

So it can look as though anyone who doesn’t have the sort of direct, face-to-face conversations with Jesus that his disciples did, and which very few people except a handful of mystics like Julian of Norwich can have had since the 1^st century, isn’t a real Christian.  If we’re not real Christians, perhaps we aren’t even saved from damnation (unless you take the Universalist view that Jesus, by atoning for us, has already saved everyone, regardless of whether they believe in him or not).

A book I have re-read recently, The Owl and the Stereo by David Osborne, offers a different way of looking at this.  Osborne compares Jesus’s healing miracles to the work of a psychotherapist who wants to help patients to be able to function not as a frightened and unhappy child tyrannised by abusive parents, but as a confident adult who can interact assertively with other adults on an equal basis.  Osborne emphasises that a key element of this style of therapy is to enable the patient to disengage with the therapist.  Therapy is not about encouraging the patient to become permanently dependent on the therapist, but enabling them to be someone who can build healthy friendships with those around them.

In the same way, Jesus, when he healed people, did not just cure them of a physical or mental illness.  In a society where, even if you didn’t have a mental illness that made you unable to bear the company of other people, having a physical imperfection (such as the woman with a haemorrhage whom we meet later in the same chapter) made you ritually unclean and an outcast, Jesus, by healing people, enabled them to be part of the society they lived in.

So this suggests that, despite the notorious line about turning brother against brother, Jesus was generally in favour of people loving each other.  After all, if he had really wanted to encourage siblings to hate each other, why would he have chosen so many groups of siblings to be among his closest friends: Simon and Andrew; James and John; Mary and Martha and Lazarus?  If he had wanted the siblings he chose as his disciples to hate each other, how does that fit with the passages in John’s gospel where he urges his disciples to love each other as he loves them, as God the Father loves him?

Strikingly, in that scene in John’s gospel, Jesus goes on to pray for not just his disciples, but for all of us who will come to believe in him because of the disciples’ teaching:

 

that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—  I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

 

Jesus did not come just to call a favoured few to personal friendship with him.  He also did not come just to restore the people he healed to the status quo of normal interaction with their family and friends.  Rather, he came to teach a group of people to live in fellowship with each other and with him, and then sent the Holy Spirit to enable them to carry on his work of building communities of people who love each other as God loves them.

A number of modern hymns, including ‘The Heart of Worship’ by Michael W. Smith, ‘Jesus, Lover Of My Soul’ by Paul Oakley, ‘All About You Jesus’ by  Ryan Williams and Wesley Schrock, and ‘All About You’ by Israel Houghton and Cindy Cruse Ratcliffe, state that everything is, well, all about Jesus.  Oakley’s lyrics expand on this:

 

It’s all about You, Jesus
And all this is for You
For Your glory and Your fame
It’s not about me
As if You should do things my way
You alone are God and I surrender
To Your ways

 

I don’t know how Jesus might respond to that; I am not a mystic who hears from him.  But perhaps he might say something like, ‘No.  It isn’t all about me; it’s about the Father, and about the Spirit, and about inviting you to be adopted as part of our family, to be to the Father exactly what I am: His child.  It isn’t not about you, just because I don’t have to do what you say.  I didn’t get crucified in order to be famous for rising from the dead.  I came because I loved you enough to want to save you.  How could there be a friendship between us which is only about me and not about you?’

Whereas modern hymns try to make everything about Jesus, older hymns frequently end with a verse praising the three persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  This often capped adaptations of the psalms, to remind the congregation that although this was originally a Jewish hymn, they were singing it as Trinitarian Christians rather than as Jews.  But it comes up in all sorts of other contexts, for example, at the end of the Christmas carol ‘A Boy Was Born in Bethlehem’ whose last two verses go as follows:

 

Then praise the Word of God who came,
Of God who came
To dwell within a human frame: Alleluia, Alleluia.

And praised be God in threefold might,
In glory bright,
Eternal, good, and infinite! Alleluia, Alleluia.

 

One part of The Owl and the Stereo that I did disagree with comes near the end, when Osborne describes the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as one God seen from three different perspectives – like Shigeo Fukuda’s sculpture Encore which, seen from different angles, shows a pianist or a violinist.

I think this misses the point.  What the Trinity says to me is that love is the essence of God’s nature because God did not start out as a solitary person who decided to create a universe and happens to choose to love the people He created (or even as a solitary person who decided to father a son).  Rather, God has always been multiple beings and the love that flows between them.  As Jesus says, he and the Father are ‘one’ in the same sense that he prays for all who believe in him to be ‘one’ with each other and with him and the Father, or in the same way that a loving married couple become ‘one flesh’.

The Christian message isn’t all about Jesus.  It’s much bigger than that.