When I was young I was told how important it was to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. That’s when I knew I was in deep trouble… because the Jesus they told me about had little, if anything, in common with a person like me.

The Jesus of the perfect church was sinless and when the going got rough it seemed he could always slip away unnoticed or pull off some sort of miracle to save the day. Not me. I never got away. I always got caught. I cursed and swore and thought of doing things that really ought not be done! In short, I struggled. But not so with the Jesus of Sunday school. He had it all together. He was different. And so I grew up thinking that ultimately I was destined to be a failure – to God and others – and I guess in some ways I have been or am or was or something like that. I’m thinking a lot of people feel this way about themselves, regardless of their background.

Personally, I’m not new to this thing called Christianity. My grandfather was a minister, my father was a minister, and I have been attending church (like it or not) since I was a fetus. In that time, I’ve heard what must be a million sermons. I’ve sung every song telling me that, “Jesus Loves Me” and reminding me of all that waits for me in “The Sweet By and By.”   I’ve spent no small part of my life reading Scripture, studying theology, and attending seminary classes. I even excelled through years of study in Koine Greek so I could read the New Testament in its original language.

Now in my late forties, I’ve given myself permission to confess what I knew in my youth: “I can’t be like Jesus.”

There, I said it. The cat is out of the proverbial bag. Actually, there’s something cathartic about putting those words on paper. Through most of my life, I would have never entertained the notion—after all, isn’t being like Jesus what the Christian life is all about? The now-fading “WWJD” craze is predicated on the idea that we can both know and emulate what Jesus would do in a given situation. These days, though, I don’t feel like that’s so easy, or even obvious, and I’m not alone expressing these sentiments. I’ve encountered countless people who feel this way, too. Maybe you’re one of them.

The image of Jesus that I grew up with—the one I encountered in church, in seminary, and in Christian popular culture—has caused me to conclude that I don’t do well walking in his steps. The way his story is usually told and the things that people seem to latch onto in describing Jesus have led me to determine that I cannot, with any amount of effort or earnest desire, morph my life into his.

For instance, at a time in my life when my family was running short on food, I couldn’t multiply a few loaves and fish in order feed my wife and children. I would have liked to – I really would have – but I couldn’t. And when I consider the millions of people around the world with unsanitary drinking water, I can’t turn their dirty water into the world’s best wine either. When I wrestle with my own inner demons, I’m all too aware that I can’t seem to get the upper hand on the sin in my own life, much less expel it from the lives of others. If the idea is to be sinless as Jesus was sinless, count me out. I struggle. I always have. When it comes to sin, I do the Full Monty; my weaknesses are out there, naked, exposed for the world to see.

Unlike Jesus, I’m not eloquent, I’m hardly patient, and compassion does not come easy. My goodness, when I see what he had to put up with from his detractors, I confess I would have turned some of those guys into frogs!

I also don’t tell profound stories that will carry themselves on the winds of wisdom for ages to come. And far from being redemptive suffering, my wounds are usually self-inflicted. You know what I’m talking about – all those things we do and say and can never get back even though we’d give just about anything to be able to have a do-over. In so many ways I just can’t be like Jesus.

I wish I could heal people from the horrible physical and emotional suffering they endure, but I can’t do that either. I hate cancer. I really do. If I could be like Jesus, I’d for sure get rid of that. I’d also like to be able to raise from the dead a friend or two who slipped away from this life far too soon; I know they’d probably prefer I didn’t, but—again, unlike Jesus—I’m selfish like that. I miss them greatly but I can’t bring them back.

In our religious gatherings, we usually don’t hear people saying that they can’t be like Jesus because it seems to me that most folks who have reached this conclusion keep quiet or don’t attend church at all. Regarding those who quit church, maybe it’s because they’ve heard the standard versions of Jesus and he appeared to them as being too far out of reach, too idealistic, too…untouchable.

And if someone is untouchable, can he really be known? Deeply? Fully? Can he be embraced?

As I see it, that’s the problem. When our lives come unglued and the biggest part of us wants to die, our “Jesus of the miracles” seems far removed from our reality, from the path we’re walking. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve been there.

At times all of us experience deep, deep confusion and even despair. We pray and we want to believe that Jesus will magically make it all better – but we still carry so much doubt, don’t we? And then what happens when he doesn’t give us our miracle? Is it because he can’t? Because he won’t? Because he’s too busy? Is Jesus like a smarmy politician, pretending to care for the Biblical equivalent of a photo-op but not really concerned about the daily life of us unwashed masses?

So why do we say that we should follow the footsteps of Jesus only to represent him as living wholly separate from anything we have or ever will know? What if we’ve lost touch with who Jesus is supposed to be for us, what he most wants to say to us? What if we’ve trivialized God’s message—the one he sent to us when the Word became flesh? What if we’ve missed the point of Love taking on flesh and being made like us? What if we missed the fact that, long before God ever asked us to walk in his steps that he actually came to walk in ours, to live our stuff? Wouldn’t that make a revolutionary difference in the way we actually view and experience what sprung from the life of Jesus?

Andrew Lloyd Webber was right: Jesus Christ is a superstar. He’s certainly one of the most written-about figures in all of history. It seems there are as many versions of Jesus as there are books, movies and songs about him. He’s portrayed as everything from a liberal sage to a fiery radical. Some authors portray him as a superhero, and others picture him as a perceptive teacher whose divinity was painted onto him by a later group of pious disciples. It is this last direction that Dan Brown took in the wildly successful book The DaVinci Code. The novel and the not-so-successful movie conjure up a fictional Jesus whose humanity had little to do with the divine drama.

The backlash from the church predictably exposed the DaVinci Code as a fraud having the potential to threaten and undermine the faith of millions. To call the response “predictable” is neither to condemn nor praise it. It’s just that hardly anyone was surprised. It seems that curses for the darkness are readily on our breath when we Christians disagree with something from the world-at-large. We find fault and take an unyielding stand for what we believe to be the truth. This might stir up the faithful within the walls of our assemblies, but it doesn’t always help those on the outside...maybe it doesn’t really help us as much as we think either. So while the church battled a book whose author admitted it was fiction to begin with, it’s worth considering that we may have been neglecting weightier matters. If someone losing their faith after reading Brown’s book is a remote possibility, the fact that many of us throughout the world are struggling mightily to cope with daily living is a sobering and undeniable reality.

As I observed the church’s response to Dan Brown’s fictional weavings, I had this feeling we Christ-followers may have missed a legitimate message the world was sending to us. The book’s broad reception shouted: “Give us a Jesus we can relate to. One that doesn’t seem removed from the real world. Show us a Jesus who is enough like us that we might actually come to believe and even emulate him in our daily lives. Show me a Jesus who actually walked in my shoes.”   Not long ago, Superman was depicted with a more human face; why should the Son of Man be less real to us than the Man of Steel?

It seems that books portraying a more human Christ are wildly successful because they offer the world a Christ with whom we all can relate—a Christ who appears more human than the church’s usual portrayals. This Jesus touches our hearts and makes our imaginations run free with the daring thought that perhaps Jesus was truly human, and from the depths of his humanity he actually found a storyline and a love worth giving his life for. People begin to believe that if Jesus could find true love then they can too.

Incidentally (or perhaps not), isn’t this one of the main purposes of the Incarnation, that mystery so central to the Christian faith? The Jesus I see points to the reality that God is love. He helps us transcend ourselves and our fleshly limitations so that we can join with him in becoming love incarnate and in living abundant lives capable of giving birth to a better world. For me, I think one of the most important things about Jesus is that he put flesh on the One that the world all too often views as being so far “out there” that they have no real hope of connecting with him. But lately I find myself wondering if maybe we believers have, even if unintentionally, been abstracting Jesus to the point of irrelevance, stripping away the essence of his humanity to where we now find ourselves of little effect in speaking authentically of the one named “God with Us.”

To those with ears to hear what the world is saying, we may want to inquire into the way we have been telling Jesus’ story. What has our portrayal of Jesus contributed to people’s dissatisfaction with him so that they are drawn to a fictional novel rather than the Greatest Story Ever Told?

This is an invitation for self-reflection. Pointing fingers at a receptive audience that we may have helped create in the first place does not address the root cause. I believe that there is a better way to tell the wonderful story of love—the story of Jesus, the human incarnation of divine Love. I believe there is a better way to tell the story of the one who, as the creed affirms, is “Very God of Very God.”^[1]

A few years ago my youngest son Jason began meddling in drugs. My wife Gwynne and I agonized over his choices and behavior. I recall the grueling sleepless nights worrying over his health and safety. Full of fatherly wisdom, I decided to begin testing him for the use of marijuana. Brilliant! He simply upped the ante to crystal meth, got kicked out of school and won a free trip through the judicial system.

Together, we participated in a court-mandated “scared straight” program at the Colorado State Penitentiary. There’s nothing quite like looking through a glass window as the son you’d give your life for walks into the room wearing an orange jumpsuit. We stood face-to-face, looking at each other through a glass window as people in our respective areas barked out profanity-laced messages about what losers we were.

We were inches apart, but we stood miles from each other—separated by years, knowledge and experience. We were close enough to touch, yet a transparent barrier stood between us preventing us from embracing. I think that’s an apt metaphor for the way Jesus often seems to us. So close, yet so far away. And it just so happens that we’re the ones standing in the orange jumpsuit. We’ve been busted. No matter how hard we try, we can’t get on the other side of the glass to be “like Jesus.”

In that moment, as I watched my son walk into that room, if someone had thoughtlessly offered me (or worse, offered my son) some well-meaning platitude like “give your heart to Jesus” or “let go and let God” as if that would make everything better, I think I might have overturned their tables. No, that’s too much like Jesus—I would have just punched them.

Seeing my son in that situation gave me the wake-up call of a lifetime, one that made me yearn for a more knowable Jesus, a more in-touch and hands-on Savior. When our families are falling apart and our relationships have long since lost their direction, hearing about a remote Christ just doesn’t cut it. We need a more accessible Jesus, one in the here and now, not the by and by… one who has walked in our shoes and whispers to us that he understands the stuff we’re living through.

Sometimes I wonder if, as the people of God, our collective voice hasn’t been silenced; or at least, a little strained. I believe there’s much more to the story and the person of Christ than we’ve been telling. I’m convinced that we have only begun to plumb the depths of knowing, of relating to, of touching Jesus. I believe that we can discover Jesus anew if we explore a well-known account from his life story; an account that might help us see him through a different lens; one that helps us see that he really did walk in our steps and that he really does offer help in times of need because he has already lived everything we go through. Sometimes that’s all that’s required – just a different way of seeing. Perspective is everything, and there is no shortage of options when it comes to perspectives on Jesus. 

Reexamining the way we picture Jesus is difficult because there is still so much mystery about him. Packed into the very word “mystery” is the strong hint that we’ll never fully exhaust the ways we can tell this story. Perhaps that’s how God intended it. Admittedly, we aren’t the first generation to grapple with understanding the one who is the epitome of both humanity and divinity. It took the church some 300 years to come to a consensus (or at least an imperial fiat) concerning this. Still, the question is one each of us can wrestle with. The way we see and present Jesus means everything to a world exploring how to relate to him, asking exactly what it means to follow him, and wondering if it’s really worthwhile to know him.

If the plethora of books on Jesus today teach us anything it’s that Jesus continues to interest a good many people. Even non-believers marvel at his life. They wonder what made him so exceptional and what drove him to dedicate himself to people when so many rejected him. The apostle John tells us that Jesus “came to his own and his own did not receive him.”^[2] Why, then, would Jesus love them anyway? This doesn’t seem natural, so how could he do it? Just what was his code for living?

These questions draw me to the event of Jesus in Gethsemane’s garden on the final night of his life.^[3] Gethsemane intrigues me. I’m captivated by this gut-wrenching setting where I see Jesus at his most human. He is grieved and distressed. Sorrow fills his heart, and tears pour from his eyes. His strength fails as he falls to the ground. He sweats profusely. He pleads for help from his friends, and he prays to God that the cup will pass. In Gethsemane, I see a human Jesus who is dejected, lonely, hurt, and weak. I see a human Jesus who asks God for an alternative. I see a human Jesus who wrestles alone with his fears.^[4] I see a human Jesus that experiences everything that we’ve experienced. I see a Jesus who has actually walked in our steps.

We might be tempted to look at Jesus in the Garden and assume that he came fully equipped with eternal foreknowledge as to how everything would play out. This is worth questioning, though; is the Gethsemane experience a charade in which Jesus play-acts his way through it all? By minimizing his anguish, his prayer, and his death, this caricature of Jesus makes him less admirable and less in touch with some of our greatest fears.

Meanwhile, various alternative depictions of Jesus strip him of his divinity, leaving us with a well-intentioned man who ultimately gives his life for little more than a moral lesson in principled nobility. Is that really what caused Jesus to sweat swelling drops of blood in the garden?

While Jesus may have been able to speak of his eventual resurrection, nowhere do we find any indication he understood the emotional experiences that his passage into and through death would elicit. Besides, since when has knowing our destination delivered us from the fear we feel when pondering all of the unknowns of our journey?

Considering the complexities and tensions of Jesus, how can we do justice to the mysterious blend of humanity and divinity working within him? At the moment in the garden he cries out for help—how can we hear this authentically so that it speaks to us with its intended gravity? This is the question of the hour and what it reveals could be so earth-shattering to our way of seeing God’s story that it could finally clear the way for embracing the fullness of life Jesus came to give us.

I sense that a full-orbed reflection of Christ’s wrestling helps us through our struggles. In this epic encounter we finally find a Jesus with whom we can relate—a Jesus on our side of the glass. Here we see a Jesus who seemingly checked his miraculous power at the door to enter Gethsemane with something greater, something accessible to each of us; Jesus enters Gethsemane with faith in one hand and the courage to follow the way of God in the other.

Jesus shows us that our humanity can receive a divine infusion of strength and power in our times of need. Significantly, this power exceeds turning water into wine. 

In Gethsemane, like no place else, we can decipher and grasp Jesus’ ability to access a nature so beyond our normal way of being that it can only be called divine. This is, at least partly, why we desire to know him. The opportunity to have this kind of life intrigues us.

In Gethsemane, therefore, we discover a fully human Christ suffering the same agony we would and, in many ways, do. He avails himself of resources that we have access to in our own garden experiences. 

When our story is formed by his, the well from which he drew strength becomes available to us as we travail in our Gethsemanes.^[5] Entering into the garden with Jesus helps us clarify the deeper realities of the Son of God, one broader than Hollywood creations or fictional speculations. We can connect to a source of strength crucial to enduring the greatest struggles of our lives—even if it means the loss of our health, a spouse, or staring through a glass window at someone we love dearly who is standing before us in an orange jumpsuit.

In Gethsemane, at long last we encounter a God who has lived our stuff – a God who chose to make us more by making himself less by walking among us – a God who knows what it is like to walk in our steps.

 

 

URL: http://www.presence.tv/cms/per_jesus-gethsemane-us-part-1.php

---

Top of Page

Email Article

Printer