Who Is This 'Jesus'?

WHO IS THIS JESUS who rattles my cage and rumbles through the history of my life? This contradictory figure who proves an embarrassment and stumbling block to my mind, but who won’t go away? This man who brings awe and tears to my eyes, who makes me want to resist authority when it’s wrong, who points me to a God who works from the underside of every system of power?

Who is this Jesus? Disturbing teacher of the gospels, comfortable with children and irritating to scholars, unsettling people by his enigmatic stories. Dancing member of the Holy Trinity, looking out from a stunning Russian icon. Object of saccharine devotion in the Sacred Heart of Catholic spirituality, the “Jesus and me” sentimentality of evangelical piety, the unbridled passion of 17th-century metaphysical poets.

He’s the first-century Jewish rabbi of the Jesus Seminar, calling for justice and inclusivity, making no ethereal claims about his own divinity. He’s the Jesus of Jelaluddin Rumi, who wants to be born in the mystical experience of every soul. The Cosmic Christ who weaves his spirit through the fabric of the natural world, causing all things to scintillate with the sacramental, Christic presence of the divine.

He wanders in and out of my reading of Bernard of Clairvaux, Marcus Borg, Dorothy Day, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and John Shelby Spong. Each with a finger on the mystery of this figure who pulses back and forth in my life: “Jesus, lover of my soul.” “He walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own.” “Jesus, the very thought of thee.”

This is the Jesus who refuses to be contained in rigid, orthodox formulas of doctrinal correctness.

The Jesus who wasn’t content with remaining an exclusive Son of God, insisting that all are beloved sons and daughters of the Most High. Who stays restless in promoting the work of deification—turning every human being (the whole of creation) into the image and likeness of God.

This is the Jesus who lures and seduces my heart, making me fall head over heels in love with a God more sensuous than I can imagine. But he’s also a Jesus who bugs the hell out of me, uprooting my comfortable white, straight, male, middle-class values. He roams the streets with the homeless, far from the gilded crosses of suburban sanctuaries. He’s the fierce Pantocrator gazing down from an Orthodox monastery chapel ceiling. Yet he rages against those who turn him into an other-worldly savior, safely ascended into heaven, too distant to be real.

“Call me by my true names,” cries Thich Nhat Hanh...and Jesus, as well. I’m Warner Sallman’s head of Christ, he says, and the Piss Christ of shocking modern art. I’m Francis of Assisi’s leper on the road to Perugia and Mary Oliver’s snow geese announcing my participation in the family of things. I’m the grieving women of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the men of the military junta who haven’t yet learned that power is not truth. I’m the redwood trees cut down by Pacific Lumber and the out-of-work loggers whose families have to eat. I’m the young girl trapped on a boat of refugees in the South China Sea and the pirate who rapes her.

I’m all of these broken, vulnerable beings, yearning for the wholeness and healing of the earth. I’m gestating in the pregnant soul of a 12th-century Persian mystic and tasted on the tongue of a Buddhist monk at tea. I’m the Jew that Christians have wanted to turn into something else and the messianic critic of imperial power that first-century Judaism found uncomfortable. I’m there in the revival tent at the end of the sawdust trail and in the harmony of plainsong at vespers in a Dublin convent.

WHO IS THIS Jesus? He keeps out-growing—and yet building upon—all my inadequate images of the past. The Jesus of summer Bible camp, sung around campfire embers. The Jesus of Anselm’s Canterbury, causing me to wonder why God became human. The little Mexican kid named Jesús, begging in the streets of Juarez. The Jesus of Karen House, a Catholic Worker community in north St. Louis, and the young people of Taizé.

Post-liberal, post-evangelical, post-Catholic, can I almost say post-Christian people like myself (?) remain hungry for a Jesus they can take seriously. Able to summon them to something powerful and life-changing and world-affirming. They have to reject a Jesus who remains too small, even as they remember scraps of a devotion that once moved them.

My own journey with this Jesus forces me into an ever-widening inclusivity, from the evangelistic fervor of Moody Bible Institute to the challenge of doctoral studies at Princeton. I’ve sung gospel songs at Youth for Christ rallies, French psalms with Dominican monks at the École Biblique, civil rights songs of the ’60s in the South, Leonard Cohen tunes with eclectic Christians in the wilderness of Alberta. I’ve seen Jesus in a mariachi Mass in Cuernavaca and a sixth-century icon at St. Catherine’s monastery beneath Mt. Sinai. In Lakota songs sung by Navajo brothers in an Arizona sweat lodge and in the most critical biblical scholarship. In post-colonial critiques of those who use Jesus to camouflage injustice. Every time he is more—and less—than I anticipate ... yet enough to hint at what I still hope for.

At the age of 10, fresh from a Wednesday night prayer meeting, I began writing a “book” about this astounding figure, Jesus. It was my first effort as a writer, scribbling on the pages of a ringed notebook. I was overwhelmed at the time by what it was like to experience God in human life. I’ve never gotten over the fascination.

In the end, I’m less concerned with defining this Jesus than I am with experiencing him. I’m more taken by his vulnerability than by his claims of miraculous power. Yet I hear him in the crack of thunder echoing through Ozark hollows, in much of what I’ve never been able to explain.

He affirms my doubts. Encourages my yearning. Forbids my indifference. I can’t get away from him. Nor—at last—do I want to.