Making Friends With Jesus
For a lot of years, I found it difficult to read the Gospels. John, especially. There are places in the Gospels when, as best I can tell, Jesus is alternating being deliberately obtuse and going around picking fights with people. I remember once or twice, sitting at Mass and going, “Good grief, it’s like he was trying to get them to crucify him!”
For a while, I thought that might have been the point.
In this period of time, talk of personal relationships with Jesus really bugged me, because how do you have a personal relationship with a guy whose present presence is entirely spiritual and whose past presence went around fight picking? Whenever people talked about “personal relationships” my b.s. meter started going off.
During that time, I talked a lot about Christ, not Jesus, because the larger, universal title felt more real to me.
So did the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has been present to me throughout my adult life as a cool, quiet presence who eases my anxiety. (And inSpires books and songs.) When I experience the presence of God, that’s what I mean. That’s what I long for for my loved ones who experience fear, anxiety, and doubt.
But I didn’t have Jesus, and it bothered me, because that was the point of Christianity. I was totally on board with the teachings of the Gospel. I just didn’t “get” Jesus himself.
At some point, I finally realized what bothered me so much about the Gospels. It’s how much is missing from them.
I’m a fiction writer, which means at all times, an outsized portion of my brain is focused on making a person’s inner life knowable to someone outside. What they’re thinking, how they react to what’s going on around them, why and how they say or do the thing they say or do.
Virtually all of that is missing from the Gospels.
Then I realized WHY. These were stories and wisdom teachings that were shared orally for years before being written down—the first Gospel wasn’t put “on paper” until 40 or so years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. And John, my nemesis, didn’t get put down until 95 A.D. or after (according to a quick online search).
And when they did get written down, we didn’t have convenient printing presses to make mass copies. This was hard work and also, expensive.
So the stories were necessarily going to be bare bones. I would say Cliff Notes version, except Cliff Notes are supposed to explain why, and the Gospels, it seems to me, got written down more like cue cards for people who already knew the stories, to make sure they didn’t get distracted and miss something important.
So first, imagine how different the world was in 1970 from now. That’s the difference in culture from the death and resurrection of Jesus until the time the Gospel of John was written down. And we live a lot longer, and have way better ways to keep track of information, than they did in the first century.
And second, these stories were passed down orally, which means people heard tone of voice. Had body language. The Apostles who told these stories could have— in fact, they almost HAD to have— mimicked facial expressions and sidelong smirks that Jesus used. I suspect that early gatherings of the faithful had a much clearer picture of Jesus of Nazareth, the man… and a lot more laughter than we ever allow!
Because over time, whether accidentally or out of an overzealous sense of reverence, we erased Jesus’ personality. Come to think of it, we’ve kind of done that with figures like JFK and MLK and JP2, too, despite having a whole lot more historical records that should prevent such a thing. The people who knew them as human beings are passing away, and the rest of us know only the legends… and the whispers about their flaws don’t seem to impact the monolith of their image, somehow.
So, lots of realizations, a long time coming. But frankly, they left me more frustrated, not less. And more angsty about people who claim personal relationships with Jesus.
It was The Chosen that changed all that for me. Because The Chosen managed to put the Gospels into a plausible context.
I am generally deeply, DEEPLY suspicious of religious media. It’s generally just not well done. It’s heavy-handed, effective only for those who are already on board. Not a good tool for evangelizing those who most need the message.
I went into The Chosen with a low expectations and sky-high defenses, preparing for it to be “tolerable, I suppose, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” But I was wrong.
I am well aware that The Chosen is not the Gospel. But it gave me personalities, tone of voice, body language— to say nothing of back stories!— and not just for Jesus, but for the people around him.
And now when I read Gospel stories, they live in a way they didn’t before. I can hear the wry wit in Jesus’ voice. These parables we’ve been listening to for the last weeks of Ordinary Time? Holy cow! Jesus was a smart-ass, you guys. He just was. I’m pretty sure at any given time, half his audience was laughing and the other half was calling him names unutterable in their head.
Jesus was not afraid to call a spade a spade. I’m sad that we’ve lost that piece of him, that we’ve buried his ability to make us simultaneously laugh and squirm b/c he’s poking our idols. We only want to point his barbs at others. And there are so many idols now.
But that’s for another post. It’s been a really hard year for me, and I’m trying to push back against the feeling of overwhelmed-and-stretched-past-my-limit by forcing myself to focus on gratitude. Gratitude is, after all, the November Thing We Do. And I know what you choose to focus on defines your reality. So I know I need to put in the effort to be grateful. And not surface grateful, but deep, thousand-plus-words-of-analysis grateful.
So that’s where I am landing with this. In these past few weeks, I’ve read the Scriptures and just been reveling in how much personality I can see now, and how differently these stories strike me now. To recognize how that shift has made it possible for me to pray to and, more importantly, feel connected with, Jesus as a human being as well as the Word Made Flesh and the Lamb of God. The human Jesus, who hungered, thirst, got sick, and wept for Lazarus—that’s who I need right now, in this season of my life. And now I have him.
That is, indeed, a cause for gratitude.