Testimony 4

Testimony 4:

Jesus.

This is really where the intersection between God and man gets tricky. If I could get over Jesus, I could get over a personal, knowable God and exist in a happy-ish pond of meaningless beauty. Jesus, man.

There are consequences to every faith; studying the consequences in culture and in our own lives seems to be the only human way to assess truth. God is not nice, but by definition is good (I’ll leave it to Spinoza and Liebnitz and Aquinas to prove it). So when someone says she knows God, she pursues God, it’s the consequences of her beliefs that I’d want to look at, to some extent. Jesus is the only seemingly sane man to claim to be God; he is the only paradoxical leader of nobodies that shifted the trajectory of all of history. He is not like Plato, not like Mohammed or Joseph Smith. He performed miracles, not the least of which was fulfilling some 300 prophesies of the Old Testament. He spoke truths, most of which result in patterns of fulfillment in our own lives. He revolutionized the world, all of which was in desperate need of revolution through submission. If the strange miracle of his existence could be ignored, then I’d be inclined to accept that all religions have about the same chance of connecting us to an unknowable being; however, Jesus.

Now, Jesus changes things. Jesus places God in the midst of us. Jesus indicates a God who has a plan, a purpose, a desire for restoration. Jesus makes the fallenness of man obvious (not because he had to die to redeem us, but because of course we had to kill him of all people); Jesus makes the closeness of God plausible; Jesus is also not a happy ending. If this is how God treats himself, I’m not sure what that indicates about how he’ll treat us. Nonetheless, Jesus.

Jesus is how I come to speak of religion as a conduit to God’s truths and some religion, Jesus, seems the better conduit. Now, some may say it’s the hegemony of growing up in a Christian household that would result in my saying Jesus is the way, the truth, the life, but does the hegemony of current tastes, kale salad and grassfed beef, cancel out its nutritive truth? No, and while Jesus is a convenient truth for me to believe, the nutrition of his practices cannot be denied. If we all actually did what Jesus did, we have to admit the world would absolutely be a better place. I’m not saying Christianity hasn’t hurt; like everything man has touched, he’s corrupted Christianity too, but I am saying that regardless of what your mom and dad taught you, the world would be better if we just did as Jesus did. Of whom can we say the same? Of anyone? Jesus.

Now, Jesus wasn’t exactly a good Jew and he wasn’t Christian, so this makes following Jesus a bit difficult. All we have is Jesus and from him we then have his early disciples birthing Christianity over hundreds of years. Tradition, disciplines, doctrines, and rhythms establish themselves. There is no only Jesus path, there is not even an only the Bible path; we are not without biases, lens, interpretations; let us then hope that a seeker’s heart will be fed for there is truth.

If God wants to reveal God in a breeze or a word, God can. Since I believe there is God, I also believe there is a very real good to be preached and a very real evil to be redeemed. The witch doctor, from the death and violence he practices, does not seem to be pursuing truth, does not seem to be practicing life-affirming, heart-restoring practices, but that’s not to say that he couldn’t. That’s just to say not all truths are truth and not all religions are the same; there is only one Jesus.