I hate limits, but I realize that limits are a prerequisite for a stable society, so I grudgingly accept that we need to live within limits. I’m not an anarchist.
So, it doesn’t surprise me that I don’t like it when limits are placed on Jesus either.
In my last post, I gave the intro to this and the next post I need to edit.
So, now I am going to attempt to talk about the substance of what I was trying to express when I started this essay back in February. (Yikes! Has it been that long?)
The first limit that I want to talk about is the limit “Not My Jesus”.
Definition -
I define “Not My Jesus” as the attitude that Jesus will always behave the same way towards everyone in all or similar circumstances.
Lately, I find myself getting riled up because of this phrase or others like it. Another example would be “Jesus wouldn’t do that.”
It’s fair to say that we shouldn’t claim that Jesus would do anything outside of what God would do outside of Christian teaching.
Jesus will never act heretically. However, it isn’t fair to suggest that Jesus can only relate in one way to all people, in all times.
This attitude really irks me.
I’ve heard these phrases on and off throughout my life.
So, this is a season on hearing this phrase and I’ve heard it a lot since the show, THE CHOSEN” dropped season 4, episode 3.
Everyone has an opinion on this episode because it is a game-changer for the story and the end of the episode was just so shocking.
People either liked it or they HATED IT.
Yes, *HATED IT* with all capital letters. The major complaint boils down to “Not my Jesus”. “Jesus wouldn’t behave that way” or “Jesus shouldn’t be portrayed that way.” “Jesus wouldn’t behave or be like this.”
My snarky brain automatically jumps to “how would you know?”
Seriously, none of us are experts on Jesus and Christianity. None of us are God and only God is God, so there’s a lot we don’t know.
Even the “experts” and theologians admit there is always more to know. We haven’t uncovered everything from the Bible and will never fully understand God. So, seriously “how would you know how Jesus would or wouldn’t behave” towards an individual?
The fact is that we are all individuals and that means that Jesus must get along with 8 billion people with different gifts and charisms. That’s a lot of different.
Individualism is a huge definer of American culture. As an American, you learn early on that we don’t think about things in groups, but rather in how things relate to the individual. It’s a recent phenomenon that we’ve shifted to thinking more about group identity rights. The culture I grew up in was geared towards maximizing individuality, so the emphasis on group rights these days is often off-putting and foreign to me.
So, this drives a lot of my perspective on how Jesus would or wouldn’t behave.
We are all different, so why wouldn’t Jesus treat us differently?
Regardless of my viewpoint on individualism, fans and ex-fans of “The Chosen” have a lot to say about this episode (Season 4, episode 3) and the direction of the series, given their recent challenges.
My goal isn’t to turn this into a “Chosen” propaganda piece one way or another.
My goal is to talk about this one issue “Not My Jesus” because, as a Christian, it’s important to acknowledge ways that our community struggles with talking about our faith in Jesus.
Some Christians are very rigid when it comes to faith. Others aren’t. As a result, the way Christian culture is perceived by the unbelieving world is very complicated.
It’s not straightforward because Christians vary a lot in creed and action. This has led to a lot of confusion on the part of believers and nonbelievers.
If you follow Christian “Twitter/X”, then you’ve seen this meme.
When people say “Jesus” generically, some listeners (Christian and non-Christian alike) will wonder “what Jesus are you specifically talking about?” The question goes deeper for some Christians because it leads to other questions. For me, those questions and comments can range from “why can’t Jesus do this or that?” to “you’ve got a whacked-out version of Jesus”. It just doesn’t compute that to me why some people expect Jesus to be a rigid, sourpuss who can only behave one way when we are all individuals. We have different experiences, ideas, and gifts.
Even though we are all children of God, God created all of us uniquely. We can disagree on a lot, but we can’t agree that we are all the same or have the same relationship with God. As humans, we don’t have the same temperaments or tolerances. Some of us are slow to anger, some of us have lighting fast tempers. Some of us are more extroverted, others just aren’t. It’s just how we are wired. You can learn skills to try to learn to be more of something, but there’s always your inherent nature. Everyone must learn to cope with things and learn to manage relationships. These are things that you just don’t inherently know when you are young.
Personally, I am conservative in my theology, but I take a liberal view of how Jesus can work in the world.
Jesus isn’t just the Lord of our time, but of all time, and our society has changed since the dawn of humanity.
The fundamentals of who God is and what He represents haven’t changed, but most of us don’t live in an agrarian culture with strict moral codes these days. We aren’t hunter-gatherers. We have information readily available on our gadgets that wasn’t even imaginable for centuries.
I think it’s arrogant to assume that Jesus is limited to my experiences, or the experiences shared in the Bible. I think that Jesus celebrates our uniqueness and individually as much as the Father, who created us, does.
I don’t subscribe to the ultra-legalistic version of Jesus, but I also don’t subscribe to a “hippy-dippy” version of Jesus either. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.
As a very late comer to “The Chosen”, I freely admit that I haven’t spent years following the show and getting invested in the dramas that come with being in fandom.
Instead, I look at the show through two lenses. One lens is my Catholic lens. The other is my writing lens. And – damn – Season 4, episode 3 was just good writing.
It’s the kind of writing that completely changes everything for the characters and you are left, as a viewer, shocked, stunned, and simply impressed at the major twist that the writers came up with. It was good, really good.
Everyone was quiet when we left the movie theater, and I sat there like this for a few minutes.
*https://unsplash.com/photos/a-woman-with-her-hands-on-her-face-VLQ3TlrBGdA?utm_content=creditShareLink&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash*
I was just stunned in the moment. In fact, everyone was silent and still for a few minutes. It was dead quiet when everyone left the movie theater. I still have some of that feeling of shock when I think about it, even weeks later. People had their hands over their mouth and had expressions like this person above. It was really a “what just happened here” moment. Now, I am just in awe of the great storytelling of that episode.
And, well, others are not.
Hence, “not my Jesus” became and still is a common theme on message boards and in conversations about this season.
Thinking through my frustration with this phrase, I discovered my problem is the use of a tiny word “my”.
“My” is a two-letter word. Not exactly impressive in terms of letter count.
But as you look at the word “My” you see that the definition is (a form of the possessive case of I used as an attributive adjective) according to dictionary.com.
Because I want to be specific, I’m adding the additional definition of “attributive” to the conversation,
1. Attributive means pertaining to or having the character of attribution or an attribute.
2. Grammar. of or relating to an adjective or noun that is directly adjacent to, in English usually preceding, the noun it modifies, without any intervening linking verb, as the adjective sunny in a sunny day or the noun television in a television screen.
In short, it denotes that something belongs to me.
It is the “my” that I find exclusionary and selfish.
Both attributes are uncharacteristic of Jesus and both attributes are ones that Christians are insisting to others that Jesus is. (both Christians and non-Christians).
That leads to tricky waters because in Christianity is exclusionary on its face.
“Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life and that nobody comes to the Father, but through him” is a claim of exclusion.
Jesus also wouldn’t behave in a way that contradicts the Father. Again, this is exclusionary.
So, we can’t claim that Christianity is inclusionary. That would be disingenuous and dishonest.
Yet, I don’t think that Christians should claim that Jesus belongs exclusively to us.
Yes, of course, Jesus belongs to us as Christians.
Yet, Jesus exposes himself to non-Christians all the time for the purposes of conversion.
An early example of this in the Bible is St. Paul’s conversion. Before he was St. Paul, he was Paul “the Christian killer”. He was on his way to Damascus to kill some more Christians when Jesus appeared to him and asked him “Saul, why do you persecute me?” Saul (or Paul) wasn’t a Christian before his encounter with Jesus, but he certainly was one after.
*http://worldhistoryvolume.com/early-christianity-byzantium-6-b-c-a-d-1453/paul-tarsus/*
We also shouldn’t claim that Jesus would behave the same way towards me that he’d behave towards another human being.
Jesus is going interact differently with all of us. He’s going to interact with me and my spouse differently simply because I’m female and my husband is male.
Neither is “bad” or “wrong”, but we are different people with different temperaments and backgrounds and are different sexes. It stands to reason that Jesus would interact with us on a personal level differently.
For example, my husband was “that guy” in his youth. He was the guy who peppered people with questions looking for an argument. I’m not “that person”. I don’t ask a lot of questions, but I watch how people behave. Jesus used these two different approaches and met us where we were. My husband converted to Catholicism in his youth after encounters someone who was willing to answer his “annoying” questions and push back on him. I converted after watching how my faithful Catholic friends responded to the sex abuse scandal in the church and reading a lot of books.
God used the circumstances in our lives to nudge us towards a deeper relationship with Christ in ways that only we could hear and respond to. He didn’t try to be anything else, except what we needed.
As Christians, we’ve all had these experiences (big or small), where we know that God is working in our lives. Most recently for me, it’s been this past Lent. I’ve been focused on Him in a way that I haven’t been in a long time. I notice the difference it’s made in my life. I also notice the difference that my Bible study is making in my life. The women in my group challenge me and we challenge each other to go deeper into our relationship with God.
The truth is that He has a unique relationship with every single person that the Father has created. People can choose not to participate, but for those of us who do, it can be truly miraculous and life changing.
So, “Not my Jesus” limits Jesus to the unique experiences of one person in a particular place and time.
This was highlighted further a couple of weeks ago at mass when one of our deacons pointed out in his homily that St. Thomas needed to touch the wounds of Christ to believe that he has truly risen from the grave. St. Peter, on the other hand, needed forgiveness for the three times he denied Christ after the resurrection. These were both challenges to their belief in Christ, but they were different challenges and needed to be answered in different ways.
*https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1Yn0hhPCWP8/XI48OznivjI/AAAAAAAAAFU/W8TbY3JqKCoUeeFwMW3FtGl9gAQCzGArwCLcBGAs/s1600/st.-thomas.jpg*
It would have been weird for St. Peter to say that he wanted to touch the wounds of Christ when he had already been to the empty tomb and had seen Jesus in the flesh after he rose. He didn’t need to touch the wounds. Peter had already hung out with him.
It would have been awkward for St. Thomas to need forgiveness three times for something that he didn’t do. St. Thomas never denied Christ in the same way St. Peter did on the night of this crucifixion, so he didn’t need the same forgiveness. For whatever reason, St. Thomas needed to touch and see, not just believe his friends, or believe the man standing in front of him.
The “Not My Jesus” attitude frustrates me because I take the attitude that Jesus can do whatever He wants, and his reaction isn’t dependent on mine.
However, because He knows what’s best for me, He will act according to how I would best respond to him.
He seeks the best for all of us and wants us all to draw close to him in familiarity and friendship.
I’d be insulted and hurt if Jesus approached me in a way that didn’t match what I needed. It would be weird if Jesus didn’t give me what I needed but forced something on me that didn’t mesh with my uniqueness.
That wouldn’t be Jesus and that’s how I hear “Not my Jesus”.
When people say, “Not my Jesus” I hear “Jesus is limited to my experience” and that’s so limiting.
That person’s experience doesn’t belong to me. So, how would I fit into Christianity if that thinking is true?
It simply doesn’t connect with God being all-mighty and powerful. It doesn’t connect with the idea that Jesus died on the cross for all of us, not just one person. (But the amazing thing is that Jesus would have died for you, if you were the only person on Earth. That is how much He loves us).
Jesus is limitless. Jesus can move mountains. I don’t understand why people stop at “Not My Jesus” when Jesus is so much bigger than anyone one of us.
Jesus doesn’t stop being loving, tender, or compassionate after He deals with someone else’s situation. This is why I find the thinking selfish.
In a way, I understand because when you have a deep relationship with Jesus, you really are his friend. You have a personal connection and it’s on a heart-level. It goes beyond our understanding because his love, mercy, and care are bottomless. Yet, Jesus has that kind of relationship with other people. It is not particularly unique for someone to have a personal relationship with Christ. What is unique is how our lives and personal circumstances change when we know Christ. Yet, it's the same joy, peace, and story of change that we share. It’s just that the details and the heart of the relationship are a bit different for all of us.
Honestly, for all the words I have written, I think this is just a surface response to the idea of “Not my Jesus”. It seems like there is more that I want to say, but I don’t have the words to express my deep hurt when I hear these words.
I feel hurt and pain for the speaker because they simply can’t understand how limitless Jesus is.
I feel awful as a listener because I wonder what I did wrong not to have that experience. I wonder if I’m being left out. I wonder why God didn’t behave that way with me. Yet, I realize that I’m a totally different person with different needs.
I also realize that this sets me up for the trap of comparison. This is so easy to slip into and we shouldn’t be comparing experiences and relationships. The truth is that one isn’t any better than another. Yet, a lot of us get caught up in looking for those spiritual highs because when you are truly walking with Christ and everything is good - it’s really good. You never want that feeling of closeness to end. We forget, or haven’t learned, that feelings are fleeting and deceptive. They ebb and flow and aren’t constant.
Yet, that’s what we do as human beings. We compare ourselves and our stories.
We think that our experiences are the only ones that truly exist because they happen to us body, mind, and spirit. We have collective experiences, but you don’t experience them or remember them in the same way as the other person or people that you share them with. We notice different things within the big picture.
Also, as humans, we tend to think that history started when we were born.
For me, that would be the mid-70’s of the last century. Yet, history doesn’t just belong to me, but to all of us.
For me, it boggles the mind sometimes that I am now living in the United States with people who weren’t alive and fully aware of what happened on 9/11/2001 because that day changed our country’s direction forever.
There are adults who *really* don’t remember or never experienced the “before times”, but they certainly have experienced “the after”. That scares me for a variety of reasons, but that is beyond the scope of this essay.
Yet, because of these two vastly different experiences with the same topic, we find ourselves clumsily trying to relate to each other because we occupy the same space.
In the same way, Jesus doesn’t just belong to me, but to all of us. It’s a matter of how we personally choose to relate to him.
Even though I have a deeply personal relationship with Jesus, I realize that others can also have a personal relationship with Christ as well. I also realize that some chose not to have a relationship with him at all and, sadly, some choose to actively hate Jesus.
Christians need to be careful about using the words “Not My Jesus,” especially around non-Christians. There are pitfalls to using that specific language. I’ve mostly discussed how I hear the phrase as a believer, but it seems to me that it would send mixed messages about who Jesus is to a non-believer.
I understand the idea that people found comfort in a specific way that Jesus interacted with them when they really needed comforting and they can’t imagine Jesus not doing the same for someone else, but even in this example, I find myself being put off.
I realize that Jesus does comfort us in our grief, but the idea that Jesus would comfort us in the same way still makes me raise my eyebrows.
It’s not that Jesus shouldn’t comfort us, but that not all high emotions are the same.
Grief leads some to anger, but it leads others to despair. Grief can lead to silence and isolation, or it can lead to destructive behaviors where you start filling your life with busyness to conceal your pain. Also, comforting someone who doesn’t want to be comforted doesn’t work. These are difficult emotions to manage, and each requires a different response.
So even in this case “Not My Jesus” just seems arrogant and deaf to the needs of the other person.
I think that most people who speak like this come from a good place. They want to help. They want to be charitable. they want to share that they’ve made a true connection with Jesus.
Yet, I don’t think that they understand the effect that these words have on some listeners. My hope is that there is some recognition as to how this phrasing affects listeners and people who employ this language would reconsider how the words that they choose and the positions they take that inform this way of thinking.