I can’t find Jesus. I’ve searched, but he isn’t there. Not in Scripture anyway. Oh, there is an image of Jesus there. A sort of saint-like, peaceful Lord who knows just what to say and just what to do at just the right moments. He moves knowingly in and out of scenes that seem to have created roles just for him to act in, delivering lines that are destined to be immortalized.
But there isn’t any real humanness in him in those passages. Only supreme humaneness and love and compassion and peace, and, yes, those things are human. But only given this side of the story, Jesus comes off a little one-dimensional. That is, Jesus is pretty much God all the time, acting as a human, and that, we’re told is one of the major heresies to have afflicted the church.
What I’m looking for doesn’t make a very good story, nor a very good God, for that matter. I want to know Jesus as a man. God made truly man. If he was tempted as am I, if he experienced and suffered life in any way at all similar to the life as I know it, it had to be in the day-to-day, not just all saved up for one big crucifixion. I mean, how about Jesus, a fairly average-looking, early thirties guy who hangs out with friends, camping in the woods…who is sick as a dog with gut-wrenching flu? Vomiting all night and just wanting to die? What if Jesus was lazy and always the last one to get up in the morning, while everyone else stoked the campfire and got breakfast going? We just don’t get a real, human picture of Jesus in the Bible.
And that’s too bad. Or maybe it’s just right. And perhaps Scriptures should always read this way because otherwise we’d dismiss the point and focus on the banal. Yet, doesn’t it dampen the vitality and importance of the whole God-became-man theology. When Jesus wasn’t stoically and calmly moving from Biblical scene to Biblical scene, doing messianic things and guiding his people, did he ever have to go the bathroom? Did he ever laugh so hard that wine came out his nose? Did he like to swim? Go for a run? Was there a particular food that he did not like to eat? Did he like to do his laundry, or was his often the dirtiest robe in the crowd?
You get the point. Where is Jesus?
I’m also wondering why, if Jesus was such a good teacher—why didn’t he take the time and care to write down something himself? Why rely on others to interpret and record what they felt was important? Instead of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, why don’t we have a book of Jesus? I mean, really, if eternal life hangs in the balance, wouldn’t a good teacher take a few moments to be explicit about what people need to know?
Yes, I know the Christology about hidden things and even the potential political fallout that could have occurred should Jesus have been too explicit. But how about a hidden writing, something the boys could pull out later (given some undeniable proof of authorship) and say, “Hey, everyone! This is what Jesus wanted you to know.” Why doesn’t the resurrected Jesus sit down and pen a few direct lines himself. Then we’d have real original source material.
Instead, we get to make up our own roadmap. We piece together a “Roman Road to Salvation” and concoct a “Sinner’s Prayer.” We pull together a BIG VIEW that spans from Genesis to Revelation and formulate contexts for understanding our experience. We make meaning out of it all the best we can. If all that were so important (again, I have to ask), wouldn’t Jesus have talked about it? Wouldn’t he have included “The Sinner’s Prayer”…at least, as a footnote to “The Lord’s Prayer”? With the eternal destiny of our souls on the precipice of endless, joyful life or endless suffering and damnation, why would Jesus leave it to trust that Paul, Francis, Luther, Wesley, you, I would later string it all together and get it?
Since he seems to have done that, maybe the exactness of our conclusions isn’t all as important as we think it is. Maybe we have our ideas about salvation, our formulas, our criteria for what is Christian and not Christian, maybe we have all those concepts because we need them. They are our inventions because we want them. Perhaps Jesus didn’t give us those when he was walking this earth because he didn’t think they were necessary.
Anyway, I am still looking to find Jesus, the human one. I’m wondering what would happen to our theologies and christologies and escatologies if somewhere, tucked away in Holy Scripture we read, “Jesus awoke in the quiet of that morning before His fellow disciples by the sea of Galilee with a real morning hard-on. Vestiges of an arousing dream still lingered in his mind as memories of yesterday’s sermon on the mount took a back seat. And Jesus stole away to the woods to jack off.”
I guess that it probably doesn’t matter. Otherwise, writers directly inspired by God would have included such information, right?
Still, without a picture of the human Jesus, a guy who struggled with a sometimes-controlling mother, who told funny jokes around the campfire, who liked to ride galloping horses or play stick ball with friends, who thought speakers who stuttered annoying, who liked to bronze his chest while lying in the sun and who sometimes felt that maybe he wasn’t living up to being all that could be…without those details, I wonder if sometimes I become a little too disconnected from my Savior to realize that he really does get me. Or that I truly can be a true Son of God, too, and, like he said, do even greater things than Jesus did.
