The New Testament is a relatively short collection of books, yet it is unbelievably complex and intricate. One of the things it hammers in more clearly than nearly anything else is that Jesus is a God of this world, not of some ethereal heaven where we go after.
The Jesus presented in the Gospels is a man who interacts with spit, food, mud, stones (he was a tekton, which is often translated carpenter, but more accurately is closer to a stone mason), and then later in the story, he makes pronouncements about economics, politics, and more. He teaches on divorce, marriage, forgiveness, money, and the damage of elevating religion and tradition over human beings.
In other words, he teaches about real world STUFF.
God has his hands in the ground with dirt beneath divine fingernails.
But do a thought experiment with me. Imagine you’ve never read the Bible, and the only impression you have of Jesus is what you hear from Christians and what you see in their lives. I imagine you’d think Jesus:
- is primarily focused on getting you to heaven, or sorting out who goes to hell
- is very nice and prim and proper and clean and polite
- kind of hovered over the ground and was really holy; too holy to worry about boring stuff like taxes, and too holy to touch mud or lepers
- was a Republican (Or a Liberal, depending on who you’re talking to); basically, that he fit in a nice, tidy ideological box
- isn’t really involved in the things of our modern world, except making sure you don’t have pre- or extra-marital sex.
I interact with people all the time and it becomes obvious that, though they talk about Jesus, they haven’t read much of their Bibles. They haven’t gotten to know the Jesus presented in the gospels.
The sad thing is, there are countless nonbelievers in our world today who haven’t ever picked up a Bible, so largely, the above points are their impressions of who Jesus is. Our words and lives are the only exposure to Jesus they’ve ever had. Is it a good one? Is it even remotely close to the Jesus depicted in the New Testament?
The main problem
I’d say one of the main issues with today’s Christianity is actually thousands of years old: gnosticism.
It’s a complex belief system, but largely, it says that God cares about ‘spiritual things,’ and doesn’t really care about the stuff in this world. This world will blow away and then all that will be left is our spirits…so focus on those and don’t fret too much about the things of this world.
“The things of this world…”
As in, spit, mud, food, stones, economics, politics, divorce, marriage, forgiveness, money, and the damage of elevating religion and tradition over human beings.
As in, the things Jesus mainly taught about.
You see how that works?
How do we have Jesus come and teach about all of this, and then end up with a belief system that disregards, like, all of it? It’s baffling. But I think that’s one of the ways our psychology works against us.
We figure that since we can’t see God, He doesn’t care about things we can see. (I know that was a mouthful)
Or, since God is invisible, He is only concerned with invisible things, not all these normal things of our world that we deal with day to day.
I’m always left with the question, then, of what are spiritual things then? For all that we can interact with are visible, natural things…
We assume God is bigger and more mysterious than our little earth, so He couldn’t possibly be too concerned with the stuff we have going on down here. And this is the root of so many of our problems. Our Christianity is a theology of ‘out there,’ not ‘right here, right now, among the sweaty August days and my flat tire.’
And it expands into so many other areas. How you use your body matters to God. Jesus gives a rip about how and where you spend your money. Etc.
Christianity is not about ‘flying away from this world to heaven,’ but it’s about bringing that kingdom of heaven here, to earth, today. And properly understood, this should change our actions and lives drastically. (Jesus barely talked about how to get to heaven, or what it’s like. He actually never talked about ‘going to heaven,’ but about ‘being with him,’ but that’s a story for another day)
Let’s not let our theology be too lofty to put its knees in the dirt or touch another human. Just as Jesus came down and dwelt among us, eating and working and pooping, we can come to see God in the seemingly normal, everyday aspects of this world as well.
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Day 18 of 100 days of blog.
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