Lenten Blogging: Day Five
Today's Question: "Who's the most important person in your life - and how would your day-to-day existence be different without them?"
The answer to this question will be obvious to some, pretentious to some, and generic to others.
The most important person in my life is Jesus Christ. It's not even close.
Does this mean that I am hyper religious? No, just ask anyone who knows me. I am a striving disciple, who's toes are always sore because of how often I stumble. I lie, I cheat, I'm prideful, I'm stubborn, and I'm a hypocritical person (that's only a short list); the chief of sinners is me.
With that being said, Jesus is still the most important person in my life. He is the most demanding person I know, but also the most accepting. He is the most inclusive person I've met, but also the most exclusive. He is either the most arrogant, prideful, or insane, or he is the most humble, meek, and genuine human being I have ever met.
Without Jesus in my life the center of my universe would shift from him and land squarely on me. And then my "stumbling" would be known simply as my life's pursuit. It wouldn't be good for anyone... including myself.
I've answered that question, and I'll leave it now. But it raised another question in my mind; "why do some people view my answer as ridiculous or over spiritual?" Even many a Christian would not place Jesus' name as the answer to today's question. Why?
The simple answer must be because they don't view Jesus as a person; and if they do he is not a living person, therefore he certainly couldn't be the answer to this question. However, I believe a majority of people view him, not as a person (even if they believe he existed), but as a proposition. Jesus for many people is no different than a set of principles we give assent to, or agree with.
To be sure, there are theological, philosophical, psychological, and many other branches of study, that accompany belief in Jesus. But all these are secondary to an actual belief that Jesus was and is a human being like us.
Even the way we ask one another about Jesus suggests that we depersonalize him. We ask, "Do you believe IN Jesus?" The "in" suggests that the question is asking 1) about the existence of Jesus, and/or 2) what Jesus does or can do. So a person believing "in" Jesus might mean they believe he is historical and they agree with his belief system, or they believe that he can do what he says. This, too me, removes relationship from the equation.
Replace Jesus with aliens, Kobe Bryant, or the Boogie Man, and the impersonal nature of the question will shine forth. Believing in aliens could mean any number of things, but most of those things will not alter your day-to-day existence. But the question people had to be asking in the first century was, "Do you believe Jesus?" This already assumes that Jesus is a living human being, but it is asking a far more meaningful question:
"Do you believe the things that Jesus is saying?"
There are so many implications to the way we answer this question. First it assumes a person has heard the things that Jesus has said (things about himself, life, God, humanity, etc...), and it asks for a response to those things. It is direct and straight to the point, because it is about Jesus and you, you and Jesus.
Tim Keller once said, "Anyone who ever met Jesus either loved him or hated him; there was no, 'He's an okay guy.' There was no fence riding when it came to him." This is because Jesus made claims that were extreme, pushy, and counter cultural.
C.S. Lewis' famously sums it up; "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
So, if you believe in Jesus, the question for consideration is, "Do you believe Jesus?" He made a ton of claims, and said a lot about himself, and what it means to be human. If we believe him the logical next step would be to follow him, become his apprentices, and learn to be like him. If we don't believe him, then we should have nothing to do with him; for he is not trustworthy,
Ok. I feel like I rambled. Thanks for reading.
Tomorrow's Thought: "Tell us how your week went by putting together a playlist of five songs that represent it."