The Jesus that's Left

My entire lifetime has played out on the backdrop of the Religious Right, a powerful cabal of men who have orchestrated events to lead millions of others to believe that Jesus is inseparable from a particular politic. But they didn’t invent the idea.

Since Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion in 312 AD and his organization of the Council of Nicaea (where the Nicene Creed was written) Christianity has been awash with the values, philosophy, and validation that only empire can bring.

• The secular philosophy of the Greeks was the foundation for the Western view that God is a stoic chess player, the perfect mind, running the world.
• The Roman system of government replaced a Jewish view of atonement with a legal one, turning the cross into a transaction between an angry God and His innocent Son.
• The European monarchies morphed the church further into an extension of the state.
• The American view of power, efficiency, scale, and productivity have poisoned the Biblical concepts like glory, hope, and kingdom.

Every altar call I’ve ever heard was drenched in empire. Some kind of benevolent Lord-Grantham-style land master hands off his land to the most evil and untrustworthy creatures ever imagined. A select subset of those abominations (who ought to get burned at the stake) are allowed houses on his eternal land grant, if only they acknowledge his generosity, goodness, and kingship.

Jesus is set up as the Branson-style agent: part-lord, part-tennant, retired socialist who once preached about good news for the poor, but got upgraded to a gig pardoning the landmaster’s enemies.

When you start to see it, you can’t unsee it. The conflation of the gospel of Jesus and the anthem of the empire has been so thoroughgoing as to be in almost inseparable.

What if Jesus Didn’t Look Like “God”?

Fifteen years ago, when I was in the heart of evagelicals super-clubs, I began to notice a trend that permanently unsettled me. I lived side-by-side with people having real, deep, and transformational experiences with the Spirit of Christ that affirmed all-encompassing love, the dignity of every life, the call of God to be a neighbor and to empty ourselves of our own power for the sake of others. But those same people then felt the pressure to twist those stories into knots, reframing their gutteral knowledge of a Infinite Love, into the theology of a spiteful god who holds the world under his thumb with the everlasting threat of eternal punishment.

As if they had no other option.

And, of course, it occurred to me—over a period of years—this is the way a national religion would be organized. That there could be no free thought. That you would always be trained to question the truth of your own experiences. That any feeling of unmanagable goodness would have to get cocktail blended with the Koolaid of the empire’s singular way forward.

God, we’d been told, was the unmoved mover. The mastermind behind a singular and unflinching vision of reality that would leave the overwhelming percentage of humanity burning in endless torment, many of whom had no cognitive option to assent to the beliefs required to escape.

I had done enough Bible study in my life, and by this time was a seminary graduate, to know that none of this looked like Jesus. How was this explained by those that equated Christianity with power? The mercy of Jesus, his love of women, immigrants, the powerlesss and the poor… was all just an object lesson. A few acts of kindness and quaint fables, told in a time so far from our own. Most of them don’t really apply.

We were trained to ignore anything of Jesus that didn’t look like the empire’s “G”od.

Jesus Sans Empire

• What happens if you take away the Greek’s stoic God in the sky who plays chess with the universe?
• What happens when you remove the Roman Empire’s (history’s most cruel oligarchy) definition of justice and mercy?
• What happens when you remove the erasure of women’s voices by the Council of Nicaea?
• What happens when you peel back the 500-year legacy of King James’ translation (and nearly all of its English successors), interpreted by only white men to serve the British and American empire’s preferred vision for power?

Think about your life in church without those layers… what remains?

Of what is left, is it full of love, generosity, hope? Is it pulsating with the goodness of creation and humanity as God’s partner in it? Is it weighted with the humble glory of being a priesthood of God’s mercy to all creation?

What can we do with a Jesus who has no interest in power? A Jesus who sees emptiness as a blessing? Who hands the world to the broken? Whose definition of wholeness is welcome, grace, generosity, and inclusion?

Can Jesus thrive if He has no eternal torment to save people from?
If the hell we are living is the only hell to which he concerned himself?
Can such a Jesus be worth following?

The Jesus that’s Left

The Jesus that remains, is not unmoved, but moved.
He is a mentor, not a disciplinarian.
He is a member of the community. Not the benevolent lord.

The Jesus that remains, is not picking favorites, but including all.
He is a the impoverished guest, not the wealthy host.
He is the humble flower, not the stone tower.
He is God. But not any God the empire would want.

A self-emptying God.
A dying God.
A suffering God.
A God beside, not a God above.
A Jesus God.

A God whose resurrection is so scandelous it makes martyrs, awakens mystery, and transcends empires.

There comes a day when this is the only Jesus you have left. And then you decide: was the power of being right, assured, chosen, preferrable to the weakness of being loved?

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I’m here because you can deconstruct your faith without losing it.
I’m here because to find faith, you must lose it.

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