Why Jesus is so hard to get to know…
Dec 29th, 2011 by ljkim
Many people say, “I ‘get’ Paul and John and Peter… And I love reading [insert favorite Christian author]…but Jesus Himself is so…abstract.” Of course there are also many less-thoughtful Christians who “like to think” of Jesus as their best friend from High School, or as Obi Wan Kenobi, or their favorite famous Christians – or some other image they picked up – and they have trouble reconciling their version of Jesus with the one in the Bible. Now if you’re in the first group, and you really want to know why Jesus is hard for you to get to know – and how you can break past that barrier continue reading. For the rest of you, I know you might be curious – but wait till you really want to know, otherwise what I’ve learned about this just might discourage you instead of helping you…
One reason why Jesus is hard for you to know right now is (probably) because you’re a snob: You have certain standards for what people need to be in order to be “worthy” of your attention. You have certain standards of what people need to have in order to be considered “smart” or worth listening to. And Jesus probably does not have any of those things… He probably does not look the way you’d like him to look, talk the way you’d like him to talk – or say things that you really want him to say… And so in our snobbery you filter him out.
Don’t worry, the rest of the world pretty much did the same thing already, so you’re not alone. It’s really hard to imagine for many people with grad degrees that anyone who never went to college could be smart. And it’s even more difficult to imagine someone who never finished high school could be smart. Jesus never wrote a book, held an office, earned a degree, taught a class, owned a home, raised a family of his own, or any of the things we spend our lives chasing after… So could you really take relationship advice from someone who’s never been married or financial advice from someone who never made a lot of money? Or beauty advice from someone who was never considered attractive? Exactly.
So to get around this we build fake Jesus-es in our mind: Jesus-es that we can more readily accept as the Lord of our lives… Because if Jesus never had these things (and he could have had them), that means that these things that we spent so much energy chasing after don’t really matter all that much…and we just can’t accept that.
But here’s how you can start getting to know the real Jesus… Do what you’ve already been doing, studying the Bible, praying, debating ideas at church, reading Christian books… But first here’s what you need to do different: stop being a snob. The early church naturally became ethnically diverse and socio-economically diverse – because believers who knew Jesus realized all the stuff that was important to them didn’t matter – and they stopped being snobs. Knowing Jesus forced them to stop being snobs. Another word for “stopping snobbiness” is humbling yourself. The things you think make you so great do not. Instead knowing Jesus humbles you, and transforms you, and in doing so you actually do become great.
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