We Don’t All Follow the Same Jesus

Over the last several years, I’ve watched churches (and families) become bitterly divided by politics. I’ve offered support to clergy who have felt battered by congregants who insisted that their pastors support openly a MAGA agenda or else face termination. The rise of American Christian Nationalism has forced me to realize that we’re not all following the same Jesus.

Almost all Christian Nationalists would insist that they are loyal to Jesus. Many of them, however, have placed their loyalty to a particular vision of the United States above their commitment to him. The American way of life as they understand it and the way of Jesus as they perceive it are essentially the same thing. They conflate the flag and the cross, confuse self-securing coercive power with self-giving persuasive power, and conclude that America (especially white and male America) is chosen by God in ways that denigrate the saving truth, made clear by Jesus, that all people everywhere are chosen for love and grace.

I was naive to think that we held a view of Jesus in common. I failed to reckon fully enough with history.  For instance, most southern slaveholders convinced themselves that they were faithful Christians. Their view of Jesus was starkly different from that of the abolitionists. An alarming number of German Christians found ways to justify their accommodation of Adolf Hitler, and their Aryan Jesus contrasted sharply with the Jesus of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller, Karl Barth and the Confessing Church. Many segregationists were Baptist deacons, while most leaders of the civil rights movement were also church people, but their understandings of Jesus drastically diverged from each other. Countless theologians and pastors have managed to justify their denial of the calling of women to ministry by treating the liberating way of Jesus as secondary to their interpretations of contested passages in Paul’s epistles. A similar dynamic is at work in how Christians use the Bible to close rather than open doors for LGBTQ people. As these brief examples make clear, we’re disciples of a different Jesus.

I’m know I have blind spots in my perception of Jesus, and I want to learn about them. That’s why I need a community of Jesus-followers who help each other to listen to his teachings, especially his Sermon on the Mount and his parables; encourage one another to do in our time the kinds of things he did in his; and invite one another to allow him to shape our character in ways that reflect his love and personality.

Some congregations aren’t these kinds of communities, but some are, and some can become those kinds of communities again or for the first time. Some Jesus-followers, though, will need to gather in new communities; they can’t wait any longer on a church they haven’t yet been able to find.

I’m praying regularly this prayer to Jesus inspired by Richard of Chichester (1197-1253) and made popular in this version by the musical Godspell:

Three things I pray:

To see thee more clearly

Love thee more dearly

Follow thee more nearly.

I want to see Jesus more clearly and to see life more clearly through him; to love him and, with him, to love others; and to follow him on the way to life as he means it to be.