By Isaac Withers
I have a friend at uni who talks like no one I know. He was one of those people that used to say ‘cheeky Nandos’ genuinely. ‘Bad guy’ seems to be his ultimate insult, ‘nice guy’ plays a similar role when he approves of someone, and before we split for Easter last year, he applied it to Jesus.
We’d been talking about how we were going to celebrate the coming holiday and I was talking faith stuff, Easter, all that. He said he didn’t believe Jesus was the son of God but thought he was a ‘really good guy’.
It was a really funny exchange in between printing essays, but it reminded me of how many people must see Jesus. How there are various versions of pop culture Jesus, all 'nice guys'.You probably know them all already. There’s:
a) Hippie Jesus, favoured by internet memes. A guy in a robe you
could easily replace with ‘The Dude’ from The Big Lebowski, who’s just happy
for you whatevs bro.
b) Che
Guevara Jesus, this kind of political figure, a leading revolutionary in a
Jewish uprising, who was killed.
c) Then there's
guy they told you about in assemblies at school at 9am when you were
bored/tired out of your mind, where he walked you through a nice story to get
to a moral. About how you should be nice. Stirring stuff.
For all our laughing that day, I knew that my friend was representing our generation, a whole wave of people had never had Jesus explained to them beyond the nice guy image. So, almost to remind myself, I thought I’d write this all up, as to why Christians have many reasons to distinguish their ‘nice guy’ from the rest.
1. The Claim
Jesus's claim to be the son of God, sets him apart in
history. When you think of the other major religions of today, none of the
founders of those faiths, claimed such a position. Not Mohammad, nor any of the
Buddhas, or even anyone involved in Scientology (yet...).
And it was my first response to this friend. 'He claimed to
be the son of God!' That's why he's remembered. He's either crazy, or it's true.
For all the nice stories about lost sheep and for all the entertaining
agricultural analogies, they all fall to the wayside with this.
But let me pass this on to someone who's thought this argument through.
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
2. The Miracles
If you haven’t seen the film Risen yet, I advise you to
check it out. It came out around Easter this year and it follows a centurion
(Joseph Fiennes) on his quest to find the body of Jesus post-supposed
resurrection (and it’s got the kid that played Malfoy in it). SPOILER ALERT,
Jesus is alive about halfway into the running time. Sorry.
The scenes with the centurion, the disciples and Jesus are
really interesting. There’s a moment when the centurion, asks Peter ‘why do you
follow him?’ Straight after that question, someone limps over nearby, covered
in bandages under their robes, and you watch Jesus get up, embrace them, heal
them, send them on their way, and then sit back down with his friends. Peter
turns to the centurion and says, ‘that’s why we follow him’.
I think it’s the fault of 9am assemblies at school, and people
telling the nice stories of the nice miracles, that they seem far less real to
us 2000 years later. But they’re consistently reported, all over the New
Testament and they make sense of the phenomenon of early Christianity. If it
was a few stories, you could make it up, but there’s 37 detailed
accounts of miracles in the Gospels, and then countless references to more.
'So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics,
and he healed them.'
Matthew 4: 24
'But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were
every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not
contain the books that would be written.'
John 21:25
The Catechism clarifies the purpose of this phenomenon of
miracles that Jesus brought with him wherever he went. 'They are not intended
to satisfy people's curiosity or desire for magic' (CC 548:272), instead, 'the
signs worked by Jesus attest that the Father has sent him. They invite belief
in him' (CC 548: 269). And they're a phenomenon that set him apart form
everyone else really.
3. The Crucifixion
To be ‘nice’ to someone, I think you draw the line a long
time before dying for them. Nice is offering them another biscuit, the one you could have had. It’s nothing drastic.
It's perhaps easier to think that Jesus was just a good philosophical teacher, if you leave this area well alone. He was brutally executed. Bishop Robert Baron at World Youth Day described the cross as ‘a kind of state sponsored terrorism’, a way for the Roman Empire to say, if you mess with us, this is what we’ll do to you. St. Paul put it like this:
'And being found in human form he humbled himself and became
obedient unto death,
even death on a cross.'
Philippians 2:8
The early church would have got what Paul meant. God
accepted worse case scenario. Crucifixion was the worst way to die, and I still
don’t think we have come up with an uglier alternative. Jesus the nice guy
doesn’t go anywhere near this kind of pain, this kind of brutality. But the real Jesus?
'Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his
life for his friends.'
John 15:13
Jesus died for what he said, but the Church says that much more
than that, he died for us. The message of Christianity, is that Jesus died for every human individual. No other 'nice guy' carries that.
Where other religions are stories of man reaching for God, Christianity's story
is one of a God constantly reaching down to us.
Even when it hurts.
Even unto death.
4. The Resurrection
This is a huge claim. Most people tend to just shrug this
point off as obviously untrue. When someone dies, that’s it.
And yet, it's what so many of the early Church were martyred
for. It's what came to shake the lives
of those most intensely trying to break the early Church, people like St. Paul. And
without it, there simply isn't a Christian faith.
Resurrection is a precisely Judeo-christian principle. Christ's resurrection fits completely with his life long message of an afterlife, and
fits straight into the Jewish prophesies of the Old Testament.
'The mystery of Christ's resurrection is a real event, with
manifestations that were historically verified, as the New Testament bears
witness. In about A.D. 56 St. Paul could already write to the Corinthians:
"I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that
Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was
buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,
and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. . ." '
(CC 639:490)
And yet, it's a huge belief, that's hard. It's probably not
something you can convince a mate of across and Nandos. But it's something
that no other faith claims, that no other nice person is said to have achieved, and
if we remove the Passion and the Resurrection from the story, we can't be surprised
when people live with a tame version of Jesus.
5. The Church
I feel like this is a good point to end with: Jesus has his
Church.
A lot of the time, people who believe in nice guy Jesus,
will separate him from the Church. If he was anti-establishment and
anti-religion in his own time, how could he agree with the Church today? And
they have a little scriptural evidence to back that up. Think the turning of
the tables in the temple, and Jesus's calling out the hypocrisy of the
Pharisees. However, in the context of the rest of scripture, that doesn't
really hold water.
'Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the
prophets;
I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.'
Matthew 5:17
And right after the turning over of the tables, you get
this:
'Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in
three days I will raise it up.'
John 2:19
I'm going to pass this point over to someone cleverer, so
again, Bishop Robert Baron, take it away. Commenting on a fairly recent viral
video called, Why I love Jesus, but hate religion, he had this to say:
'Was Jesus against the corruptions of religion in his own
time? Sure, in fact often bitterly so! Did he know about the ways that
institutional religion goes bad? Of course! ... But, Jesus was not simply
against religion, in fact he was a loyal, law abiding Jew. Jesus in fact said,
I don't want to abolish it, I want to fulfill it. In other words, he took the
very best of Israelite religion, took the best of Jewish instiutionalism: think
of law, covenant, temples, sacrifice, priesthood - he didn't abolish it, he
fulfilled it. He brought it up into a new and higher synthesis.'
***
Unlike the nice philosophers we've seen come and go with
time, the belief of Christians, is that
Jesus still works through his Church. And there's a world out there that has been undersold on him and his Church, drastically. I challenge you to shake the nice guy image they know. Because this generation is comfortable, and needs something better than just a nice guy to look up to.
And so do I.
'There are a lot of new age people today, who want
spirituality without religion. And there are Evangelical Christians who want
Jesus without religion. The problem is, both those views end up with an
abstraction. But the one thing the real Jesus is not, is abstract. The word
became flesh, and now that incarnation is prolonged over space and time
precisely in and through the Church: sacraments, liturgy, the mystical body,
the lives of the saints, the love we have for each other, that's precisely
where the real Jesus is apparent to us.'
Bishop Robert Barron
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