By Creg
(This has been adapted from writings by Patrick Mead)
Many different santas with their fake beards & welcoming
laps are in our malls & department stores now. Lines of kids form impatiently waiting to speak to their one hope of getting
that new ipod or 3D video game. I read recently where a small town
used a woman to play Santa for the town hall party. Just unheard of-men should always be Santa because they are far
more used to sitting in one place for long periods of time than women
are and they’re better at making big promises they have no intention
of keeping.
In different
cultures across the world people will remake Santa in their image.
You’ll see big Santas & little Santas. Tall Santas &
short Santas. White Santas & brown Santas. And that’s
great. We want Santa to look familiar, the better for him to get to
know us so he’ll know what size shirt to get us.
The problem is
when we try to remake Jesus in our image, reversing the order
of Genesis 1:27. Several years ago, the British Broadcasting Company
ran a mini-series on the life of Jesus. There were howls of protest,
not because they had gotten the story wrong, but because the actor
chosen to play Jesus was short and overweight. They said "Jesus
wasn’t short! He wasn’t overweight!" Really? Who says? What
if he were? What if Jesus had acne scars, or bad breath, or crooked
teeth, or walked with a limp.
One criticism of
Jesus was that he was a country hick. The accent Jesus and his
apostles had marked them as coming from a part of Judea that was
considered a joke by the rest of the nation. They were assumed to be
uneducated. Remember how, as soon as they began speaking, they were
labeled as "ignorant and unlearned men"? What if you get to
heaven and Jesus sounds like Jeff Foxworthy… or Larry the Cable
Guy? What if you get to heaven and hear a Yankee accent or a Texas
drawl. Maybe he sounds British, “Welcome to heaven you bloody
saints.”
You’re not
offended are you? Some of us have made an idol of a white American
Jesus. Remember this: Jesus looked like an Arab looks today. He would
have had the coloring and features that would have singled him out
for extra screening at the airport. He might have made you nervous
when he sat beside you on the bus. His accent would sound strange to
you.
Politicians try
to make Jesus be a member of their party, instead of doing the hard
thing and trying to be a member of his. Remember the "What would
Jesus drive?" advertising campaign of a few years ago? The
assumption was that Jesus (always gentle, meek, mild) would want to
treat the planet lovingly, with sweetness and care. He would, the
commercials left no doubt, drive a Prius or ride a bicycle. Where did
we get the idea that Jesus wants to save the planet? Didn’t he tell
us, in no uncertain terms, that he was going to destroy it by fire?
I saw a "Who
would Jesus bomb?" bumper sticker not long ago. It’s a
sarcastic question that implies God is a pacifist. It makes me wonder
if those people have ever read the Old Testament. By looking at just a few
parables and teachings in the gospels, they have a skewed picture of
Jesus. Look at God moving in the Old Testament and in Revelation and
you see great swaths of destruction, destroyed cities and cultures,
and dead bodies alongside the road. It seems that God IS willing to
kill some folk… unless you decide to remake Him in your image.
Most leaders of
the emerging church believe that Jesus is a Democrat and a pacifist
because they are. Most Republicans think Jesus likes them best. Jesus
is not a mascot for our desires, wishes, and dreams.
It is too easy
to create new stereotypes of what Jesus looks like. We can see Jesus
in the life of Mother Teresa… but can we also see him in the
bloodshot eyes of a recovering addict, or the fancy suit of a company
CEO, or in the tired face of a third generation welfare mom?
God gave us 66
books to show us His many faceted character. When we make God in our
image, or when we localize God to a few gospel stories, we lose the
big picture and end up with a white skinned, blue eyed, brown haired
Jesus. That was the mistake Jesus’ people made in the first
century. They had so many preconceptions concerning how the Messiah
would act, sound, and look, that Jesus didn’t measure up and
they passed over him, waiting for a better Messiah to come along.
Jesus, in fact,
transcends every classification because he is God and Man — both
fully. We should quit trying to make him in our image and bow our
knees to him so that he can remake us in his.
