So this is the point in the story where I turn to Jesus.
Don’t worry. There’s no altar call or soft light or repetitious droning of “Just as I Am,” no sudden realization that all of my questions are answered in a single verse, every doubt cast away by a moment of illumination, just me in my sweats with a glass of wine and the familiar stories of Jesus spread before me on the kitchen table like an old family photo album that suddenly carries new meaning after a death or a divorce or a long overdue reconciliation.
Three years had passed since I first saw Zarmina’s execution on TV, and I was as angry with God as ever. Not because of any sadness in my own life — I was married, working for the local newspaper, and busy decorating our newly purchased home — but because of the deep, entrenched sadness of this world, a world in which thirty thousand children die of hunger every day, a world in which tsunami waves wash away entire villages, a world in which the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow wider.
As a sort of last resort, I decided to commit the summer of 2004 to reading through the Gospels. I remembered something my youth pastor used to say in his sermons. “We’re going to stop by the New Testament to see what Jesus has to say about this,” he would announce before citing chapter and verse, “because Jesus embodied all of God’s desires and passions and hopes and dreams, because Jesus was God in sandals.”
I always loved that image: God in sandals. Nothing is quite so absurd or profound as the notion of the Great I AM walking around with dirt between his toes. I thought about this often as I wrestled with questions about God’s nature and doubts about his goodness. I recalled what John said about Jesus in the opening lines of his gospel: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (John 1:18 NASB, italics mine). I wanted an explanation from God, and according to John, the best place to start is with Jesus. If Jesus was really the most complete and comprehensive revelation of the divine, if he was indeed God in sandals, then that means he cared about what God cared about, hated what God hated, and loved what God loved. The incarnation gave God a face. It gave him literal tears, literal laughter, literal hands, literal feet, a literal heart, and a literal mind. What the Spirit of God said and did while living among us in the person of Jesus must say a lot about what matters most to him. So in spite of my doubts, or perhaps because of them, I decided to see if Jesus had the answer.
Well, he didn’t. You can’t get too far into the Gospels without noticing that Jesus made a pretty lousy apologist. I’m convinced he would have flunked out of any halfway decent Christian liberal arts institution. Jesus responded more with questions than with answers. He preferred story to exposition. Despite boasting infinite wisdom and limitless knowledge, Jesus chose not to overtly address religious pluralism, the problem of evil, hermeneutics, science, or homosexuality. He didn’t provide bullet-point answers for detractors or lengthy explanations to doubters. He didn’t make following him logical or easy. And yet I wasn’t disappointed. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps it was the surprising relief of getting swept away in the story. But something about Jesus made me ask better questions. Something about Jesus gave me just enough hope to decide not to give up . . . at least not yet.
The first thing I noticed while reading through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John was that Christians who claim to take the Bible literally or who say they obey all of his teachings without “picking and choosing” are either liars or homeless. Jesus asked a lot of his disciples. “None of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions” (Luke 14:33 NASB). “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37). “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).
Now, some argue that these instructions were meant specifically for those disciples charged with serving alongside Jesus during his ministry. This may be true, but even in the Sermon on the Mount, which was intended for a much broader audience, Jesus told the first Christians, “Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. . . . Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. . . . Do not store up for yourself treasures on earth. . . . Do not judge” (Matt. 5:39 – 42, 44; 6:19; 7:1). The teachings of Jesus fly in the face of all we are told by our culture and even by the church about setting boundaries, getting even, achieving financial success, and “calling sin a sin.”
For the first time, I asked myself if my reservations about Christianity were purely ideological. I wondered if perhaps counting the cost played a subtle role. You’d have to be crazy not to have second thoughts about following Jesus.
The second theme that emerged while reading the Gospels is that, if Jesus is God, then God has not forgotten the downtrodden and oppressed of this world. In fact, Jesus had a special relationship with the most forgotten of first-century society: women, tax collectors, sick people, minorities, Samaritans, and sinners. Jesus welcomed children into his arms and washed his disciples’ dirty feet. He took those suffering from leprosy by the hand and surrounded himself with the poor and uneducated. Jesus began his first sermon by explaining not that the poor are unlucky victims of the cosmic lottery but that theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Luke 6:20). Even when the crowds got so big that people were stepping all over each other, even when the beggars became loud and obnoxious, even when all the neediness and desperation embarrassed the disciples, time and time again Matthew describes Jesus as being “moved with compassion” (Matt. 9:36; 14:14; 15:32; 20:34 NKJV). Cautiously, I began to wonder if the reason I was so desperate to believe that God loved Zarmina was because he does.
The final and most startling thing I noticed as I grew more acquainted with the Gospels was that Jesus had a very different view of faith than the one to which I was accustomed. I’m not sure when it happened, but sometime in my late teens or early twenties, it was as if Jesus packed his bags and moved from my heart into my head. He became an idea, a sort of theological mechanism by which salvation was attained. I described him in terms of atonement, logos, the object of my faith, and absolute truth. He was something I agreed to, not someone I followed. Perhaps because I spent so much time as a student, I thought about faith in terms of believing the right things about Jesus. Born of a virgin? Check. Fully God and fully man? Check. Without sin? Check. Sacrificed on the cross on our behalf? Check. Checking the right things off the list meant the difference between salvation and damnation. It was what separated Christians from non-Christians, or as I liked to say, believers from nonbelievers.
But Jesus rarely framed discipleship in terms of intellectual assent to a set of propositional statements. He didn’t walk new converts down the Romans Road or ask Peter to draft a doctrinal statement before giving him the keys to the kingdom. His method of evangelism varied from person to person and generally involved a dramatic change of lifestyle rather than a simple change of mind. To Jesus, “by faith alone” did not mean “by belief alone.” To Jesus, faith was invariably linked to obedience.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the short parable he told at the conclusion of his Sermon on the Mount: “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash” (Matt. 7:24 – 27).
We used to sing a song about this in Sunday school that involved a lot of cool motions that showed exactly how the rains came down and the floods came up, how the wise man’s house stood firm, and how the foolish man’s house went splat! Through the years, I heard about how the story represents the importance of building my house on the solid rock of a biblical worldview, about how the best way to protect my faith against the winds and rain of doubt is to build it with the concrete of absolute truth, the joists of inerrant Scripture, and the bearing walls of sound Christian doctrine. And yet, in the words of Jesus, all those apologetics courses and theology books and debating techniques are just castles in the sand without a commitment to love my neighbor as myself. I began to wonder if obedience — with or without answers — was the only thing that could save me from this storm.
Needless to say, that was a strange summer. It wasn’t the summer that brought an end to my doubt, but it was the summer I encountered a different Jesus, a Jesus who requires more from me than intellectual assent and emotional allegiance; a Jesus who associated with sinners and infuriated the religious; a Jesus who broke the rules and refused to cast the first stone; a Jesus who gravitated toward sick people and crazy people, homeless people and hopeless people; a Jesus who preferred story to exposition and metaphor to syllogism; a Jesus who answered questions with more questions, and demands for proof with demands for faith; a Jesus who taught his followers to give without expecting anything in return, to love their enemies to the point of death, to live simply and without a lot of stuff, and to say what they mean and mean what they say; a Jesus who healed each person differently and saved each person differently; a Jesus who had no list of beliefs to check off, no doctrinal statement to sign, no surefire way to tell who was “in” and who was “out”; a Jesus who loved after being betrayed, healed after being hurt, and forgave while being nailed to a tree; a Jesus who asked his disciples to do the same.
We all go to the Bible looking for something: sometimes it’s comfort in the midst of sorrow; sometimes it’s confirmation of what we already believe; sometimes it’s facts to add wrinkles to our brains. I went to the Gospels looking for hope for Zarmina and answers to my questions about God. What I found was hope for Zarmina and about a million more questions about God. It occurred to me that if my faith managed to survive all of these doubts, then this radical rabbi, this God in sandals, would require more from me than ever before. This radical Jesus wanted to live not only in my heart and in my head but also in my hands, as I fed the hungry, reached out to my enemies, healed the sick, and comforted the lonely. Being a Christian, it seemed, isn’t about agreeing to a certain way; it is about embodying a certain way. It is about living as an incarnation of Jesus, as Jesus lived as an incarnation of God. It is about being Jesus . . . in tennis shoes.