I used to think I should talk about everything,
but now I know it’s better to keep some things a secret.
Do you know the movie The Incredibles? There’s a superhero dad in the movie, and he’s tired of his desk job. He sells insurance, I think, but he knows that’s not the real him. So he starts doodling on his sketch pad, drawing different superhero suits because he wants to go back to being who he knows he really was meant to be. Most of the outfits he draws have capes because that’s how most superheroes dress, and he wants to be the same as them.
He has a friend, Edna, who makes superhero uniforms, and every time he shows her a design, she keeps telling him to lose the cape. She shows him video clips of superheroes who wore capes, and in the end, the capes caused big problems for them, like getting caught on something and causing them to be sucked through a jet engine or worse. That’s her reason for my favorite line in the movie: “No capes.” Her point, I think, is that you can get a lot more stuff done without a cape. I think Jesus agrees.
It seems like every time Jesus did an incredible thing, He would say something similar to the people nearby. He raised a little girl from the dead, and what did He say? “Tell no one.” He met a guy with leprosy and healed him, and said, “Tell no one.” He healed two guys who were blind, and He gave them one admonition before moving on: “Say nothing to anyone.” In a world driven by self-promotion and spin, Jesus modeled something different for us. Jesus was saying that instead of telling people about what we’re doing all the time, there’s a better way. One that doesn’t require any capes that can get snagged on something—something like ourselves. Maybe Jesus wants us to be secretly incredible instead. That was His plan for self-promotion. Secretly incredible people keep what they do one of God’s best-kept secrets because the only one who needs to know, the God of the universe, already knows.
Being secretly incredible goes against the trend that says to do anything incredible you have to buy furniture and a laptop, start an organization, have a mission statement, and labor endlessly over a statement of faith. Secretly incredible people just do things. To be sure, mission statements can have a purpose and statements of faith too, I suppose, but are they really necessary? I don’t think so. Most times, mission statements are just a catchy sentence or two about how noble the task is, and maybe by implication, how noble we are. The truth is, the task would probably be even nobler if we didn’t talk about it and just did it instead. It’s not about being secretive or mysterious or exclusive. It’s about doing capers without any capes.
It’s usually only religious people who know what a statement of faith is anyway. I guarantee the guy at the deli doesn’t. The religious people are the only ones who tease out the missing word or phrase needed to fall in line with their view of faith or doctrine. Their lives aren’t really changed by it, of course, and yours isn’t either. Getting religious people to agree with detailed mission statements or statements of faith is the same. It’s kind of like getting people who already own Chryslers to feel good about owning Chryslers. I’d rather trade all the religious jargon for the chance to invite one person into experiencing Jesus.
You want a mission statement to go along with being secretly incredible? Okay, here it is: “Be Awesome.” That’s it. If you want to follow Jesus’ example of how He did things, that’s probably all we’d write down instead of our otherwise heady doctrinal statements. But there’s more. I don’t think Jesus wants us to make a fashion statement or be edgy or promote ourselves on the backs of clothing and bracelets all the time either. I think instead, Jesus wants us to write “Be Awesome” on an undershirt where it won’t be seen, not on the back of a hoodie.
Jesus hardly talked to anyone about what He’d done. The Bible never depicts one of those end-of-camp slideshows where Jesus goes over all He had done with His disciples. Instead, Jesus modeled that we don’t need to talk about everything we’ve done. It’s like He was saying, what if we were just to do awesome, incredible stuff together while we’re here on earth and the fact that only He knew would be enough? If we did that, we wouldn’t get confused about who was really making things happen. Not surprisingly, we’d get a lot more done too, because we wouldn’t care who’s looking or taking credit. All that energy would be funneled into awesomeness. Even then, though, don’t take the bait that if we do incredible things Jesus will dig us more. He can’t. He already digs us more. And more than that, our pictures are already in His wallet.
There were two guys named Judas who were among the twelve who followed Jesus. There was the bad Judas, who betrayed Jesus and is the Judas we all know about, and there’s also the good Judas, a guy also known as Thaddeus. I hadn’t ever heard about him. I can imagine the good Judas telling everyone for the rest of his life, “Just call me Thad.” I can also imagine he was probably the first guy to want to go into the witness protection program.
After Jesus left, the ones who were following Him decided they needed to add another apostle to replace the bad Judas. The requirements were pretty straightforward: the replacement needed to have been with Jesus the whole time He was here, and he had to be a stand-up guy too. There were two guys the apostles came up with.
One was a guy named Matthias, and the other guy was nicknamed Justus. I’m not sure how they cast lots back then. Honestly, it sounds a lot like rock, paper, scissors to me. Somehow, however, they picked Matthias. He got the nod and has been in every stained-glass window from then on. But I’ve always wondered, what happened to Justus? We never hear about him again, yet he did all the right things, saw all the right stuff, knew who Jesus was, and was a faithful guy.
The thing is, “Justus” sounds a lot to me like “just us.” God’s plans are full of just-us kind of people. I would say probably the majority of us are just-us people, folks who don’t get capes or stained-glass windows. We just get the opportunity to do what God wants us to do without a lot of fanfare.
Even though he lost paper, rock, scissors, I bet Justus was one of those secretly incredible guys who kept on being incredible. We get the same shot. Getting passed by can feel like a great injury. But it’s not. It’s people like us who can be secretly incredible and get the most done. That’s the way Jesus’ reverse economy works. God loves the humble ones, and the humble ones often don’t make it as first-round draft picks for the jobs with big titles or positions. But they always seem to be the first-round picks for God when He’s looking for someone to use in a big way. Jesus’ message is a simple one. We all get a chance to be awesome if we want to be. Not surprisingly, the way to do it best is by being secretly incredible.
We don’t know who lowered a friend through the roof to get him in front of Jesus. We never learn the names of any of the guys who were part of the caper. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if they were people just like us and were wearing undershirts that said “Be Awesome.” And I’ll bet you one more thing: They weren’t wearing capes.