Domesticating Jesus

1 John 2:28-3:10
By Jean L. Keller-Thau
Associate Pastor, Dillsburg Brethren in Christ Church

I thought I was well equipped to raise Amanda, my youngest child. I had already walked through the challenges of raising three children in less than ideal circumstances, who had entered their teen years with all their limbs still intact, so how hard could it be to raise one small child with a wonderful husband that I loved with all my heart. The one thing I didn’t anticipate was the level of my anxiety in “getting it right this time.” That added extraordinary pressure to parenting. It created in me a fear that caused me to want total control over this small bundle of love and joy, driving me to a place of near desperation that this beautiful little girl become the person I envisioned her to be. I wanted to mold her into the image in my mind and my heart. There was nothing wrong with the image I had created for my daughter; it just wasn’t an image that I had allowed her to mold through a personal relationship with Christ. I was not very open to her individuality; an expression of God’s working in her life. I wanted her to be polite, caring, compassionate, but it was my perception of those qualities that I wanted her to conform to rather than allowing her to discover her own character and allow God to shape that through the ups and downs of her life. Most importantly, I wanted to “domesticate” her so my life would be comfortable. Expressing her individuality could at times set off landmines in an otherwise peaceful landscape of day-to-day living.

Unfortunately, the more I struggled to mold her to my image of the ideal daughter, the more challenges I faced in truly building a loving, caring relationship where we both could reach out and draw closer to one another. In order for her to become her own person, she felt the need to break away because she felt threatened by the walls I built. Those walls discouraged her from becoming too connected to me as her Mom because of my need to control, mold, and shape her life. I finally came to the realization that I did not have ownership over this incredible child that God had so graciously brought into my life. She was a gift, and my responsibility was to care for that gift in a way that allowed her to grow and find Christ in her life, allowing him to mold her into his image. I needed to see her as she truly was formed by God. I haven’t by any stretch of the imagination reached that place of perfection in my relationship with my daughter. I have, however, begun the process, and our conversations have taken on a new direction that has brought us into an incredible, loving relationship where we have much more open communication and respect. I am allowing myself to see my daughter for who she is and to appreciate the woman she is becoming.

 

            Do we have the tendency to treat our relationship with Jesus Christ in the same way? Is it our desire to shape Jesus into our own image? Do we try to domesticate Jesus to avoid his setting off landmines in our otherwise peaceful, day-to-day lives? I believe we do, and in the attempt to domesticate him, we are tempted to understand him in light of what we already believe about the world. We try to place him in familiar categories; we want to have some natural, comfortable understanding of who he is. The tendency is to make him into something we might expect, what he would be like if he were our creation. In that process of re-imaging Jesus so he makes sense to us, we reduce him to the commonplace. Once we have finished our re-imaging, we can be comfortable with our lives because he will pose no threat to our complacency.

In order to domesticate Jesus we also take his sayings and reconstruct them to fit our image of who he is. When Jesus says “Anyone who does not give up all that he has cannot be my disciple,” or when he says “When you give a feast, do not invite your friends and relatives, lest they repay you. Instead invite the poor, the lame, the blind, the maimed,” or “do not lay up for yourselves treasure on earth,” we find it difficult to believe that we are asked to accept these sayings literally. So our tendency is to reconstruct his sayings in a way that feels more comfortable. What we have left is not true revelation. We remove ourselves from the necessity of allowing the Holy Spirit to speak into our lives in providing for us an understanding of the hard sayings of Jesus. We are easily persuaded that the life Jesus calls us to doesn’t require our total surrender.

Consider Jesus command to “take up our cross.” In many cases, we have reduced that to an understanding of the cross we bear in having to deal with a difficult coworker, a misbehaving child, or an abusive spouse. But when Jesus told his followers to “take up your cross and follow me” they understood that to mean following him to the death. According to Dietrich Bonheoffer, “When Jesus bids a man come, he bids him come and die.” Bonheoffer truly understood the call “to take up his cross,” for he died at the hands of the Nazis, ministering to and pastoring his fellow prisoners up until the hours right before his execution.

We focus on Jesus calling us to a change in behavior, when in reality Jesus is calling us to character transformation, changing our heart. We have attempted to domesticate Jesus in a way that allows us to simply express love in good deeds, but often that love doesn’t automatically come from a heart that’s focused on Christ. We have changed our behavior, but not our heart condition. Jesus didn’t die on the cross to provide self-improvement tips for living, he died on the cross to provide a way for us to be reconciled to God, and in that reconciliation, to be transformed to his image. We don’t always fully understand what Jesus meant when he spoke of peace, love, and doing good. It isn’t about feelings, or being nice, or tolerating others, although those are good and honorable things. It is about conforming our will to God’s, and choosing to live our lives according to the truth of his word.

We don’t need to look very far into the New Testament to find examples of how even the disciples were tempted to reshape Jesus. The crowd wanted to make Jesus their earthly king; Simon Peter wanted to offer Jesus “better” ideas about achieving his redemptive mission.

Paul spoke to the Corinthian church about this very thing. In 2 Corinthians 11:4 Paul complained that “For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.” 

As I thought about these examples from the New Testament, I realized that I have re-imagined Jesus to be a white, American male in his thirties who befriended and cared for people that I feel comfortable in befriending. Just as the Roman soldiers stripped Jesus of his clothing and placed on him one of their own military cloaks, I too have had the tendency to put on Jesus my own kind of clothes.

Do we attempt to domesticate Jesus because we are fearful that he will in some way transform our lives and that will force us outside of the comfort we have created for ourselves? Fear can lead us to all kinds of irrational thinking and behavior, so we want to rid ourselves of what creates that fear in us. We see that fear in the people who witnessed the healing of the demon-possessed man named Legion in Mark 5. Jesus had performed a miracle in their midst, but they were not able to see Jesus for who he truly was and they were afraid of this one who could perform such miracles, who possessed such awesome power. Such supernatural power would have been unnerving to people who had not shown any interest in honoring God. As we are told in Mark 5:17 the people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region rather than responding in gratefulness for ridding Legion of the demons and ridding the people from their fear of Legion.

We diminish Jesus’ power for fear that if he is able to remove the demons from Legion, perform miracles in our midst, he might also be able to convict us of our sin, which might cause us to change behaviors that have become very comfortable. The people who witnessed the miracle of Legion recognized that this Jesus could have the potential for broad and sweeping change. Even though life was not perfect, they were comfortable with the known and feared the unknown. They were afraid of what this man might mean for the rest of their lives. Often we become comfortable with “a little religion” but we are not ready to fully commit our entire lives. We seem to want to follow Jesus, but only if that following means little more than live and let live, be tolerant, don’t judge. We want a new life in Christ, but we are afraid of what that might mean.

As we domesticate Christ we dim his light that is to shine through us. We become like a window in much need of washing. The light can still shine through us, but it is always refracted and dimmer than the light was before it entered us. We have difficulty imaging how to set aside human preferences for the pure light that is found in the gospel. We become divided along lines of race and class and worship in ways that reflect more the understanding of the world, its culture and history, instead of the true light of Christ. We tend to focus on one small aspect of Jesus teaching and ignore areas that make us a bit uncomfortable. We can more easily connect to his perfect love, but have difficulty understanding that perfect love as we lay it alongside his perfect justice. We find it difficult to embrace mystery, and so we re-imagine Jesus in ways that we can comprehend, leaving little room for faith. When we domesticate Jesus to fit our agendas, we surely will dim his light in the world and in our lives.

Our Scripture text this morning in 1 John seeks to expose those who distort the truth through their false teaching and living, and to reassure those who are staying the course in faithfulness to John’s teachings about Christ. John wants to encourage his readers to stay that course. We are told that “now we are children of god, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” John seeks to truly understand what it means to be born of God. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God.” He is drawing us to an understanding of the need to truly know Christ in order to be transformed to his image. Our identity as God’s children is firmly in his hands, but we cannot imitate someone we don’t know. We must be careful to truly know Christ in order to be transformed to his character. We are told in verse 6 that no one who is truly in an intimate relationship with Christ “keeps on sinning.” Can we have that intimate relationship without an understanding of Jesus true character? 

John is presenting an ideal, a vision of Christian character that is godly and above reproach. He would hardly say, “Be as much like Christ as you can.” Rather, he would urge us to take on Christ’s perfect character, even though it may feel as if that ideal is beyond our reach. If, however, we domesticate Jesus, can we even begin to know his character? Unless we recognize who God wants us to become, we cannot be transformed and, without transformation, we will not bear fruit.

Without a true understanding of Christ’s character can we find assurance in our salvation? When we distort Jesus in order to re-imagine him to fit our needs and desires, we effectively deny ourselves his righteousness that leads to peace and joy as we reflect on eternal things. Our re-imagining of Jesus may provide us some comfort in the world, but we have robbed ourselves of the transforming power that can only be found in the true character of God. It is when we see Jesus as he truly is that we receive our security before the Lord. Our source of power to live a life outside of sin is the divine rebirth spoken to in 1 John 2:29. In an understanding of our rebirth, we gain a confidence that our identity is completely found in Christ. This rebirth is testified to by how we live our lives, and that must be as it is modeled by Jesus. Our lives must be lived in undivided devotion, loyalty, and obedience to the person of Christ even when that devotion denies our self-interest.

We need to go back to the authentic Jesus of the New Testament, whether or not that fits our re-structured image of his character and mission. For we are told in 1 Corinthians 8:6 that there is only “one Lord, Jesus Christ.” When we take Jesus out of his original context we begin to manipulate and domesticate him in such a way that what we present to the world is a caricature of him rather than a true portrait. We must have open minds and hearts to listen to the Biblical text and embrace the witness of the whole of Scripture as it speaks to us in regard to the character of Christ. Dr. Peter Kuzmic, founding President of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Yugoslavia, tells us that if we are to renew the credibility of Christian mission, “our main task may be simply to ‘wash the face of Jesus,’ for it has been dirtied and distorted by the compromises of institutional Christianity through the centuries.” 

Bill Donahue in his book, In the Company of Jesus tells us that “Jesus is our provocative teacher who shatters our illusions, renews our minds, exposes our motives, and confronts our unbelief. He is our sacred friend who shares our suffering, desires our fellowship, guards our trust, recognizes our weakness, and celebrates our success. He is our truthful reveler who describes our heavenly Father, discloses our identity, uncovers our past, exposes our needs, and unveils our destiny. He is the extreme forgiver who hears our confession, invites our repentance, cancels our debt, takes our punishment, and restores our relationships. He is our authentic leader who releases our strengths, aligns our vision, demands our devotion, redeems our failures, and rewards our obedience. He is the compassionate healer who cries our tears, binds our wounds, carries our burdens, covers our shame and restores our community. Jesus is our relentless lover who invites our intimacy, desires our faithfulness, respects our individuality, protects our vulnerability, and releases our joy. He is the supreme conqueror who confronts our enemy, chooses our weapons, supplies our strength, secures our victory, and celebrates our triumphs. He is both the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and the Christ of the Apocalypse.” This Jesus is not merely an ancient prophet but the living, breathing Son of God.

Can we say as Thomas, who after putting his hands in the nail prints exclaimed, “My Lord and My God,” for that is truly who Jesus is, “Our Lord and Our God.” I need to remind myself of that each morning in order to truly open my life to be conformed to him rather than trying to conform him to my image of who I believe he should be. For He is the incomparable Christ! 

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