I’m 35,000 words into my book and wrapping up the final chapter on Jesus, the cross, and all the things. It’s a mess, really. I mean, Jesus and the cross. Well, not Jesus and the cross, but what we (the Church!) have done with the message of Jesus and the cross. Here’s my (unedited) attempt to begin untangling it …
“And so what do I believe about Jesus and the cross?
For starters, I think we’ve really missed the entire point of Jesus’ teachings and (as a result) I think we’ve really missed the whole point of Jesus and the point of the cross.
My experience in church was that God expects me to believe certain things …
About HIM – that he is the holy and perfect Creator of all things.
About ME – that I am a sinner, detestable to God and incapable of anything good.
About JESUS – that he came to save me from my wretched sin.
About THE CROSS – that it was a punishment I deserved, but that Jesus took for me.
About THE AFTERLIFE – that believing in Jesus gets me to heaven while not believing in him gets me sent to hell.
About THE END TIMES – that Jesus is coming back and I better be ready.
About THE BIBLE – that it’s the inerrant Word of God.
… God expects me to believe these things (and more) in my brain and doing so will ensure my salvation, my golden-ticket to heaven, and my escape card from hell.
And so, really, the Gospel that I and many others were handed was not much more than a mental exercise or a theology exam or sorts whereby my entrance into heaven would be granted to me only if I could answer all the questions with all the right answers.
“Is Jesus the Son of God?”
“Did Jesus die for your sins?”
“Do you deserve punishment apart from Jesus?”
“Is the Bible the inerrant Word of God?”
This is why when I interviewed to pastor the church I mentioned earlier, all the board was interested in was my answers to their questions.
Right?
No one cared how Jesus impacted my life or the way that the words of Jesus changed the ways in which I chose to live my life. Instead, all they really cared about was that I would toe their theological line and believe the same things about Jesus and the Bible that they believed.
“What do you BELIEVE about Gay people?”
“What do you BELIEVE about Hell?”
“What do you BELIEVE about the Bible?”
“What do you BELIEVE about the role of women in the church?”
In his book “Jesus and the Bicameral Brain” Dr. James Danaher talks about how the human brain is divided into 2 parts – (1) the Left Brain and (2) the Right Brain. The Left Brain, he says, is the more analytical part of our brains that focuses on knowledge and facts and figures and having all the right answers. The Right Brain, however, is able to move beyond the facts and figures and holds space for ambiguity and not knowing - it’s where our imagination lives, the part of us that can transcend language and see beyond the black and white words on the page.
The Gospel that I and many of us were handed is a Left Brained Gospel, right? It’s all about facts, figures, and right answers. It’s all about the black and white stuff on the page, finding and holding on to absolute truth, and being 100000000% certain about what you believe and why you believe it. It’s about standing strong, defending the truth, and proving people wrong who disagree or think differently.
BUT.
Is that the Gospel of Jesus? This is a big question we need to wrestle with. Yeah, I know the murky waters we get into when we read Paul and the other letters attributed to him. And I know all about Revelation and the Old Testament’s many calls to “believe”, as well.
I know.
I know.
I know.
BUT, when we look at the person of Jesus and the things he taught … did he present to us a Left Brained Gospel?
I posed this question on a Facebook post one time and got absolutely lit up and obliterated in the comment section because apparently, someone told me, I never read the Gospel of John which uses the word “believe” a total of 49 times.
Here is one of those many references …
“For God so loved the world that he sent his one and only Son so that whoever BELIEVES in him might not perish, but have eternal life.” - John 3:16
On the surface it seems like my theory is blown to pieces, right? Because in this verse we even see Jesus himself calling people to “believe in him”. I thought so too, but then I came across a book written by Doug Pagitt called “Outdoing Jesus” where he points out that in the Gospel of John when the writer uses the word “believe” he always (every single time) uses the VERB as opposed to the NOUN.
In Greek, Doug says, there are TWO words for “believe” – one is a NOUN describing the Left Brained activity of mentally agreeing with or adhering to a particular idea and the other is a VERB, which is more action oriented. In other words, whereas the NOUN is about believing something with your mind, the VERB is about BEING a certain way in the world.
The NOUN is about what to BELIEVE.
The VERB is about how to BE.
And so when the writer of John has Jesus saying, for example, in John 3:16 that “whoever believes in him will not perish” … he’s not talking about mentally adhering to a certain theology or doctrine about salvation and the cross in order to escape hell; instead, he’s talking about living your life in such a way that the teachings of Jesus impact the way you are BEING in the world so that the world around you and the lives around you grow and evolve instead of perish and devolve.
That gives us a very different picture of the teachings of Jesus, right? And therefore, I think, the Gospel, the cross, salvation, and all the things. Because perhaps, then, the Gospel isn’t really an invitation to sign on to a particular set of beliefs so that we can gain entrance into heaven and escape the fires of hell, but maybe it’s more of an invitation to live our lives in a certain way so that we can co-create with God in making this world and this life more like heaven and less like hell.
Maybe the death of Jesus, then, wasn’t so much to take our place on the cross or to take the punishment that you and I deserve, but maybe his death along with the beating he took was meant to serve as a strong reminder of who we are and how our Creator has intended for us to live our lives and respond to our enemies, to adversity, and to the horrors of this life.”
Glenn || PATREON / BUY ME A COFFEE