Scriptorium Daily
At some point a Christian says he loves Jesus. I think that is an infallible test of anyone who might be a Christian. Not everybody who says they love the Savior is a Christian, but nobody who doesn’t is.
What does it mean to say I love somebody I have not seen?
It does not mean I love a mere idea. The ideas of Jesus are interesting, but not as intriguing to my intellect, I confess with some shame, as those of Plato. If my goal were to solve mental puzzles, then I would ask for a day with Socrates, not the Jesus of the Gospels.
Loving Jesus is not loving being in love. As a romantic the passion for passion is a problem for me, so I know the difference. Jesus insists on being treated like a person. When I sin, He insists I repent. He has mercy on me, but demands I admit I am a sinner. At times, I wish I were simply a “thing” Christ valued, but He loves me. When I wish to be treated like a commodity, He treats me like a person accountable for what I do.
Jesus is a person. He has opinions, ideas, and feelings. As God and as man, He has opinions only a fool would ignore and that are not so abstract that they are beyond impacting my daily life. If Jesus were just God, I might plead ignorance of His will, become lost in the real inability of any man to know the Divine Nature. Instead God insisted on becoming flesh and living as a man, so He can relate easily to me.
In some ways, it is like loving Hope. My wife, my bed partner as modern commercials call her, keeps insisting I treat her as a changing, living being that cannot be reduced to a check-list of “things I know about my wife.” Strictly speaking, she is not mine at all, but God’s own.
I can no more own Hope than a slaver could own Frederick Douglass.
And really who would want to try owning the woman she is?
Jesus insists that I treat Him as the person He is. In His case, that is a very big deal. Hope does not deserve capitalizing every personal pronoun. My darling is not She, but He is He.
My secular friends think, of course, that I am talking to myself. When I say I love Jesus, I love some mental construct that I have pulled together from reading the Gospels and my life experiences.
Maybe, but it does not feel that way. As a child I had imaginary friends, but Jesus is not like they were. He does not go along with my attitudes or prejudices, but in fact frequently challenges them. Just when I think I have Him figured out, He insists on overturning my neat image of Him.
In that way Jesus is more like my experiences with Hope, than my childhood experiences with race of imaginary beings called the Hongese. I could put the Hongese away, but Jesus keeps on appearing in my thought life at odd times.
As I get older, I begin to understand the answer to the most obvious question I am usually asked at this point. Why does Jesus hide His physical presence from me? I think it for the same reason that it is good for me to be far from Hope. When I am with Hope her beauty and my passion for her can overwhelm knowing her. I am tempted merely to adore and not to love her with my heart, mind, and body.
Jesus is more beautiful than Hope. If I saw Him, I could only worship, even if I did not love Him. Evidently, no being, not even Satan, can see Him as He is and not say: “Jesus Christ is Lord.” If I am to have a relationship with Him, He must hide as He did when He was on Earth.
I could be kidding myself, but I cannot believe it. My sense of Jesus has become greater than my sense of the world around me at times. It is easier for me to believe that my eyes are kidding me, than that His quiet, lovely, insistent voice is unreal. Years of listening, or trying to listen, have given me that blessing.
If it is an illusion, it is one I would have jarred, but which is not shaken by the real world. Instead, I hear His voice even at painful times or in hard turns my life takes.
I love Jesus. This Jesus is perfectly revealed in the Gospels and this has kept me from kidding myself or being deluded by false voices before and will do so again, but it is Jesus I love. I love the Gospels, because they show me my Lord and my God.
America, my beloved country, may fall. My friends may betray me. Hope may let me down, God help me, but there is a Man and more than a Man, God come in the flesh, a person that will never let me go. He judges me rightly, justly, and knows every error, stupidity, and vice in my life. He is not soft on that sin, but loves me in any case.
I cannot write what that does for me. I cannot say how I long for everyone I meet to have that comfort. That there is beauty does not comfort me, because I am not. That there is goodness can make me afraid, because I am not. That there is truth reveals my errors to me. But that there is Love and Love is a person full of grace and mercy is news so good that I cannot write anymore.
I love you Jesus.
