Gumby Jesus

Jesus can be like Gumby. You can stretch him around anything you have a mind to. (Although, as you see in the pictures, the little Gumby I bought turned out to be not very stretchy. I had to make adjustments to get him to stretch.)

You can stretch Jesus across a gun (here, just my BB gun). You can stretch him across bars of gold (here, it’s just a spray-painted brick, though I suspect to Jesus there would be no difference). You can stretch him across your ethnicity and your nation. You can carry a painting of him around as you wreak violence. You can stretch his arms across Your Latest Thing, and say, “Thank you, Jesus!” You can stretch him and say, “Jesus, died to give me all this.” Sitting on a lifetime’s accumulated pile of stuff, armed to the teeth, you can say to God, “Thou hast made me thus.”

I have been thinking about how Jesus gets stretched since I read Russell Moore’s book, Losing Our Religion, and since I read his follow-up interview in Newsweek.

In the book, Moore tells of a pastor describing “the game” of successful preaching: “You give them 90 percent of the red meat they expect,” he said, “and then you can do the 10 percent of the side stuff you want to do, on immigrants or whatever” (p. 7).

In the Newsweek interview, Moore says, “Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount . . .  [and having] someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’” Christians, Moore says, think Jesus is weak.

After all, as Lauren Boebert noted, Jesus didn’t have enough AR-15s to keep his government from killing him.

If Jesus, identified by his followers as the Son of God, had only capitalized on that title, he would not have ended up hanging limp, like a week-old cut flower, on a cross. If he had done useful things, like smiting Rome with the breath of his mouth, no one would have minded if he wanted to heal lepers and then let them call him God. That could have been the 10% stuff he wanted to do if he’d only given them the 90% red meat stuff.

Another of Jesus’ critical errors: He applied all his fame and notoriety to weak humans. He did not raise himself to kingship and then, just once in a while show mercy to some poor slob, some outcast. Everybody loves stories like that. Instead, Jesus tossed his whole stack of divine chips into the streets. Mercy and compassion were his main game. What a waste.

What finally sunk his ship was going public with his “Compassion for the Wasted People Project.” He could have escaped crucifixion if he had only stayed in the gutter with the spent people, the morally deficient, and the unproductive. If only he’d just stayed on the down-low with the low down. But no, he decided to go viral by feeding five thousand of them. He decided to flip the power-and-oppression tables in the temple. He decided to tell stories in which God appears foolish by draping his love over some stupid kid who had blown all his inheritance. Jesus made himself a royal pain.

It is good then, to just openly admit that Jesus, in his actual life, teaching, and example, is so often worthless by modern “Christian” standards.

I have become a disbeliever in the Jesus I used to worship, the Jesus commonly promoted these days by his preachers, promoters, and politicians. Jesus’ name has become meaningless to me through overuse and misapplication. The more his self-proclaimed chosen ones and Gumby-fiers claim to have absolute truth, the farther away they are from the real Jesus.

I too am far away. I have lost faith. With precious few exceptions, I trust none of his paid spokespeople to speak or sing to me about Jesus.

Yet, I cannot shake him.

Precisely because he, as he defined himself and as he lived, refused earthly power, possessions, national identity, and violence, I yearn for him. His sheer and total otherness beckons. I am Nicodemus in the night.

I am starting from scratch. It’s like what restorers do with chemicals to liberate old paintings from layers of grime. It’s like Phillip Yancey’s book and its cover art, which whispers like flame to moth: The Jesus I Never Knew. I wonder if once I leave behind the thronging hullaballoo-ers and red meat carnivores and saber-rattlers and flag-wavers and gong-clangors, I can get a look at Jesus from out here on my spiritual limb. 

I catch glimpses of Jesus, at least I think I do, in places of human weakness and woke-ness. There is no game here. Just the grist of human suffering. Just his message and his vision, stretched but never breaking, over an otherwise “useless” person.

If I ever find him, I suspect it will be here. I hope so.