Jesus Gets Us but He Gets Us Doesn't

 

As usual, I’m behind the times with my posts, but I like things to die down before I speak up.

The He Gets Us campaign again spent upwards of $10,000,000 for ads during the Super Bowl.  Part of me is glad to see the name Jesus but I can’t help but ask: at what cost beyond just the dollars and cents?

Andrew Walker, Professor of Ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary noted in a tweet after the game that there were no Nazis shown getting their feet washed in the ad, no KKK members, no MAGA hat wearers.  He then asked an appropriate question (paraphrased): don’t they deserve to have their feet washed, too, or is that only for left-of-center socially acceptable sins like LGBTQ and abortion? Others, like Professor Walker, more well known than me (Robert Gagnon among them) have asked similar questions.

Where He Gets Us (the campaign, not Jesus) fails to get us is it does not deal with sin . . . at all.  Jesus said in Mark 1:15 “repent and believe the good news.”  Repent of what?  Sin.  For what else can there be repentance?  We certainly need not repent of good deeds or for worshipping God or glorifying God.  What is the good news?  That by repentance through faith in Christ you can be forgiven of all sin.  Paul noted in Romans 3:10 (quoting Psalm 14:3 and Psalm 53:1), there is none who are righteous, not even one.  This is the default setting of every human being that has been in existence since Adam and Eve’s fell from grace in the Garden.  It is an inescapable feature of human existence.

Apparently, the He Gets Us campaign either (a) doesn’t care, (b) doesn’t understand Christian theology, or (c) is pulling a bait and switch.  None of these are desirable characteristics. 

Apologists for the campaign will argue well at least people are seeing Jesus’ name in public on one of the most watched programs on tv every year, doesn’t that count for something?  Well, yeah, to some extent. 

He Gets Us throws the name Jesus out there, but isn’t really directly promoting the whole Jesus.  It was more of a Barney the Dinosaur kind of Jesus singing I love you, you love me . . . without sufficient context for people to get the whole message.  Might some folks investigate Jesus further because of these commercials?  Possibly.  But how can we conclude He Gets Us actually cares without telling people the more fundamental problem: THEY ARE SINNNERS IN NEED OF A SAVIOR? 

The second problem is that the campaign makes you wonder if the people running it actually understand Christian theology.  The foot washing commercial took a scene out of John Chapter 13 where Jesus was celebrating the Passover for the last time with his disciples.  There is theological weightiness and heaviness in this circumstance.  Nowhere in Scripture is foot washing proclaimed as some sort of indication of one’s love for neighbor. The commercial implies Jesus went around washing people’s feet to show how much he cared.  Foot washing was a lowly task because people in those days, who walked almost everywhere and wore footwear that didn’t cover their feet completely had very dirty feet.  It was a menial task allotted to the lowest of servants because it was gross.

Jesus was using the foot washing as an enacted parable of sorts to show his disciples how they were to relate to each other and to other Christians, not to the world at large.  In fact, the context of the entire situation was Judas leaving to betray Jesus and Jesus telling the disciples that one of them would betray him.  In John 13:18 Jesus says “ I am not speaking of you all [regarding the point of the foot washing]; I know whom I have chosen . . .”  He told them they were not to wash Judas’ feet because he was not “chosen.”  

Each disciple was to seek to be the servant of the other – later he tells them the abiding characteristic of Christians should be love for each other. (John 13:34 – 35).  Yes, Christians are to evangelize – but that wasn’t what Jesus was demonstrating here.  The point was that if he, their master, was willing to wash their feet, they should be willing to wash each other’s feet to show their love for one another.  It’s not symbolic of how Christians are to interact with non-believers but how Christians are to interact with each other.

Finally, there’s the bait-and-switch aspect here.  What in the world do you do with someone who says “I like the Jesus on the commercial” when they meet the real Jesus?  The Jesus who says “repent” and who tells a woman caught in adultery to sin no more and who has come not to bring peace but division.  When confronted with the full picture of Jesus and not just the cuddly Barney version, you have to think people are going to get rather incensed.  They’ll rightly say to He Gets Us I didn’t want that Jesus.  Offering a false gospel is offering no gospel at all.  In fact, Galatians 1:8 says that preaching another gospel is “accursed” (some versions might say “anathema”).

He Gets Us isn’t telling the truth because somehow the people who run it have concluded people just can’t handle the truth.  Well, this isn’t a Tom Cruise movie and people aren’t on a witness stand being cross-examined.  This is real life.  We have to be honest with people.  He Gets Us doesn’t get it.

 

A professor's lame lambasting of the word lame

 

https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/lets-stop-using-the-word-lame

No. Let’s not.

The above is a link to an article by a so-called professor of English, Ethnic Studies, and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.

Acting as if it somehow denigrates people to use the word lame is completely contrived.  Our erstwhile English professor is correct that the word lame has in the past referred to a physical condition, typically related to one’s difficulty or inability to walk. I daresay if tomorrow you interviewed 100 everyday people on the street what you’d find is most would define lame as per the current vernacular – it means something isn’t good or worth the time, money, or effort or that it’s just dumb.  Most (likely 90% or more is my guess) wouldn’t even realize that it had a meaning related to a person’s physical condition. Agonizing over the current usage as somehow demeaning creates angst and worry where none is required or even meaningful.

Why do I even care?  Irony. The same English professor would likely be angered if I wrote that we shouldn’t be using gay to mean homosexuals – she’d argue that’s what the word means now and that I should just get over it and that words sometimes change meaning or add meaning over time.  The word “gay” until about 50 years ago still meant happy or well-disposed.  Now it doesn’t.  That’s in the nature of words. The word “texting” didn’t exist in 1980 when I was a teenager. But we now use it as a gerund (a verb used as a noun typically ending in “ing”) to mean sending a written message via a device known as a smartphone. It may, or may not, retain this usage exclusively over time. Neither I nor Professor Wendorff can know.  The irony is that it is all-too-predictable that I'd be told to stop being whatever villainous kind of "phobe" or "ist" it is to suggest we go back to gay meaning happy.

One of the most fascinating things about words and usage is the additions and changes that occur over time. We don’t speak in Chaucer’s Late Medieval English. For that matter we don’t speak the same English as that of the late 1700’s. Fortunately, many words retain their meanings over long periods of time (we could likely converse reasonably well with people from the 1700’s but there would be awkward moments).  So why, suddenly, must we stop using lame in its current form?

To add insult to injury, let me use some clichés to describe what the good Professor is doing here. She’s finding a cure for a disease that doesn’t exist; she’s treating everything as a nail that requires hammering; she’s sawing off the branch while standing on it. 

We don’t need so-called do-gooders like the Professor shaming people for their ordinary usage of words because she needs to justify her salary and position at a university teaching nonsensical ideas like not using lame to mean what it has come to mean.

She's being, dare I say it . . .  LAME.

Their sins are not your sins are not my sins - we can't repent for "generational" sins

 

It dawns on me that this whole business of evangelicals “repenting” of the sins of their forebears goes far beyond the biblical commands and, in fact, encroaches on the power of the Holy Spirit.  Ultimately, it is an usurpation of God’s work.  Hear me out.

In Mark 1:15 Jesus proclaimed that all should “repent and believe” that the kingdom of God was at hand.  In John Chapter 3, Jesus explains to Nicodemus that he must be born again.  Again and again we read in the Gospels and throughout the New Testament that true Christianity involves a movement of the individual person away from the old and toward the new (2 Cor. 5:17).  We are now a “new creation.”  Even the episode of the thief on the cross teaches that salvation comes to individuals who act upon the understanding of who and what Jesus is.

In other words, repentance for sin is a matter for an individual who responds to the Holy Spirit’s prompting and recognizes his or her unworthiness before a holy God.  Romans 3:23 tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  Yet, Romans 4:8 tells us “Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord will never count against him.”  The word “one” in the Greek is actually  a)nh\r which is the singular form.

Finally, in 1 John, the apostle explains that Christians have an advocate, Jesus, who will stand before God when they sin, indicating that Christians will not stop sinning until such time as we are with God in heaven.  There is no indication from John that Christians need seek any advocacy regarding the sins of others.  Jesus told us in Matthew 6:34 (my paraphrase) today has enough troubles of its own, so focus on those rather than on troubles over which you have no control.  While Jesus was discussing the anxiety of tomorrow, the reality is he could have been talking to us about the anxiety of the past.

Too many in the evangelical community are effectively taking on the sins for which Christ already suffered.  Frankly, it’s not simply seriously misguided, it’s rank heresy.  We are not required to repent for things we didn’t do.  I can’t repent for anyone else’s sins – there is no Scripture that allows me to do this.  I can lament, but I can’t repent for someone else’s sins.  More importantly, did not Jesus’ work on the cross already pay the price for all sin?  Think of it this way, if I got behind on my car loan and someone paid off the loan on my car, or the mortgage on my house, I no longer have to keep paying for it.  It’s done.  I get the title, free and clear.  No one can come back to me years later and demand more payments from me . . . even though I wasn’t the one who paid off the loan! Even more clearly, no one can ever come back and ask us for payment on loans for which we never signed a promissory note, especially when those notes were also paid off by someone else.

Jesus paid it all (as the old song says), so we not only don’t have to pay, we can’t pay.  We mar and mock the work Jesus did on the cross when we try to repent for sins we did not commit, as if we need to add something to what Jesus already completed.

Some will say I’m misunderstanding what’s going on here.  I’m mixing up repentance with the atonement.  But I’m not.  The atonement was only necessary because of sin.  Repentance is necessary for the sins I’ve committed (my mortgage to God if you will).  Once I’ve repented, I’ve appropriated the benefit of Jesus paying off my mortgage to God, if you will.  The analogy isn’t perfect (or it would be the thing analogized) but I trust it helps to understand why we should not get involved in the charade of attempting to repent for the sins of others, especially those long dead.