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.