White Jesus

There are very few "celebrity pastors" that I follow and respect. One of the exceptions to this is Judah Smith. Judah is the lead pastor of a mega church in Seattle Washington. He recently wrote a book called Jesus is ____. The purpose of this book is to tell the story of Jesus and who He is.

In promoting the book he put billboards around the city that simply said Jesus is _____. Leaving a blank on the billboard left the door open for people to vandalize and fill in the blank. As you can see from the picture, someone wrote 'middle eastern' in this spot.

Seeing this picture on Instagram got me thinking how rarely people in this culture view Jesus as a middle eastern man. I don't know the exact history of how Jesus became white but I'm sure it has to do with the church trying to make an image of Jesus that people can relate to in this culture.

I feel like this goes beyond simply making Jesus white, it also involves making Jesus into someone we can manipulate into something we are more comfortable with. People are guilty of doing this all the time. I'm sure we have all heard someone say "my Jesus would never". This is something people inside the church are guilty of doing. However, people outside the church are guilty of this as well. Often it takes a different appearance. Proof of this is t-Shirts that say "Jesus is my homeboy". This sort of this makes Jesus into the guy who lets things slide, making it easier to live a life of sin.

When Jesus was alive He was not interested in catering to people's expectations of Him. He spoke the truth wherever He went and I believe that's what we need to do wherever we go. All of this needs to be coupled with love.

Here are the rules...

One of my first blogs on the topic of Jesus was based upon a video from Vintage 21. As a reminder, these videos are in a series that spoke about the misconceptions about Jesus and different ways the chuch miscommunicates who He actually is. I would love to show you another video in this series, this one speaking specifically about how culture, and especailly people in the church view Him as someone who has many rules and regulations.

In this hilarious video which is a satire on Chrisian legalism, Jesus is giving the rules for the first Christian meeting. Such important rules such as wearing t-shirts with Jesus' face on them and only luahging in the church if it is about how dumb the devil is, and my persnal favourite, you must have a stylish beard like His. After all these rules have been stated a man bursts into the meeting angry because he can't go to heaven. He even grew out his beard! Jesus stated that because he went to a football game he can't go to heaven.

Why I feel like this video is so impactful is that so often we think that Jesus has a ton of rules and that He is trying to take everything in life that we enjoy and say that it is evil or bad. I think this is a reason why many people keep their distance from Christianity or shy away from going deeper in their walk with Him. There may be things in their life that they enjoy doing but they have fear they will have to give them up.

It is true that the sinful things we do need to be excluded from our life because they are things that are harmful to both ourselves and our relationship with Christ. The problem with this mentality is that people think that they have to clean themselves up before they can be accepted by Jesus. I would argue that people outside the church think this way because often they need to clean themselves up before they can be accepted by Christians.

Do you know how much this must break the heart of Jesus? He died because we could not live up to the standard the law set, and now we are putting the burden of obligation and rules on others. I think it is time we all started showing people the kind of radical grace we have been given. Once this has taken place I would argue that the dirt in peoples lives would start to be washed away.