Tag Archives: Jesus

Celestial messengers

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Several minutes before the Seventh-day Adventist program begins, I slip into a chair next to a woman who is dressed to the nines. She and I appear close in age, though I am a dull stone next to her sparkle. She is wearing a bright yellow dress with a full skirt and matching heels. The color is electric against her black skin. The vibrant, lady-like attire simultaneously fights and flatters her tall, athletic physique. If life was a fashion spread, hers would be part social commentary, part satire: a fresh interpretation of the 50’s housewife. Her smoothed-back hair highlights a perfect heart-shaped face.

In a charming patois, she tells me she has recently moved here from the Dominican Republic to start a graduate program. I listen, enraptured. Her family wasn’t religious, she tells me, and didn’t attend worship services; she would watch from her bedroom window as a school acquaintance waited every Saturday morning for the bus to church. Something in her classmate’s patient demeanor piqued her curiosity about the destination.

Then, in high school, she began to receive visits from Jesus. She explains matter-of-factly that for many nights, he came to her in dreams, so vivid and real. I can tell by the sincerity with which she speaks that this experience had a profound influence on her. Not long after, she began to wait for the bus with her friend.

What she describes is not so different from what happened to Ellen White, the spiritual head of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. White’s visions began within a few weeks of the Great Disappointment. Something about the failed prediction regarding Christ’s return emboldened this otherwise ordinary young woman to channel divine messages.

During the visions, White grew limp and unresponsive on the outside; on the inside, she took epic journeys guided by angels and other heavenly creatures. She learns that Christ’s failure to appear was all part of God’s plan. Jesus hadn’t come to earth, but he had taken up residence in a “heavenly sanctuary” that, from what I understand, is an intermediary space a little closer to earth than wherever he was before. From this new location, the angels tell her, Jesus is conducting an “investigative judgment” of the planet’s inhabitants. In the meantime, true believers must get ready for the moment when Christ’s invisible presence becomes visible. Engaging in this preparation is the backbone of the Seventh-day Adventist belief system.

My new friend is hoping to meet Jesus again, this time in the flesh.

The Seventh-Day Adventists may be anticipating Jesus’ imminent return, but they don’t seem overly concerned regarding the details. The only mention of any sort of apocalyptic vision came at the end of the service as the microphone was passed around for congregants to share a few words about this or that. The microphone landed in the hands of an older Asian woman. She looked aristocratic, with her hair in a chignon and streaks of grey at her temples. She said, “I’m just so thankful the lord will be returning soon.” Everyone nodded their agreement and then it was time for lunch.

Jesus’ last day

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Given our collective reluctance to believe anyone claiming to be the messiah, why have so many people over the last 2,000 or so years accepted the actual historical Jesus as the son of God? I decide it’s time: I have to go back and read every word Jesus said. It sounds like an enormous task. But, really it isn’t. All the dialogue he is purported to have spoken would fit in fewer than 100 pages if collected back-to-back and, by some accounts, would take a person about two hours if she were to perform it as an enormous, disjointed, and somewhat repetitive monologue. But it can’t possibly be exact quotes, can it? The words attributed to Jesus were written down 50 or more years after he died and, then, not necessarily by the original guys to whom he spoke them. After that, copies of the originals were made by hand until the printing press was invented and later the texts went through translations into modern tongues—all of which has created some distance between the source and us contemporary folks like some epic game of telephone.

I pour over the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—the books of the New Testament where the bulk of the Jesus story is told. It’s amazing what I learn. Again and again, Jesus lets others draw their own conclusions about his identity. He asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” and they’re the ones who say “messiah.” He asks several times, “Who say the people that I am?” When rulers call him “King of the Jews,” he says, “If you say so.” I count about a dozen variations of an exchange like this one: “And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou are the Christ.” I find it truly remarkable that I’ve gone through life thinking that Jesus went around saying, “I’m the messiah,” which has colored my impression of him despite his many good qualities. I’ve just bought what other people have said about Jesus as words he said about himself. On a few occasions he even warns against believing anyone who claims to be Christ.

I arrive at the church at noon expecting that I’ll go through the stations of the cross guiding me through the last 24 hours of Jesus’ life alone because the minister mentioned that they’ll be numbered and easy to traverse. I don’t really know what to expect. I picture a Halloween haunted house with little vignettes—some frightening, some merely creepy—set up around a series of darkened rooms. Here is a ghost that pops out at you; here is a bowl of ketchup and spaghetti that feels like human brains. Are you sufficiently terrified? Why, yes, I am. Thank you.

A small group of three older women and a man plus the minister is assembled near the altar when I walk into the sanctuary. I recognize one of the women; she sat next to me at the Sunday service. She has short white hair and the cute round face of a cabbage patch kid grown old. Today when she spots me, she smiles and waves me over. “We’re just getting started,” she says putting her arm around me and giving me a squeeze. As soon as my shoulder presses against hers, I realize how relieved I am to have companionship through this strange little journey. I wrap my arm around her.

A date with Jesus

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I dab at my face with my shirt sleeve and try to quietly suck the snot back into my head because I wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about me. I’m not having one of those ridiculous “coming to Jesus” moments you hear about. I’m just moved, that’s all—and there’s a difference…a really big difference I will learn eventually.

The minister invites us to return later in the week to go through the “stations of the cross,” which he says he’ll be setting up throughout the sanctuary over the next couple of days. I’ve never heard of “stations of the cross” so I go home and look it up and learn that it’s a Catholic tradition in which a number (usually 14) of “shrines” are erected, each dedicated to one event in the last 24 hours of Jesus’ life. The idea is for the faithful to experience step-by-step that fateful day. It’s not usually celebrated by the Methodists, but the minister says it’s something, “he’s trying out.” I’ve read that a trend is afoot in which the mainline Protestant faiths are embracing elements of Catholic tradition they once distanced themselves from and I suppose this is an example of just that. I decide to return on Good Friday, the day Jesus’ crucifixion is traditionally recognized, to walk through the stations.

I spend several days obsessing about Jesus like I need to prep for a blind date with him at the end of the week. By all accounts, he was a real man, a carpenter and a Jew who was interested and knowledgeable enough in religion to be called a rabbi. Just from the Bible snippets I’ve been hearing over these last several weeks, I know he preached love and equality, even stopping to talk with individuals considered so lowly that his friends wondered what he was doing. All of which makes me like him very much. Yet, I’ve never quite come to terms with his claims of divinity. Why is he exalted as the son of God when others making similar claims are locked away in loony bins? When my best friend Julie and I were 12, she confided in me a painful secret. We were walking home from school and I could sense something was wrong. It wasn’t like her not to tell me everything. Finally she spat it out, she said, “My dad is in the mental hospital.” I knew she was referring to her biological father, a talented artist she didn’t see very often. She called her stepdad by name.

Her face scrunched up, it looked like she was in physical pain, like the time we stepped barefoot into those cactus needles. “He went crazy. He thinks…” She couldn’t say it, whatever it was, it was too horrific.

“What? What? He thinks what?”

Her face was a map of agony. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “He thinks he’s Jesus!”

I didn’t know what to say, how to react. Judging by her face, it was about the worst thing imaginable—and I got the sense it wasn’t the crazy part that so disturbed her, it was the Jesus part. Her shame was apparent, and I wished for something to say to make it go away. She had me promise not to breathe a word to any of our school friends.

Season of Grief

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So it is with a mix of skepticism and heartfelt curiosity that I approach the topic of Jesus now. It happens to be Lent. Before this, what I knew of Lent came from my elementary and middle school years, when a classmate would proudly exclaim that they were “giving something up for Lent.” It might be chocolate or video games or, if she was super hardcore, television. I thought this was a fascinating and impressive endeavor, especially as it seemed to come out of nowhere, like a little personal challenge of willpower. My secret feelings about my own worthiness lent a certain logic to the notion that a person might deny themselves something they loved: a self-inflicted punishment for whatever deep badness lay hidden inside each of us. What any of this had to do with Jesus, I remained blissfully unaware of until recently.

I’m learning that Lent is the time of year when Christians are meant to reflect on the last chapter in Jesus’ life. Sometimes called the “Season of Grief,” it stretches from late winter leading into spring and is recognized over several Sundays that culminate with Easter. Catholic clergy are more likely to formally integrate its commemoration into their services, but it seems Protestants are coming around to honoring Lent with more than a just passing mention. The sequence of events at the heart of the season is so ubiquitous that one need never step foot in church to know the basic facts: Jesus is condemned to death and nailed to a cross. So pervasive is the associated imagery, that it’s hard to actually feel anything in response. (A bloody young man hanging from planks of wood? Just Jesus.) The purpose of Lent is to move past the desensitization, to go deeper into the painful aspects of this story, to at least reach for understanding. In fact, in some cultures a decadent party is thrown before Lent to help sweeten the bitterness of what is sure to be a difficult time of sadness and sacrifice. Carnival in Brazil is an example, as is Mardi Gras in New Orleans—just think of all those partying Nones participating in the preparations for an ancient Christian ritual without even knowing it.

Last week, when I was at an Episcopalian service, the female priest acknowledged how difficult Lent is, explaining that she understood why people would rather leap frog over it and land on the happy Easter part. Today, the Methodist minister, an absent-minded professor-type with a beard and a wall-eye, leads us into the eye of the storm. He explains that when Jesus was summoned to stand trial for his crime, which was claiming to be God’s child, he was greeted by the people as a hero. They knew Jesus had never been anything but exceptionally kind to everyone he encountered, had gone around practicing the love that he preached. The people lined the streets and cheered and spread palm fronds on the ground so that the hooves of the donkey he was riding wouldn’t touch the dirt. After his conviction, the people turned on Jesus, spitting on him, kicking him, ripping at his clothes. They clapped as he was lashed and then cheered as the spikes were driven through his palms and feet.

I’m thinking about how I would have reacted if it were me that was unjustly sentenced to death. I would have been both terrified and pissed, I would have hated all those people, I would have gone down with the bitterest anger in my heart and the worst expletives spewing from my mouth. But Jesus goes willingly, with nothing but pure love for every one of those jerks. Then I think, ‘what if I were one of the crowd?’ Would I have stood up for Jesus? Doubtful. All my information would have been through the grapevine: this man claims to be divine. I wouldn’t buy such a claim now, what makes me think I would have bought it then? Even some of his most loyal followers turned their backs on him. The people who lashed out physically were caught up in a frenzy, they were not any more “bad” or “good” than any of us. We fool ourselves if we don’t recognize that in each of us exists this same capacity for cruelty. Even Jesus knew it, but loved them anyway. I think about the many public examples of greed in our culture, the CEOs who take million dollar bonuses when their businesses have just been bailed out by taxpayers struggling to make ends meet, and all the smaller versions of selfishness we perpetrate throughout any given day, and how Jesus’ actions and message were the antithesis of this kind of behavior.

I glance up at the whirring fans, hoping to blink away whatever this is I feel rising in my heart. Then it happens: tears well up in my eyes. My reaction is about more than just Jesus, I realize. It’s the bubbling up of emotions I’ve kept tamped down throughout my church visits so far. These designated places where life’s most profound subjects take center stage, all the devotion that pours out, all the people who show up on Sundays to search in their hearts, even if not everyone comes for this reason or the “right” reason, I still think most people are sincere when they walk through those doors. They want to remember the importance of love, forgiveness, kindness. If nothing else, they will lend their voices to those of their neighbors. They will hear the words expressed on these topics by wise people who have lived and died, and maybe they will be touched by their meaning. It’s such a beautiful attempt at something good.

This moment feels like a small victory, a step toward some greater wisdom I’m in desperate need of—a small step, but a step nonetheless. I can’t possibly understand the essence of Christianity unless I get Jesus. I have yet to tackle the biggest challenge: how to wrap my mind around God. But Jesus is a start.