Hot Wing Jesus
“Hey, Jesus is kind of like the hot wings at Buffalo Wild Wings.”
We’ve been going through the book of Mark, using Timothy Keller’s King’s Cross as our guide. It can be quite a challenging book, especially for teenage boys who are more interested in playing Just Cause 3 on their Playstations or who have the attention span of, well, teenage boys.
Tonight we read the part where Jesus comes into the city of Jerusalem as a king riding triumphantly...on a donkey. This strange juxtaposition of royalty and poverty seems to plague Jesus’s entire ministry, symbolizing His manifesto for a Kingdom that is upside down to our world, completely backwards to our natural way of thinking.
And those apparent contradictions aren’t just limited to kings and donkeys. The youth pastor was explaining how Jesus is described as a lion and as a lamb, as both a powerful conqueror and as a meek servant.
(Hence our intrepid 7th-grader’s comparison to hot wings: “Yeah! The lamb is like the the mild parmesan garlic flavor, and the lion is like the fire-hot spicy kind.”)
But his observation got me thinking about this apparent duality that Jesus has, this spectrum from mild to fierce, from lamb to lion, from love to wrath; and how often we emphasize one over the other.
This morning I led a Sunday School class using a video by Francis Chan, and he brings up a similar dichotomy in his message. Essentially what he winds up saying is that the only reason he follows Jesus is because he is terrified of the consequences of not following Him. “I mean, look at the book of Revelation,” he says, citing the terror and wrath and fury of God’s judgment.
Now, I have a great issue with this idea, and I told the students exactly how I felt about it in our discussion afterwards. I don’t follow Jesus out of fear. I follow Jesus because He loves me, and the shalom He promised is beautiful. I follow Jesus because I don’t think there’s any other way that leads to Life and reconciliation and restoration. I follow Jesus because I believe it leads to fullness.
Are there consequences? Yes! Just like there are consequences for killing someone or robbing a bank. But I don’t just avoid doing those things because I’m scared of the punishment or because I don’t want to go to jail; I choose not to do them because I believe not doing them is a better way to live--a way that promotes life and wholeness and prosperity, instead of devastation and destruction. In the same way, I follow Jesus not because I’m scared of what He’ll do to me if I don’t; I follow Him because I think His way is the Truth.
And I mean, I get it. I was around when the Left Behind series got big, and--true story--when I was in fourth grade, I had nightmares every single night about my family getting raptured and me getting abandoned and left all alone on a burning planet, with a God who told me: “It’s too late for you now.” Like, those 4 months of terrifying visions are the reason I walked down the aisle at a church revival to say the prayer. I get it.
But although that fear of the Lord is what got me through the door, it’s not what keeps me around. I stay for the joy, the fullness, the life and teachings of Jesus. I believe that His way truly does lead to redemption for all of creation, and it’s precisely because His ways are so contrary to human nature that I believe it’s true.
The theme for the Yellow House this month is Racial Reconciliation and Nonviolence, so we are reading a book called Fight, by Preston Sprinkle. I find this book fascinating, because it explores and challenges the narratives of violence and militarism that humanity likes to assume are the most effective ways to handle conflict. But it’s clear to anyone who studies history that violence only leads to more violence, so why do we always assume that wars will bring peace? Eventually, someone will rise up to take vengeance on whoever last used violence to hurt them. That’s just the way the world works, and it is repeated time and time again throughout history. (Incidentally, this is what “an eye for an eye” was supposed to prevent; instead of wreaking more vengeance, and hurting the other more than you were hurt in a misguided attempt to regain dominance and instill fear, the Israelites’ God attempted to put a cap on the violence. Don’t take any more than was taken from you, He says.)
Which is why Christ’s call to nonviolence is so radical--and so hard to swallow. But it also explains why nonviolence is such an effective response to violence; when you refuse to get even, you pull the rug out from under that person’s feet. Instead of adding more fuel to the fire, more crimes for them to get angry about, you essentially absorb the violence, cutting it off at its root. It’s why the Bible consistently talks about things like praying for your enemies, doing good to those who hate you, being slow to anger, and turning the other cheek.
Unfortunately, enduring violence with nonviolence typically results in pain, wounds, and even death, which is why most people would rather not bother with it. Often it feels like justice is not being met. And of course it’s not fair! Of course it doesn’t feel good! Of course it will cost something! It goes against everything that makes sense to our human natures; that’s kind of the whole point. But if we are to call ourselves Jesus-followers, we must find a way to put our hope in God alone, not in our human systems and methods and traditions; we must make God our Plan A, not violence.
We are learning about MLK and Gandhi and all of the people bound up in various nonviolent movements around the world and the price they had to pay, of the toll that their violent oppressors took on them. The idea of nonviolence is scandalous, and offensive, and it sucks. But Jesus died so He could set an end to the cycle of sin and violence. It cost Him everything! Yet He would rather absorb violence than perpetuate it. He would rather forgive than hate. He would rather die than kill.
Imagine what would have happened if He had sent an army of angels to slaughter all those who opposed Him. How would history be different? Would you want to follow a God like that? What good is He if He doesn’t act any differently than we do? Is He not just a god in our own image? If even God Himself has to use sin and violence and suffering to achieve His vision of shalom, then how does He expect us not to do those things?
I realized today that a lot of people believe in exactly this kind of hot-sauce Jesus. They grudgingly accept the mild garlic #TeamLamb version of Jesus presented in the gospels only because they know that the sword-spitting, fire-breathing, brimstone-and-fury #TeamLion Jesus is going to come in Revelation to destroy all of their enemies and prove that they were right once and for all.
But can I just say it? I have no interest in serving that God. I have no interest in obeying His upside-down, backwards, and difficult commands if they turn out to have nothing to do with what He’s actually like. If these aren’t the way to kingdom shalom--if He’s just going to use all of the methods that already “make sense” to us--then count me out. And if these qualities don’t describe God, then I see no reason to commit to them, either. After all, the whole point of Christianity is figuring out “What is God like, and how do we become more like Him?” (Spoiler alert: it’s Jesus. And He showed us the way.)
Too many Christians follow Christ in a way that would make them lose a game of Follow the Leader. In Follow the Leader, if the leader pats her head, you pat your head. If she rubs her stomach, you rub your stomach. But in the Church, our game of Follow Jesus has different rules than Follow the Leader. In Church, you don’t actually have to do the things that Jesus did; you just have to do them “in your heart.” But that wouldn’t fly in Follow the Leader. Imagine a kid in a lounge chair playing this game and saying “yeah, I’m flapping my wings….in my heart.” No! It doesn’t work there, so why have we become so entrenched in this way of thinking when it comes to practicing our faith?
The point I’m trying to make is that I think our students today desperately need to hear about a different way to follow Jesus. I think they’ve had very poor role models in a Church that is bound up in traditions of men, intertwined with the American Dream, that has very little to do with the scandalous gospel of Jesus. Together we’ve lost sight of what it actually means to follow Jesus and what that would actually look like in our lifestyles today.
In a world where following Jesus “in your heart” is the main message, we have become very proficient at making good religious church kids; we have failed, however, in making committed followers of Jesus. We’ve lost the art of discipleship and traded it in for the cheap substitutes of Sunday School and youth groups. We’ve become more focused on programs and numbers than in the state of their hearts or the purpose of their actions.
No wonder so many young people are leaving.
I asked the students this morning how they felt about the Church. Clearly it’s more than just a building or a service, they said; it’s the people. And even though it could be described as a family, they said, it feels kind of like your distant relatives that you only see at family reunions. In other words, they’re not really an intimate part of your life, and they certainly don’t offer any support or encouragement. They said the times where they really felt like family was when they spent time in community together on mission trips or at camp, where they got to be vulnerable and share life together in a very real and fulfilling way. (This is what the students were saying! I watched them come alive as they talked about those bonding experiences. They’re hungry for the kind of faith that matches this lifestyle. They’re begging for that kind of faith community. And they’re not finding it in the system we’ve created.)
Then I asked them what they thought it would truly look like to follow Jesus. Someone said you had to give up all your money, and someone else chimed in to say you had to leave your family. So I asked if any of them had done that, and obviously they said no. Because no one does that these days; that would be so inconvenient! You can’t do that and live an average comfortable normal lifestyle. It would mean rearranging all the pieces of your life and throwing away pretty much everything the world places value in. But these kids have grown up in a place where faith is easy and comfortable and convenient, where God never asks you to do anything you didn’t already want to do. That’s all they’ve known. But even they can see a very clear disconnect when they read the words of Jesus, and compare it to the way the Christians they know are living. Something very obviously does not match up even on the most basic level, and they’re not sure what to make of it.
No wonder so many young people are leaving.
This Lenten season, let’s do better. And I don’t want to be all cynical and negative, because I know not every church is like this, and I know not every Jesus follower is a sellout to the American Christian lifestyle. I have a great many Christian friends whose lives are very clearly modeled after Jesus’, who inspire me daily to reevaluate how I could be serving Him better, how I could make my life align more with His. And as grateful as I am for them, I also know that not everyone has been so fortunate. I have found myself trapped in the numbness of a dead religion too many times to think that I could be the only one; I fear it is an epidemic that has stretched itself into every corner of our faith, and I see it evidenced in the lives of the young people I encounter.
Jesus is not a terrifying, violent monster filled with fury and rage. Neither is He a tame, passive hippie love machine. He is so much more than those mere black or white, hot or mild distinctions. But in a season where we remember and celebrate the sacrifice He made for us out of His great and overwhelming love, what if we actually chose to exhibit that same kind of love and grace? No more hate. No more anger. No more emphasizing His fearsome wrath at the expense of ignoring His love.
Jesus may be a loving and wrathful God like a scale of hot wing flavors. But if I err on the side of God’s love, I at least want be that voice for these students who are only hearing the other side. Who are asking questions, not sure what their faith is about, not sure what they believe, not sure how to live it out. I want to give them a different perspective than the one they’ve always heard, so they can see that there’s more to following God than just believing a set of rules, or living in fear of a violent God who hates them and is just waiting for them to make a wrong move.
Because contrary to what Mr. Chan might want us to think from his video, fear does not lead to life. Perhaps we would all do well to remember that as we face the days ahead.
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