Jesus is Counter-______ [Insert your word of choice here]

I’m sitting here writing this, sitting in my favorite coffee shop and drinking my overly-expensive hot cocoa, during the time I specifically set out to work on my novel, but I feel like God is calling me to write out some thoughts that have been stirring in my mind in the past few days as the result of several experiences and encounters. Part of this is for me, because the way I wrestle with questions is through writing, but I’m also posting this here, poorly articulated as it is, because if it helps someone else to think through—or, at least, better frame—the question of who Jesus is or what he stands for, then maybe it might help a little. (Or maybe not, in which case, I apologize for wasting your time and “punishing” you for, as my students would whine, “making [you] read lots of words”.)

Lately, I’ve been wrestling a lot with the idea of what it means for Jesus to be counter-cultural. It seems like whatever company I’m in, the idea of Jesus takes on a different meaning. And not just a different meaning; a different adversarial, a different controversial, even antagonistic meaning.

In even just the last week, I’ve seen Jesus cast in many different contrary lights, including: 

Counter-terrorist

Counter-abortion

Counter-liberal

Counter-conservative

Counter-democracy

Counter-anarchy

Counter-pollution

Counter-environmental conservation

Counter-racist

Counter-diversity

Counter-xenophobic

Counter-tolerant

Counter-anti-Semitic

Counter-Islamic

Counter-feminist

Counter-chauvinist

Counter-technology

Counter-big business

Counter-Progressive

Counter-Republican

Counter-military

Counter-pacifist

Counter-colonialism

Counter-homosexual

Counter-hate

Counter-love-wins

Counter-Catholic

Counter-evangelical

I’ve even heard and seen folks paint Jesus as counter-Religion (see Jefferson’s Bethke’s viral spoken word poem on the matter of religion) or counter-CHURCH itself.

So what the hell does it mean when we say that Christ is counter-cultural??

I have to start to answer this question with my own experience, and I do ask that you forgive me for doing so and boring you with it, but I think it is essential, if we are to question what it means for Christ to be counter-cultural, to identify what each of us, individually, understands ‘counter-cultural’ to be or look like. For how we understand what is “contrary” to the “standard” worldview around us hinges on what we identify as our own “standard” worldview. (And each individual’s “standard” worldview is most certainly unique, resulting from both their religious, racial, linguistic, national, ethnic, etc. experience AND their personal experience.)

For me, as with many people, I first started to engage with and dispute the world around me when I was in seventh grade—ironically, just the age that many of my students are now. When I was twelve, I began to see some of the problems, or “holes” in the logic of the worldview imposed on me by my parents, and I which I couldn’t reconcile with other experiences and perspectives around me. I was raised in a very traditionally southern, traditionally church-y, traditionally American household, with a mom who ferried us to the local United Methodist Church (later, the local Presbyterian Church USA) every Sunday morning for 9am Sunday School, and brought us home after the 11am service, whereupon, in reward for our “good” (read: quiet, respectful) behavior, she often stopped at McDonald’s on the way home to splurge on $1 ice cream cones. (My parents were both in accounting/finance. ‘Splurging’ in our household was a Puritan affair.)

At twelve, I knew the Lord’s Prayer and could recite the 18-line Apostle’s Creed by heart; I could list all 39 books of the Old Testament and 27 books of the New Testament in order (I’ve since somewhat lost this capability). I knew most of the major Bible stories. I knew Moses, Jacob, Abraham, Isaac; I knew the stories of Jesus’ parable of the sower and His parable of the good Samaritan and the story of how he fed the five thousand with two fish and five loaves of bread. For years, I listened along in the car to the only cassette tape Mom let us play, learning rhymes about “This is the Church and this is the Steeple”, and singing about wee little man Nicodemus in the tree. Each spring, I performed with the children’s choir and handbell choir in the annual spring cantata, telling about what happened to Adam and Eve with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and about the lame man whom Jesus healed after being lowered through a roof. I knew that Jesus had been born in a manager; that He died on a cross, was buried in an unmarked tomb, and was resurrected three days later.

In short, I knew all ABOUT Jesus. I knew a good deal ABOUT God. However, I had never really met either person.

I didn’t know that, as someone made in God’s image, the Trinity was composed of real entities that could be spoken to outside of organized prayer, or to whom to complain in frustration, or to whom to cry out in despair. In short, I had no understanding that Jesus and God are inherently relational—just like me, they seek relationships. And I had no understanding of how all the little stories around Jesus and God fit together into one coherent, entirely relational, covenantal story about God wanting to know the people of His creation and wanting the humans of His creation to know Him.

In this time when, at age twelve, I started to experience tension within my own conscience and friction with my parents, relatives, and other authority figures, I also began to come into serious conflict with my parents. Namely, my mother’s and my relationship came to a head over a number of issues, and when it exploded, at the moment that I most needed someone like a mom to go to with my worries and problems, I found myself entirely confounded and alone. I had no older siblings, no older cousins, relatives, or friends to whom I might seek out sympathy or advice. I might’ve confided in my father, but the crumbling relationship with my mom also affected the rest of my nuclear family, and slowly began to crack it as well. Squabbles between my mom and I quickly evolved into all-out shouting matches that sucked in my dad and sent my brother and sister into hibernation in their rooms. Family vacations over the next decade (no, I’m NOT remotely exaggerating—we were at each other’s throats for over a decade) were to become turbulent and hardly enjoyable, and I know (without being told so), that once I had left for college, my two younger siblings felt a great sense of relief to have me out of the house most of the time, for it afforded them both a calmer, stable home environment AND an opportunity to receive all the attention of which I deprived them when I was home.

By high school, I was ready to rebel by every means possible, and HAD I had the means, I’m sure I could’ve ended up something like a pot-smoking, heroine-addicted binge-drinking high school dropout. I think the only thing I have to say to my credit during this 10-year period of violent insolence is that I was at least too stupid, too unpopular, and too naïve to be able to find my way to dangerous situations or substances.

[Those of you who know me now, you laugh, I know. But you never saw the teenage me attack my mother with words screamed at the top of my lungs with every fiber of my being. I may not look it, but I was a holy terror in those years at home.]

Interestingly—and mercifully enough, on the part of the Lord,—it was, in the same perfect timing, that as I started to doubt, to debate, and to rebel in my worldview that I was introduced to the idea of Jesus as a person—a person who sought, above all else, a relationship with each of the individuals created in God’s image, and who, himself, had been, in every sense of the word, a rebel. This idea of a Jesus who cared, who listened to my worries and problems, who even sought me to confide in Him—was revolutionary, and was, lame unintended puns aside, my saving grace from all the other paths I might’ve taken in my desperation to revolt.

(It is odd, and it makes me tear up as I realize while I’m writing this, that the person most responsible for introducing me to the person of Jesus, for helping to bring me into a relationship with Him, passed away a little over two years ago. Just six years after drawing me to the Lord, she was diagnosed with stage-four kidney cancer. Six more years later, she died. We were both only twenty-six years old. I never told her that she was the first person to guide me to Christ. I should’ve told her. I should’ve thanked her. How screwed up and broken is our world that I never thanked the human most responsible for saving my life and making me who I am today??)

For a very screwed up, socially and emotionally immature tween, a God who listened and wanted to intervene in my life, and who, above all, wanted to love me and be in relationship with me, just as I was, where I was, was exactly what I craved. It was counter-everything I had learned about Jesus and God in Sunday School with my mother; it was counter-my-culture, and I relished in it. Jesus, (and yes, I know this sounds ridiculous, but there it is) became my source of rebellion against everything I resented at home and with the world around me.

But this is the thing: for EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE, Jesus has something to say that disagrees with their worldview. I don’t like that the Bible says I have tithe 10% of what I earn back to the Lord; I worked hard for that wimpy teacher’s salary, now I have to give a big chunk of it away?! What about saving for retirement?? I hate that Scripture calls me to take care of my body—I am no athlete, why should I have to try to take care of it by eating healthy meals and exercising? It’s pointless. Besides, it’s my body. (I hear others echoing the EXACT. SAME. protest to the idea of sex and the issues around abortion.) I admit I suck at accepting these things that God commands. I don’t like that it says I can’t preach at my church's pulpit, or that Titus 2:4-5 says that I have to submit to my husband (seriously makes me hesitate about wanting to get married in the first place—I don’t want to marry someone to be subservient!). If Jesus also says that people are equal, why does God create Eve to serve Adam? Why didn’t He just create Eve first? Or create them simultaneously?? Why does it seem like the one prime female example that pastors always preach about in the Old Testament is Ruth, when she is basically the most passive, personality-less character in the Bible ever who doesn’t seem to do one damned thing worthy of commendation?? (I really resent the Book of Ruth. But that’s a rant for another day.)

I have my beef with Scripture, and I don’t always talk about it, but I realize that maybe I should. Not to complain, but to wrestle with what my heart wants to think and believe, and what the Lord says is true and should be done. In truth, we all have beef with God, whether or not we want to admit it. Some of us disguise it as beef with the Church as a whole, or with a specific church, or with those who claim to be followers of Christ, or those who claim to represent the Church in political affairs, or those who claim to know God’s mind.

Our hearts are broken, sinful, and in need of Jesus and the Holy Spirit—we are the rebelling children of God. My holy-terror temper tantrums to my parents as a high schooler are nothing compared to the acts of rebellion we commit every day in thought, word, deed, and heart. They don’t even measure when we look at the murder, slander, violence, genocide, and overall span of thousands of years of human hurt and suffering we have inflicted on each other, and, by extension, on God’s own heart.

Ultimately, you will never meet a Christian who agrees with everything the Lord says in Scripture—if you think you have, that person either doesn’t know what all the Lord says in the Bible, or he or she is deluding themselves. No one’s heart is fully in line with God’s. But part of entering into a relationship with Jesus is recognizing that fact, and, like a child learning to accept a parent’s decision and reprimand, to enter into that humble space of open-heartedness, of listening, and, most importantly, of prayer—prayer to talk with the Lord and come to understand Christ’s heart, and to have our own hearts sanctified and transformed by the Holy Spirit.