I'm just being honest, and I know that I am right because I didn't follow Him, even though I knew about Jesus and the cross. I grew up understanding that Jesus died for my sins, so that I could be saved, and it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to heal the hurt, to sacrifice myself, and it surely wasn't enough to make me put up with the hurt and rejection caused me by people who claimed it was enough. No, I knew Jesus came, lived a perfect life, died on the cross that whosoever believed would be saved and then rose from the grave three days later. I knew that and believed it from my youth, and I don't think that I ever stopped believing it. It wasn't enough to keep me, as a teen, from staring up at a beautiful, clear, night sky and seeing the wonder of the stars and the creation and being overwhelmed by the surety that there is a God. God is real. He made all of this, and He made me. And then...
And then I stared teary eyed into that night sky and with a heart full of wonder, no wait, scratch that...with a heart full of pain, I cried aloud into the night, "If this is what it's going to feel like to be a Christian, fork you!" I've been watching The Good Place, so that quote is not 100% accurate as it is. Anyway, the point is not only did I not deny self, take up my cross and follow Him, I refused to take up the cross and lived entirely for myself. I paid lip service and went through some religious motions because staying on the edges of religion and in the church was better for me. It didn't keep me from coming to church high or drunk or hung over. It didn't keep me from using the building for worse crimes. It didn't mean I was in any way, sort or fashion walking with God.
But I wanted what I wanted, and that included my family. And having my family felt like having to have religion. But I was wrong about that. Years later, in prison, my father visited me just as often with the same hugs and love when I was trying to be a religious Christian as he did when I told him I quit going to chapel, changed my card so that I officially no longer identified as Christian and had given up on Christianity being the answer.
It was one of the best things that I ever did, because Christianity is not the answer. Christianity as a religion is a clique rich, performance based, manipulative hell hole that makes me nostalgic for the nicer and more fun days of high school. And I quit high school. Christianity as a solution is empty and hard and hopeless. Christianity is not the answer. It never was. And it never was supposed to be. The church got off course, and when they did they committed atrocities on huge scale and on tiny personal scale for centuries so that there are millions of spiritual refugees running around equating the mistakes of the church made by broken religious people with the love of God they claimed to be representing when they made those mistakes.
Christianity as a spiritual path, well, that works for me, because it never claims to be the solution. It claims to be a process whereby we make spiritual progress and improve life by getting to know the person Jesus better and allowing Him to change and empower us and to give us love for ourselves and others. And I'm not being technical or cliche about Christianity being relationship rather than religion. Christianity is not relationship either. Christian is an adjective not a noun, or at least it's supposed to be. It's simply supposed to be a way to identify people who love Jesus and people. If it's more than that it's religious and off-path. Christianity isn't the answer. Jesus is. And we can trust Him to be that, because He first loved us.
Jesus loves and loved the marginal, the outcast. You didn't have to come from the right family, or represent your family well. You didn't have to be talented or gifted or, even better, rich. You didn't have to wear the right clothes or have the right friends. You didn't have to understand. He's happy to answer questions. You didn't have to be clean or sane or accepted by anybody, or even acceptable for that matter.
The hero of the battle of Jericho was a non-Jew, and a whore. The disciple Matthew was a traitor and a thief, and the first thing that Jesus said to Him was I want you with Me. I told God to fork Himself and rejected religion and He finally brought me back to Himself in a way that changed my life, not by making me accept what I rejected, but by reminding me of something I lost somewhere from my childhood. Jesus loves me. This I know.
The cross matters.Without the cross there is no hope.Without the justification and grace given us through the death and resurrection of Jesus we can not be reconciled to our Heavenly Daddy. But why wasn't the cross just for the Jews? Or for this class or group or that one. For the ones who were almost good enough or at least tried hard? What makes the cross matter is the whosoever part found in the love of Daddy and Jesus that took Jesus to it in the first place.
What is enough is not the cross. The cross is credited to those whom God says it is for. So if God had wanted to it could have been for His chosen people only, whoever those may be. No. What is enough is the love of God. He is real, and it is real. He is enough, because He loves you, and He loves me. Never mind that He died for us for a moment. How about He loves us and lived for us and with us?! He came down to earth and took on flesh and lived 33 years without coffee and faced all the pain that humanity could offer, because He wants to hang out with a loser like me. Because He wants relationship with you. As you are. Not as you should be. It's the disenfranchised, the outcast, the failures and the broken that He wants to be friends with. Those who don't think they fit in at least one of those categories have to come to the place where they realize they do before they can really get to know Jesus. That's why those religious people struggle with Jesus.
Christianity is not the answer, and the cross on it's own is about as helpful as an unloaded gun that's not in someone's hands. Jesus is the answer and the cross became what it is because of the hands of love that included everyone when they were nailed to it. Religion is empty and self centered. You have to be determined enough or good enough or something enough. That's all kinds of religions from the East to the West, and including and especially Christianity as a religion. They are not real as an answer to the problems of humanity and the pain of life. But God is real. The love of Jesus for the captive, the broken and those who are sick is real. He loves us as we are, not as we should be, He loves us first, when we don't love Him, and He even loves us before the cross.
Jesus dying for us is not enough to change our life, because until we realize that it was more than a perfect sacrifice, until we understand the depth and truth of Jesus loves me we can't accept that we don't have to earn or deserve or pay back the cross. Christianity is not the answer. The cross is not the answer. The love of Jesus for you and for me, before the cross, before we love Him or even try to believe, that is the answer to the pain and loneliness and emptiness of humanity. It is the love of Jesus for us that made the answer look like a cross, because that was His greatest demonstration of the love that is the answer, and it is that love that is enough to give life purpose and value. It is the love of Jesus for me that is enough to inspire living for Him and dying to self and being described as someone who tries, by grace, to love Jesus and others.
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