The Chase

The Chase

The ten escapes of Jesus in the gospel of John teach me that Jesus is uncatchable. All my life I have tried and tried to grasp him. I have studied the Bible with intensity. I have read scholarly and devotional works about Jesus. I have explored Christian theology with extreme existential trembling. But I always came up short.

As a young person I ‘accepted’ him as my personal Savior. By his substitutionary death I was set free from my natural destiny to spend eternity in hell. He offered forgiveness, and I accepted it. But my guilt never stopped gnawing at me.

Later in life I thought of him as the Liberator (social and personal). I saw him as the continuation of the prophetic movement of the Hebrew Scriptures. He stood up for the down-trodden, the powerless, and the marginalized. He was the foundation of Liberation Theology in South America and of Feminist Theology in North America.

At other times in my life I went to him for counsel. He became my therapist and my Taoist guide. He helped me debate my irrational ideas and replace them with rational thoughts through the mediation of Albert Ellis, an atheist—as God had used the pagan ruler Cyrus to bring the exiles home.

I tried to arrest him with psychological theory, with various theological schools of thought, with Eastern spirituality, with pacifist theory, with human rights principles, with Evangelical certainty, with Roman Catholic dogma, and with the tight grip of the Calvinist handshake. Each time I thought I had arrested him and put him into the prison of my thought, he escaped. Every time I had hold of him, he vanished like a magician’s rabbit. My pursuit of the real Jesus was always a pursuit of certainty. But certainty is a bubble. And you know what happens to bubbles.

I called him Lord. He was the one who relativized governments and all the modern Pilates, Herods and Pharaohs. He was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. All liberal causes found their source in him. I saw that the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch had its source in his Lordship and his teaching of love of neighbor. The legacy of Isaiah and Amos and Micah was on his shoulders. Christ the Lord’s teachings were personal but not private. The gospel was social or it was not good news at all.

I figured out that the Incarnation of God in Jesus was a taking on of flesh that affirmed our humanity. Humanism of the Christian genus was the way to look at Jesus. He thirsted. No docetic Christ was he. His humanity was real so that we could really be human. He came and lived in solidarity with us. I championed The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis (as put on screen by Scorsese) as a bold portrayal of the real humanity of Christ.

Like those in centuries before me I looked at Jesus through the lens of my present culture and experience. I painted him with the hues of twentieth century concepts and ideas. Each time I was sure I had the real Jesus he slipped quietly away.

The Gospel of John is not too subtle about the disappearing Jesus. Ten times he is present, then suddenly absent. They could not catch him—except when and how he wanted to be caught. The truth in the Fourth Gospel is revealed as surrender. God gives himself up only when we give ourselves up. It is when we surrender the quest for certainty that we come to know that what is finally nailed down is not our anxiety about not knowing, but the truth of a holy mystery that can only be recognized when we hear the call of our own name and know who we are.

We cannot grasp Jesus. But we can hear him say, “Peace be with you.”