A few years ago, these initials began popping up all over the place: on colorful plastic bracelets, coffee mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers, various items of jewelry. Maybe billboards. You know. Everywhere slogans tend to multiply. The letters are a Christian evangelical expression that translates: What Would Jesus Do?
At the time, it seemed like a harmless, if somewhat frivolous, form of theology. Nothing about the trinity or the resurrection. Nothing about predestination or communion. Nothing about belief or denomination. Now I’m thinking, If only it could have been taken seriously.
Jesus, as billions of people acknowledge, was a real person living in the Middle East a couple thousand years ago. For as few as three years, he walked around the countryside inviting people to love and forgive each other, to treat every other person with the kindness they expected for themselves, and to live in gratitude for the gifts of life and sustenance they enjoyed. He was gentle with women and children; well-informed and witty with religious leaders; compliant with Roman authorities. He talked about acceptance and forgiveness for everyone, including foreigners, outcasts, sick people, thieves, and even the super-righteous. That’s what we know from the fragments of his story captured in several overlapping and sometimes contradictory accounts called the Gospels.
The emphasis lifted up by those stories about Jesus is what he did, not what he believed. Christianity had not been invented yet. The Gospels had not been written yet. The book of Revelation didn’t exist. The letters Paul wrote about Jesus had not yet been circulated all over the pagan world. Really, why would anybody ever remember a guy who, like many others, walked around in a poor and dusty outpost of an imperial power performing what some thought of as miracles of healing and feeding, talking about the built-in holiness of every human born? Why indeed?
I’d like to have watched him in action. He’s the guy I would have followed around like those women who paid his hotel bills and brought in dinner for him and his other disciples. Jesus would have made me feel seen. Included. Forgiven. Loved. He still does.
WWJD? Pretty simple. I can try it myself.
2 Responses
One can believe many different things, not all of which are in agreement. But almost all of them stress the importance of loving one’s neighbor. And they never mention that one need not like one’s neighbor to love them. But one needn’t, you know. Acknowledging our common humanity and value does not signify agreement with or disagreement with anything or anyone, and can exist entirely outside of one’s political or religious belief system. Keep preaching, cousin.
O wow. This is the Jesus I believe in.