Is It Loving?
Good Friday reflections on Jesus and what he stood and died for.
I’ve been attending church for most of the last two years. I strive to follow the example Jesus set a couple millennia ago. Despite this, I’m reluctant to call myself a Christian —not because of any issue I have with Jesus, but the issues I have with the people and institutions that have co-opted his name.
It seems to be a little known fact, but Jesus wasn’t a Christian. He was the King of the Jews, a descendent of Abraham and David who established a New Covenant for Jews and gentiles alike. Jesus simply called this new path The Way. He wasn’t starting a self-titled religion celebrating himself. I think he’d be bummed to learn how people have elevated his name over his teachings. He’d be downright enraged to learn his name has been used to justify countless nationalistic, xenophobic, and economic agendas. Jesus was poor and loved the poor. He was an immigrant who loved immigrants. He was a rebel arrested and killed by the state. He never met an enemy he couldn’t find love for—even if that enemy betrayed him or put him to death. This indiscriminate love is The Way Jesus exemplified and taught. Everything else is heretical hearsay.
And then there’s the focus on Jesus’ supernaturalism —turning water into wine, walking on water, curing incurable sickness, and, of course, returning from the dead. I realize these things are important details for many Christians, evidence of his divine nature. I’m not saying I don’t believe in Jesus’ miraculous capabilities. God is all powerful and does many awesome things —why not these? But the focus on Jesus’ supernaturalism seems like a way people distance themselves from their Christlikeness. It’s focusing on the small, showy ways we cannot imitate Jesus, not the big, mundane ways we can.
While I’ve had a nominal interest in Jesus for some time, my interest increased a couple years ago following an aborted, formal conversion to Judaism. I’m descended from numerous notable Jews, and I thought a conversion might forge a greater connection to myself and ancestry.
As a preliminary step towards conversion, a local rabbi suggested I take a class called “Introduction to Judaism.” In the class, I learned about Judaism’s 613 mitzvahim and its many, many other laws and rituals.
In a strange bit of timing, the class started in September, 2023. Less than a month later, Hezbollah attacked Israel. At the first post-attack class, one of the rabbi teachers said she had no sympathy for the Palestinian people. To her, Israelis were the legal heirs to the land they took in 1948. Hezbollah and the Palestinian people were breaking the law with their mere existence—the punishment for breaking this law was annihilation (at least 70,000 have been killed and 170,000 injured since October, 2023).
This rabbi’s heartless proclamation was when I spiritually dropped out of the class, even though my body and parts of my mind kept going. Hearing her say this made me think, “this is what Jesus was fixing.”
Judaism has countless legal workarounds that can be, and are used to justify all sorts of abominable acts: using temples as marketplaces, killing dissidents, exploiting, stealing from, and raping gentiles. In New York, I heard numerous tales of ultra-orthodox Jews hiring gentile strippers and prostitutes, male and female, because there was no biblical prohibition against doing so.
To be fair, the legalistic approach to righteousness is hardly limited to Judaism. Whatever the institution is —religious, legal, cultural —there will be people claiming authority because of their adherence to the letter, if not the spirit, of that institution’s laws.
In order to prevent this type of legalistic, spiritual chicanery, Jesus stripped the 613 commandments down to two that start with, not lead to, God and our Divinity.
Love, not supernaturalism, is the essence of Jesus’ two commandments: loving and praising God, loving our neighbors as ourselves. I don’t need to walk on water to feel the nearness of God and my own Christlikeness. But I do need to constantly ask myself, Is this loving? Is the way I’m treating the people around me loving? Is the way I interact with the earth loving? Is the way I’m treating myself loving? Because if it ain’t loving, it ain’t Christlike.