The Real Jesus

If you believe Jesus was God, and He came to earth to walk among us, the first thing you start considering is that He might actually care. Why else would something so great become something so small? He didn’t close Himself off in a neighborhood with the Trinity; He actually left His neighborhood and moved into ours, like a very wealthy and powerful man moving to the slums of Chicago or Houston or Calcutta, living on the streets as a peasant.

If Christ was who He said He was, and He represents an existence, a community, and an economy that are better than ours, and it is important that I “believe in Him,” what is He like?

As I read the Gospels and other books about Jesus, I started a little list of personality traits and beliefs I thought were interesting. Here they are:

Jesus Believed All People Were Equal

In reading the Gospels of the Bible, I discovered that the personality of Christ was such that people who were pagans, cultists, moneymongers, broken, and diseased felt comfortable in His presence… And adversely, He is often opposed by the powerful.

Jesus was offering redemption through a relationship with Himself, and for those who were already being redeemed by a jury of their peers, people like politicians or wealthy people or powerful religious leaders, the redemption Jesus offered must have felt like a step down; but for those who had nothing, Jesus offered everything.

Jesus Was Ugly

I remember hearing stories about Christ as a child in Sunday school, the descriptions of Him being nearly magical, having eyes that would draw people toward Him and an aura that gave people the feeling they were in the company of greatness. This led me to assume Jesus was good-looking. It confused me later when I read His grim physical description in Scripture. Here is a description of Jesus in the Book of Isaiah: “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isa. 53:2-3, NIV).

I realize this isn’t a lot to go on, but it is enough for us to know He wasn’t exactly Brad Pitt.

Jesus Liked People

Perhaps the most comforting characteristic of Christ is that He liked people. Each of the Gospels reveals a Christ who ate with people, attended parties, drank with people, prayed with people, traveled with people, and worked with people. I can’t imagine He would do this unless He actually liked people and cared about them. Jesus built our faith system entirely on relationships, forgoing marketing efforts and spin.

Jesus Was Patient

It occurred to me as I read through the Gospels that it took Jesus years to develop the disciples into community-oriented guys. Years into their relationship with Christ, after hearing Him teach perhaps hundreds of times, the disciples were still asking questions like “Who of us is going to be the most important in heaven?” (see Mark 9:34). In a sense, the disciples were asking Jesus who was more important in the lifeboat, and the whole time, Jesus had been teaching them that the lifeboat feelings were worthless. If this were a corporation, these guys would have been let go.

This comforts me because I know how very long it has taken me to trust completely in Christ and to understand the ramifications of my relationship with Him. I read this text feeling gratitude that Jesus is patient with me, that He wants me to understand and He isn’t giving up on me any time soon.

Jesus Was Kind

I read a quote recently in which the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, musing on the negotiation of clout, gave an appropriate summation of the power of Christ’s love and kindness, saying, “I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force! Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.”

Jesus Was Good

In an exchange recorded in the Book of Exodus, God is speaking to Moses through a burning bush. Moses asks God a seemingly adolescent question, knowing full well he was speaking with God: “Who should I say sent me?”

Moses might well have been asking, How do I explain You? What is Your identity? And within God’s answer to the question we feel the limitations of language. God simply answers: “I AM WHO I AM.”

The Jews would know well this encounter between Moses and God, and it would have undoubtedly come to mind when Jesus answered His inquisitors’ similar question by repeating the phrase, “I AM.” Climbing inside letters, God explains, I encompass, I am beyond existence, I am nothing you will understand, I have no beginning and no end, I am not like you, and yet I AM.

I want to tell you without reservation that if there is any hope for you and me, for this planet set kilter in the fifteen-billion light-year expanse of endless mystery, the hope would have to be in this Man who contends He is not of us, but with us, and simply is I AM WHO I AM.

Reprinted by permission of Thomas Nelson Inc., Nashville, TN., from the book entitled Searching for God Knows What, copyright date 2004 by Donald Miller. All rights reserved.