My Norelco Messiah, and the Need for Tree Carving

I’m always killing Jesus.

I’m always envisioning him as though he’s perpetually on the cross, hardly remembering that, before his death, he just so happened to live a life. Not any life; the sort of life that purposed to inform the way I would live mine.

And even when I do finally consider Jesus before the cross - which is, sadly, to look at him as a means to an end - I get fixated on the three-or-so years of Jesus’ outright ministry that we have so well-documented in the gospels.

Jesus, as a concept, starts with the miracles. Jesus the person is born with a beard.

Jesus, I need to shave your beard.

I’m very concerned with Jesus’ actions. Yet it’s still this ‘means to an end’ mindset. There’s part of me (the Evangelical part, probably) that reads the gospels and is thinking, “This is all well and good, but you’d better get on that cross, Jesus. I need you on that cross. I need to get you on that cross.”

Not an entirely false notion, but hardly a healthy one.

Maybe my downfall is that I’m living post-Jesus. I know how Jesus’ story on this earth wraps up, so I keep looking at the finale. And not only do I get obsessed with it, but I let it inform my entire view of Christ; everything I read about Christ is read through the lens of my own understanding (reader response criticism, for you literary types), which knows full-well how Christ’s life ends.

Jesus, I need to shave your beard.

I need to ditch my way of looking at you, the one that says, “What have you done for me lately?”

I was home in Cleveland, Ohio last week, and was talking to someone about the Christian faith. And this person said to me that she’d rather have a Messiah than a Savior. It took me a second or two to wrap my mind around her statement, but after some pondering I was in agreement: I, too, would rather serve Yeshua the Messiah than Jesus the Savior.

First of all, the term Messiah, to me, connotes a sort of plural corporate focus. You can hear the term Savior and get selfish with it. “He’s my personal Savior. He came and died for me.” (Especially when you’re convinced that it’s his death that saved you and not his life.) But with the word Messiah, it becomes more difficult to get self-absorbed with its use. It intends an emphasis on rescue by arrival.

Some of this could be semantics, but, then again, I don’t really believe in semantics. Words do not have meaning outside of connotation; we’re constantly repainting the structure of language. It’s called Symbolic Ambiguity: the letters m-a-i-l only indicate an envelope and a stamp until we decide they will mean something else.

I wonder if this post-Jesus life of mine causes me to miss out on the best of this - the best view of Jesus. I never really waited for him, myself. By time I showed up on God’s green earth during Reagan’s first term, Jesus Christ had come and gone, and I was told to read all about it, and maximize my potential benefit from Jesus the Personal Savior - just like any good modernist Greek-minded consumer would.

I certainly have my excuses for viewing Jesus this way. Still I don’t think it’s acceptable - at least I doubt it’s the way of seeing him that shows him the most love or awe or respect.

Which gets us into vandalism.

Sometimes you go into public restrooms and you see the criminal engravings: “ANTHONY WAS HERE.” You’re not sure why Anthony is making this declaration, but it’s there, in plain sight, carved into the wall of the bathroom stall. You look around the walls and appliances, and you find out that Deion was there too. As was Brian. So was Ashley, which baffles you because this is a men’s restroom, so what the hell?

You see these same markings on trees and bus stop benches, and any other inanimate object someone deems a suitable personal landmark. And while I don’t know that God is pro-vandalism (Some might disagree with me: “It’s not a crime; let God express himself…”), he definitely had a similar idea in the person of Jesus - or Yeshua, the long-awaited Messiah.

Yeshua was God vandalizing this earth.

Forget the cross. Forget the miracles. Yeshua showing up on this earth was God’s proverbial tree carving, his way of saying to all existence that “GOD WAS HERE”.

“He came and he dwelled among us.”

Yes, this event - Yeshua’s birth - might arguably be the climax in God’s relationship with humanity. God decided to join in everything we had going on down here. All of the pain and confusion, all of the beauty and joy; God decided to participate in all of it.

This might be the miracle of all miracles.

In our post-Jesus world, we forget that our Jewish siblings had been waiting for the Messiah for thousands of years. In their dynamic, at-times tension-riddled relationship with the Master of the Universe, they were aching and begging and longing for this Messiah to arrive.

I don’t know that it was even so much about what he’d do once he showed up; they just wanted him here.

And of course it’s not like God didn’t know this, that he wasn’t present to receive their billions of prayers over thousands of years. It’s as if, in preparation for Yeshua’s birth, there was this giant crescendo of timpani in heaven. You can imagine the build up.

How long had God been longing and aching to join his people, to share infinite love in the most humble, personal, and physical way.

But I don’t get it. It doesn’t quite register—not entirely. I live post-Jesus. I sit around with my damn Evangelical calendar and turn every Christmas Eve sermon into some freaking Easter pageant.

The cross makes some sense to me, but it would mean so much more if I understood Yeshua the Messiah - the one who had been longed for.

I miss out on the crescendo of heavenly timpani.

We’ve crossed into December, entering the Christmas season. We’re immersed in it, actually; the music, the lights, the incessant need to purchase commercial products (specifically those which are electronic) - it’s all here. And most of the Church is going to be celebrating Easter a few months early.

“Jesus died on the cross. Jesus died on the cross. Jesus died on the cross.”

Correct. He did, in fact, do just that.

But that wasn’t the beginning of the miracle. Nor were the healings and deliverances.

Yeshua, we really need to shave your beard.

We need to hear the crescendo in heaven. We need to hear the jubilant shouts of some angels, while others remained silent, with awestruck mouths hanging open. Billions of prayers being answered. The Master of the Universe stooping to visit his creation through the person Yeshua, who would be called Emmanuel (God with us).

“GOD WAS HERE”.