Jesus is Not the Church

    George Buttrick, former chaplain at Harvard University, recalls that students would come into his office, plop down on a chair and declare, "I don't believe in God," Buttrick would give this disarming reply: "Sit down and tell me what kind of God you don't believe in. I probably don't believe in that God either."
     Many people who reject Jesus are rejecting not Jesus, but a distortion of him as presented by the church. To our everlasting shame, the watching world judges Jesus by a church. To our everlasting shame, the watching world judges Jesus by a church whose history includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Conquistadores in Latin America, and a slave ship called the Good Ship Jesus.
     In order to get to know Jesus, I had to strip away layers of dust and grime applied by the church itself. In my case, the racism, intolerance and petty legalism of a fundamentalist church in the South obscured the image of Jesus. A Russian or a European Catholic confronts a very different restoration process. "For not only dust, but also too much gold can cover up the true figure," wrote Hans Kung about his own search. Many abandon the quest entirely; rebuffed by the church, they never make it to Jesus.
     I often wish that we could somehow set aside church history, remove the church's many layers of interpretation and encounter the words of the Gospels for the first time. Not everyone would accept Jesus--they did not in his own day--but at least people would not reject him for the wrong reasons.
     Once I was able to cut through the fog still clinging from my own upbringing, my opinion of Jesus changed remarkably. Brilliant, untamed, tender, creative, merciful, clever, loving, irreducible, paradoxically humble--Jesus stands up to scrutiny. He is who I want my God to be.