a dated excerpt from jesus needs new pr…

FEELING BLE$$ED?!?

Last year when Zach Johnson beat out Tiger Woods and other famous pagan golfers to win his first Masters tournament, he said in an interview, “Jesus was with me every step of the way. I felt Him,” Well, no wonder Tiger and the others didn’t stand a chance at winning The Masters—I mean, who does stand a chance when you’re playing against Zach Johnson a la Jesus? 

For the record, I think Zach is fibbing. Jesus was not out on the Augusta greens, golfing, and helping him win The Masters. How do I know? Because Jesus was playing hopscotch with me at my church’s Easter party and helping me find all of the plastic eggs and mini-Kit-Kat bars.

Now, I’m quite sure Zach is a decent guy with decent intentions. But come on. Do we hear ourselves? Can we honestly suggest (with straight faces) that Jesus helps people win golfing tournaments? Are we really ready to proclaim that as truth? Sure, Zach can thank God for his talent; that’s one thing, but him telling the media that he could feel Jesus walking with him every step of the way is quite another.

But you know, Christians get whacky-excited when it comes to “Jesus” mentions on national TV; seriously, it’s up there with the excitement a lot of Christians feel for Christmas, Easter, and sermons about sodomy. I tend to think a lot of Christians believe that God hands out extra credit points when we mentioned Jesus’ name in front of television cameras where the potential audience is in the millions. And maybe he does–what do I know? Of course, I’m inclined to wonder how Jesus got shout-outs before microphones, cameras, TVs, and uh, golf was invented? If it weren’t for sports and the Grammy Awards, Jesus would get no love from the national media.

Okay, so here’s my real beef with Zach’s kind of Christian logic. If I choose to believe that Jesus helped Zach win that big golfing tournament, than I also must believe he could have stopped President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from declaring April 8, 2007 “Iranian Nuclear Day” and that he could have saved the lives of the American soldiers who were killed in Iraq that day and not to mention, he could have helped me beat my wife in a game of Scrabble.

I cringe whenever I hear someone suggest that Jesus’ blessings come to us in the way of good parking spots or iPods or trophies, or whenever I hear him talked about like he’s a slot machine, as if Jesus would ever give us a 1 in 142,576* chance of hitting some kind of earthly jackpot. It’s this kind of thinking that makes me want scream sometimes, mainly because it reveals a blatant misunderstanding of Jesus, I believe, and maybe a misunderstanding of faith, too.

Like so much of modern evangelicalism’s tactics, I think the prosperity gospel is just another human endeavor to make faith simpler for people. Think about it; by packaging faith with an end goal in mind—whatever that goal might be—wealth, success, good health, a BMW, you’ve essentially taken the “faith” out following Jesus and replaced it with something that could potentially be added or subtracted on next year’s tax forms. Tagging some kind of “end result” to faith Jesus is again, another way in which capitalism has seeped into our belief system. With an end result in mind, Jesus can be taken out of the spiritual category and put under some other category where faith can be measured, compared, packaged, and yep, resold in a box that has “GOD WANTS YOU TO BE (fill in the black)” on the outside. Those who proclaim this “end results” message tell their followers, “Just hold on! Don’t lose faith! Keep on, keeping on…,” and by doing so, they essentially make God into a “financial formula,” one that a first grader could solve.

I guess a lot of people don’t understand that the more tangible we make God, the more we bring him down to our standards, the less faith it takes to believe in him. And a tangible God becomes a lot like the banker on Deal Or No Deal—we know he’s there because we can see his silhouette, he’s calling us on the phone, and he’s either giving or taking away money.  

But Jesus isn’t practical. And we can’t make him practical. In fact, to be honest, Jesus is pretty impractical. Anything less, and it’s no longer faith; it becomes little more than a good attitude. A lot of Christians hate hearing that because an impractical Jesus is one that can’t be used and abused for our own selfish gain. An impractical Jesus is one that must remain in the spiritual realm, where he cannot be turned into something measurable or systematic. But that’s a good thing; because Jesus was never supposed to be copy and pasted onto balance sheet, explained with a graph, or alliterated into four points. Jesus is to be encountered, pursued, experience, debated, and meditated on. But modern evangelicalism has stolen much of that away by attempting to sell us their version of Jesus, a practical, boxed-up and bubble-wrapped version of him.

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