I’ve believed in Jesus for a while now, though I still wish I had a better phrase than “I believe in Jesus”.  But vocabulary aside, it’s been fourteen years since I first made a conscious decision to include and somehow integrate Jesus into my life.  Fourteen years, and not one of them smooth sailing.  But I guess that’s just life, really.

It’s often bothered me, though, that life hasn’t been as smooth and safe as conflict-avoiding, safe-loving, challenge-fearing me would have liked.  Even now, I find myself mentally missing the bottom step and landing on the footpath with a jarring thud when I stop and think about it.  Something obviously isn’t quite right, either with the world, or my expectations of it.  And I think I finally know what it is.

The other day, someone knocked on my front door.  I was still in my dressing gown, not long having dragged myself out of bed, and I found myself facing a clean cut gentleman, probably about my own age, in what was probably a fairly cheap suit.  (I say that only because it looked like the suits I own, and I own the fairly cheap variety!)

“Good morning,” he said, and continued without drawing a breath, “do you have regrets in your life, mistakes you’ve made that you wish you could go back and change?”  I looked him up and down once more, safely hidden behind the security door.  He wasn’t wearing a name badge, and that made him a  Jehovah’s Witness.  Being in a pre-coffee state, I was in no condition to shoot the breeze with this young JW, so I decided to end the conversation there and then.

“Oh no,” I replied, “I’m an Anglican!”  And that it seems was enough to encourage him to move on to greener pastures, and I wandered back towards the kitchen to put the kettle on.  God bless the Anglican Church.

But something about his approach troubled me, and troubles me still.  I believe in Jesus, but as much as I want that belief to guarantee me, if not a comfortable life, then at least one steeped in redemption for past mistakes, I have never experienced the great undoing of my personal blunders that his opening line seemed to promise (and I have secretly longed for for fourteen long years).  Thud, I missed the bottom step again.

I was raised, as a Christian, on inviting Jesus into your heart and giving over your life to him, and he will make you whole again, undo your pain, and shield and protect you from real hardship and trouble.  Nobody ever expressed it quite as bluntly or as superficially as that, but that was the message I heard anyway.  Jesus will make everything all better.  You won’t have to be afraid of life anymore.  Boy do I believe in Jesus!  With a Jesus like that, who wouldn’t?

It was a couple of years ago now - now that I come to think of it, it was more like five years ago! - that I was first introduced to the work of NT Wright, one of my most beloved and hated authors.  The first book of his that I read was The Challenge of Jesus, in which Wright introduced me to Jesus as a young Jew in 1st century Palestine.  And Jesus became real for me in a very new way; suddenly when I read the gospels, I could imagine Jesus saying the words he was quoted as saying, and I understood what he meant.  Suddenly Jesus had context.  He left the stained glass window and entered into the real world, where he was concerned about Roman occupation and Jewish resistance and the Kingdom of God within the world of God’s creation.

Later, when I have listened to Tom Wright on my MP3 player, he has said that when he first entered into historical Jesus study, he was concerned that he might somehow make Jesus strange, that putting Jesus back into his historical context might somehow make him less accessible today.  Well Tom, you were right to be concerned.  You have made Jesus strange.  The more I have thought about Jesus in his own context, and tried to understand him as his disciples would have, as his contemporaries would have, the more disconnected he has become from the Christ of my Christian youth.  The more sense Jesus made as a 1st century Jew, the less plausible he became as a timeless big brother intent on undoing the litany of errors I am so gifted at making.

Yes Tom, you’ve made him very strange indeed.  Worse still, you’ve made him estranged.  I no longer believed in one messiah, I believed in two: a 21st century one, all ethereal and compassionate and oh so concerned for my own wellbeing and personal comfort, and a 1st century one who was concerned for his friends, his people, his God, and God’s Kingdom, and who chose the way he lived - and died - with extreme care, and with a sense of vocation and purpose of God working within his world, through him.  And not to put too fine a point on it, the more I thought about the 1st century messiah, the more improbable and contrived the 21st century one appeared.  So much so that as I was driving between my old house and my new last weekend, I realised that there really wasn’t a place for my Casper-the-friendly-second-person-of-the-Trinity-messiah any more.  He didn’t exist, he wasn’t real.  There was no bottom step that I had been missing; the last drop is a doozy, and that’s all there is to it.  Be ready for it, or expect to get hurt.

This left me with a moment of panic.  The 1st century Jesus was the only one that actually made sense, but while that left me with a historically credible messiah, it also left me with a 20 century chasm between him and me.  What a bittersweet moment indeed, to have a moment of clarity about the nature of and person of Jesus Christ, only to be left with the aching question of how in the world this very real 1st century saviour could be a part of my life today.  Having had the penny drop, to see clearly that there aren’t two messiahs, but rather one very real messiah and one patron saint of escapists and dreamers, only to be left asking how the remaining saviour was relevant beyond his 1st century context.  The more real he became as a 1st century figure with 1st century concerns, the more distant he became from me, until at that very last moment when I realised that my make-me-feel-good-Jesus was just a figment, the real, earthy Jesus slipped through my fingers and back into the pages of history.

What emptiness.  What agony.  What loss.

But then the epiphany, that realisation which I can only put down to his inspiration.  Suddenly, I understood how he bridged the centuries between us, how he remained and remains not only relevant but integral and essential:

Resurrection.

At the resurrection, Jesus ceased to be limited to a 1st century person.  At the resurrection, in him all the elements of this creation which have left me longing for a feel-good-saviour have already been put to rights.  I’ve had it backwards all this time.  Jesus doesn’t make my life better or more comfortable, he doesn’t even perfect my life (per se).  Rather, my life is taken up into his life which is already perfected.  My life takes on it’s proper meaning when I start to understand what it means for it to be hidden with Christ in God.

I don’t claim to understand the resurrection and everything it means.  But I do know that when Christ was raised from the dead, somehow my dead life has been raised up with him and in him, and for today, that is enough, more than enough.