Yay, I Love That Guy!

Should the world love and admire Christians? In a recent blog post, Richard Beck, professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University in Texas, shared something that he said to his students in a lecture last semester:

I hope for the day where, when the world sees Christians coming, they say, ‘The Christians are here! Yay! I love those people!’

This intuitively feels like the sort of thing that we ought to hope for. We likely all have some experience of Christians behaving in obnoxious or self-righteous ways that turn people off. Maybe it’s overzealous proselytizing. Maybe it’s complicity in violence or corruption or hypocrisy. Maybe it’s an experience of judgmentalism or condemnation. If I had a dollar for every time that I heard someone complain about something Christians have said or done, I would have… a lot of dollars. Surely, it would be far better to rehabilitate our image more along the lines of the quote above!

And, leaving aside the sins (real or imagined) of Christianity, I think there is the basic reality that most of us just want to be liked. I don’t imagine many of us relish the feeling of being thought of as weird or out of touch or credulous or naïve or whatever. Yeah, we might believe an odd thing or two, but we’re basically the same as you! This was what the evangelical subculture of my youth laboured to convey, slavishly trying to imitate the culture around it, only in a slightly more Jesus-y way. We’re cool, really! We want you to like us, and we have a whole bunch of products to sell you to prove it! It’s probably also at least part of what’s going on in the more politically active progressive wings of the church as well. Hey, we’re smart and socially engaged and sophisticated, we have all the right opinions on all the right issues, if only in a slightly more Jesus-y way. We all want someone to say of us, “Yay, I love those people!”

But should this be something we aspire to? Beck’s colleague at Abilene Christian, Brad East, gently pushed back a bit in a post today. East argues that it’s not actually clear that “the world should see the church and love, welcome, and celebrate her presence.” He offers four reasons for this.

1. The only people that really admire and celebrate the church’s existence are those that are part of the church. If you admired the church, chances are you’d be a part of it.
2. The Christian message of self-renunciation is likely going to seem more offensive than admirable to those who aren’t keen on dislodging themselves from the centre.
3. The church is full of sinners and sinners aren’t particularly attractive.
4. Jesus wasn’t attractive to many people. He elicited admiration, awe, and worship for some, to be sure, but he made a lot of people pretty angry. Put bluntly, the world—at least the world of the powerful and religious—did not see Jesus coming and say, “Yay, I love that guy!” They said, “We have no king but Caesar, so you can go ahead and crucify that guy!”

I find some of East’s four arguments more compelling than others. But overall, I think he offers a necessary counterpoint to what Beck said to his students in that lecture. I don’t necessarily think Christians should long for a day when we are loved and admired by the world around us. Indeed, we should probably be suspicious should this ever come about. Does not Jesus himself say, “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first” (John 15:18)?

Jesus was and is the love of God expressed in human form. This I believe. So, how could the love of God push people away? Is not love always attractive? How could Jesus provoke the hatred of the world? Well, he had this habit of telling those who were convinced they saw clearly that they were blind, those who thought they heard accurately that they were deaf, those who thought they were healthy that they were actually sick and in need of a physician. He talked far too much about sin to be universally admired.

Now, this isn’t to say that the church needs to roll up its sleeves and start condemning sin more enthusiastically. We’ve kind of been there and done that. We’ve ably demonstrated that we’re pretty lousy judges and this should probably be left up to God. But at the very least we must be honest that we are, indeed, all sinners. This idea that we’re all perfect just the way we are and that the task of those around us is mostly just to relentlessly affirm us could hardly be less Christian.

Jesus consistently paid people the immense compliment of telling them the twin truths that they were deeply and perfectly loved by God and that they were sinners in need of mercy. Some people love this message, and some hate it. But it tends to be those who know the extent of their weakness and their need who are the most likely to see Jesus coming and say, “Yay.”

Over the last few months, I’ve been watching The Chosen with the guys in jail. In a recent episode Jesus heals a paralytic who some enterprising friends lower through the roof of a house. The order of operations is interesting in this story. He first says to the man on the mat, “Your sins are forgiven” (this would surely be seen as victim-blaming or shaming today). And then, as if to ratify the forgiveness and legitimate his ability to pronounce it, he appends, “Get up. Take your bed and go to your home.”

The truth. The mercy. The love of God.

It was fascinating to watch the guys watch this scene. You could have heard a pin drop. A bunch of them leaned forward on their knees as the story reached its climactic moment. One of them started clapping and cheering when the man stood up and walked. A few wiped a tear or two away. They saw Jesus coming, and said, “Yay, I love that guy!”

Feature image taken from the episode in The Chosen referred to above.