The Jesus Who Saves by Mike Goeke

I’m on a personal mission to wipe away the image that I call “children’s Bible Jesus.” I call it that because my first memory of this image graced the pages of my illustrated children’s Bible, but it is a familiar image culturally and worldwide. Children’s Bible Jesus is that image of Jesus showing a handsome and very white man with straight, sparkling teeth, flowing, product-enhanced hair and piercing blue eyes. His robes are bright white and his arms are usually up in the air or cradling a precious little lamb. Sometimes he has a halo, but almost always has a ‘glow’ about him.

This was the image that popped into my head for many years when I thought of or read about Jesus. He was sort of soft, sort of weak, sort of powerless and, in many ways, completely benign. His love was sentimental and saccharine. I think this image has done damage to His reality. There is nothing about the Jesus of the Bible that is weak, or soft, or powerless, or sentimental, or pristine. Do we really think He walked around the dirty landscape of Biblical Israel in pure white robes with His hands in the air and carrying a lamb? Somehow, I think not.

There was a time when I wanted this soft, yielding, un-demanding Jesus to stroke my sin like He stroked the lamb in the pictures. It felt good for a season, but over time I felt alone, and unprotected, and without a shepherd. When God pierced my heart, it was with a very different Jesus. I saw a man I really did not know. He was a rugged and dirty and scarred and mighty man – a man whose love manifested itself in sacrifice and torment on my behalf and a man who loved me with a love powerful enough to save and change me. It was a Jesus not content to stroke my sin, but a Jesus who died a horrific death and rose from the dead to transform me into something beyond my sin and struggles.

When you look at the life of Jesus, it seems clear that the image we have created of Jesus simply cannot reflect His true character. The fact that he was meek does not mean he was weak. We celebrate His birth this month and often forget the squalor and filth of the environment in which He was born. He lived as a carpenter, and he walked in the dirt and labored in a physically taxing profession. As a grown man, he faced the biggest bullies of His day, the Pharisees, with power and authority. He hung out with the ugliest of people – sinners, lepers, prostitutes and outcasts. He endured death, and the filth of all of our sin and humanity, so that we could connect with him in relationship both in life and for eternity. And in 1997, he climbed down into the filthy pit of my sin and grabbed me and hoisted me out of that pit.

In Luke 4 Jesus states that the reason He came was to share the hope of the gospel with the poor, to give sight to the blind, to release the captives and to give liberty to the oppressed. Those things cannot be done absent amazing courage and strength and power and spirit. And the reality is that we are all EACH of those things. He came to impart amazing life change on us, the most poor, the most blind, and the most oppressed. He reached in to the muck where I lived and loved me and graced me and gave me eternal riches beyond compare. He wiped the lies from my eyes so that I could see truth. He fought for my soul against the deceivers and captors who sought to entrap me and He gave me freedom. I love that man. I trust that man. I feel safe with that man.

This Christmas, my prayer is that in the midst of so much secular hoopla and Christian sentimentality, we would see the real Jesus. As we picture that manger, I pray we see power oozing out of it. I pray we see a man born in harsh circumstances who was not soft but was strong. And I pray that as we see that strength, we each get a fresh glimpse of the powerful love that fueled that strength. Imagine a man willing to go into true filth to rescue you. That is truth. And that man wants to change your life. Merry Christmas – and may you know Him as you celebrate His birth!