What is Jesus Like? - New Evangelizers

This is a different kind of writing than I usually do. I am going to be very personal. I have been reading and praying with the Gospels for decades, and seeking Jesus out at Church and in the sacraments, too. Over the years I have come to learn a bit about Jesus’ character: what Jesus is like. I am going to write about that. I know some people aren’t comfortable with non-objective writing. If that is you, I apologize in advance. This isn’t going to be objective writing. I am going to tell you some of what Jesus is like, from my own experience, and because it is from my own experience, it will be subjective. Please take it for what it is.

One thing I have learned about Jesus is that he is completely truthful. His Yes is really Yes, his No is really No, no hedging or quibbling. There isn’t even a hint of falseness about him. This doesn’t mean he’s rudely blunt or that he blurts out hard truths all the time without regard to other people’s feelings. Rather, when he softens things to reduce their impact on others, he doesn’t do it by relaxing the truth, he does it through being quiet. He says the truth, but just enough that I can handle at the moment; for the rest, he stays quiet. He is not at all uncomfortable with silence: he doesn’t feel the need to fill it. He speaks when he has something to say, he is quiet when he doesn’t, and he is fine just being together quietly. Small-talk really isn’t his thing. When I’m not entirely honest with him, he doesn’t like it but it doesn’t rattle him. He usually doesn’t call me out on it, he just stays quiet, and waits for me to recognize my own nonsense. He’s extremely patient, far more patient than I am.

Another thing about Jesus is that he loves me enormously and he loves other people enormously too. I don’t mean love like flowers and chocolates, romantic cruises in the moonlight with violins playing. I mean he cares about people and their good, and about me and my good. And he really cares. He puts up with a lot of trouble for himself because of others. Dying on the cross is certainly a big thing he put up with, for the good of others, but it is not the only thing. The Gospels are all about him not doing what he wants for himself, but doing instead what others need, and often paying a personal price for it. Jesus is someone who is to the King of England what the sun is to a firefly, and yet there is no arrogance and hubris in him. But there is confidence, and authority. He is not a waffler or a temporizer. When he is unhappy with me, I know it. Oddly, it is not usually because I did something unkind to him (he can take a lot and he is not thin-skinned). More often than not, it is because I haven’t loved someone else enough. But that’s fair. Yes, I like the fact that he loves me. But it isn’t just me he loves. I have to respect his love for others, too, and that means I need to do my best to love them, because he does.

About his love for me, he loves me the way I am but he doesn’t want me to stay the way I am. He knows the way I should be, which is better than I am now, and he wants me to become that. He knows I can’t do it without his help. Happily, I know that too, which I suppose is a sort of selfish reason I make an effort to put in time with him. I also put in time because I’m crazy about him: he is amazing. Yes, he can be pretty challenging too. But he is worth the effort.

About Jesus being challenging, it’s a little bit complicated. He is both quite demanding and not demanding at all, at the same time. By “not demanding at all”, I mean he does not force anything, ever. He asks for things but is perfectly willing to take No for an answer, even if it isn’t the answer he prefers. My relationship with him is the most disproportionate power relationship in my life, by any metric, and yet he treats my views and choices with respect, far more than they deserve. By “quite demanding” I mean that sometimes he asks for things that are rather outside my comfort zone. He is OK with a No, but he promises to help if I say Yes. He really does help, too. But if I say Yes and then run into trouble, I realize I do need to look to him for help when I am stuck. If I don’t, I usually get more stuck until I do. It’s the “not forcing” thing again, I think. He helps, but sometimes I need to ask first.

Here is where I need to address a widespread misunderstanding of Jesus. Some people think of Jesus as a harsh task-master who is looking to damn anyone who steps out of line. They think that if they have stepped out of line too much, there is no point in going to Jesus at all: they think he will throw them out with the garbage. This is a lie! It is utterly unfair to Jesus. The truth is that we people are messed up already, all of us, and Jesus is trying very hard to get us out of our mess. All we need to do is to accept his help. But unfortunately we can persist in refusing, and eventually, though it breaks his heart, he respects our choices and leaves us alone, to our own devices. That’s hell. It’s the last thing he wants for us. His dying on the cross to give us an alternative to hell shows how much he wants us to be saved. But the fact is that we don’t start out saved, and we can’t save ourselves, so the only way to be saved is through Jesus. Jesus so very much wants to save us, but we have to actually let him. He will not force himself on us.

Another misunderstanding about Jesus is an idea that some people have, that if we follow his rules, then Jesus will make us rich. The truth is that Jesus really doesn’t care much about a whole lot of things that most of us pay a lot of attention to, and money is one of them. Money matters to him only as something you can use to help other people with. He is annoyed at money for distracting people from what is really important. He knows money is fake security that makes people think they’re fine (because they have a lot of money) when they’re really not fine. What they need is not money but Jesus, yet the allure of money and what one can do with it is keeping them from seeing that. As for other worldly things, Jesus seems to me not to be particularly interested in technical and logistical things, structures and systems and all that. He doesn’t really care much about factions, teams or sides. Those seem not so important to him, but, like money, he gets annoyed with them when they get in the way of what is really important. Jesus is most interested in what is good and true, and especially the good of people. Not necessarily peoples’ socioeconomic good, though — remember he doesn’t particularly want us to be rich. Rather, he wants us to be good. He will make us good, if we let him.

I think I could write a whole lot more about Jesus’ character, but I will stop here. If you know him a bit already, I hope you can recognize him in what I have written. If you do not know him well, I hope you will come to know him better. Do seek him out. Trust me, he is worth it.

Agapios Theophilus

Agapios Theophilus is the "nom de plume" of a catholic layman who has loved Jesus from when, as a young boy in the 1970s, he first learned about him. His First Communion, at the age of seven, was the happiest day of his life, and he celebrates its anniversary each year. He lives in a large city with his beloved wife, two wonderful children, and an affectionate orange and white cat. He has no formal qualifications whatsoever to write about Jesus: he writes only because he has been given the great gift of knowing and loving him, and he would like others to come to know and love him too. See Agapios' posts at https://sites.google.com/view/agapios-theophilus and follow Agapios on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/a9apios