Wednesday, July 04, 2007

5 Things I Dig About Jesus

Mark tagged me for this and I've seen it on about a million other blogs, so here goes!

Here are the rules:
Those tagged will share 5 Things They Dig About Jesus.
Those tagged will tag 5 people.
Those tagged will leave a link to their meme in the comments section of this post so everyone can keep track of what's being posted.


Five Things I Dig About Jesus

1. Jesus had a sense of humor. And a good one at that. I'd be willing to bet that he loved a good laugh. My favorite part of this famous artist's rendering of a laughing Jesus isn't the perfect teeth or the groomed hair. It's the prominent laugh lines around his eyes:


I bet, even at age 33, that Jesus had laugh lines.

2. Jesus met people where they were, and transformed them. You name it...a bunch of fishermen who became disciples and apostles...a tax collector who paid back all he had stolen...a prostitute saved from a stoning who was challenged to go and sin no more...lepers healed...the list goes on and on. And he continues to do the same today.

3. Jesus was about wholeness, community, restoration. When there was a line drawn between us vs. them, righteous vs. unrighteous, any kind of division that served to separate, Jesus was always found on the other side of the line. He broke down human-made walls, allowing the Kingdom of Heaven to break through into everyday lives.

4. Jesus was God, yet still one of us. He became human, yet remained God. He was all-powerful, yet powerless. He was mighty, yet emptied himself. He was king of the universe, yet died a criminal's death on a piece of wood. He got hungry, thirsty, tired...he probably got cranky...he laughed, experienced joy...the whole human experience. Yet he was the same being who was there at the creation of the universe at the beginning of time.

5. Jesus had no patience for human-made rules that got in the way of God's work. He healed on the Sabbath. He touched unclean lepers. He ate and drank with tax collectors and prostitutes. He was about doing God's work, and anything that got in the way of that was useless to him, no matter how well-intentioned the rule may have originally been. Imagine the kind of work the church could do today if we followed Jesus' example instead of getting hung up on extraneous details that just get in the way of what we're called to do: love God and love our neighbor.

LH

1 comment:

Scott said...

AMEN, and awesome five.