I Don't Love Jesus

From the "Abandoned Projects" Archive

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

From time to time, things don’t work out. Plans change and projects get abandoned. That’s the case with the short chapter you’ll find below; I wrote it a couple of years ago for a book that was supposed to collect a bunch of essays from different authors, titled I Love Jesus, But. The premise of the book was that the writers would talk about the things that stand in the way of their full devotion to Jesus, or run against the current of it. “I love Jesus but I curse a little,” or “I love Jesus but I don’t love church,” or that kind of thing.

I pitched a chapter titled “I Don’t Love Jesus,” because I kind of objected to the framing of the book and the framing of Christianity as essentially all about loving Jesus. The editors accepted the chapter idea and I wrote it, but somewhere along the way the book fell apart, and it’s not getting published now. Since it’s not the kind of chapter I’m likely to ever find another home for, I thought I would post it here. I still like it as a way to challenge one of the really common shorthands for Christianity, as “loving Jesus,” because as you can see below, I am not sure Christianity is really all about that at all. Here it is!

I Don’t Love Jesus

I don’t love Jesus.

Before you come for me, hear me out. I like Jesus just fine. I’m an ordained minister with a PhD in biblical interpretation; I spend a lot of my days thinking, preaching, and writing about Jesus. I have given my professional life over to the study and teaching of the New Testament, a collection of texts that centers on Jesus’ life, sayings, and legacy. Jesus and I get along perfectly well. But love feels like the wrong category to put my relationship with Jesus into.

When I was a kid, my family lived in a small town, across the street from a Southern Baptist church. We weren’t really churchgoers, but that congregation was full of wonderful people, and I loved attending a lot of their programming, especially Mission Friends on Wednesday nights. One Wednesday evening when I was in kindergarten, the Mission Friends class sang a song I had never heard before. “Jesus loves me, this I know,” we sang. But the next line confused me: “For the silo tells me so.” A couple of blocks away, our town had a corn mill with a grain silo—the tallest structure around aside from the water tower—and I had heard the lyrics as “silo” instead of “Bible.” I struggled to understand what the silo had to do with Jesus, or how it might tell me about Jesus’ love. Eventually I threw up my hand and asked Mrs. Judy, the teacher, to explain the connection between Jesus and the corn silo. She laughed, once she had figured out what was happening, and she patiently explained that the Bible, not the silo, told us about Jesus’ love.

Mrs. Judy was right, and so was the song—the Bible does tell us about Jesus’ love. In several places, especially in the Gospel of John, Jesus’ love is front and center of the story. In John 14:21, for example, Jesus talks about loving his followers, and in 15:9-10, he invites us to live within his love. There are other places in the New Testament outside of the gospels that talk about Jesus’ love: in Romans 8:35 Paul speaks of the “love of Christ,” and 2 Corinthians 5:14 and Ephesians 3:19 do too. It’s not an idea that’s foreign to the New Testament, to be sure. And in a few places, again especially in the Gospel of John, Jesus suggests that we should love him. In John 14:15-31, for example, Jesus has an extended saying based on the idea that his disciples should love him. In 8:42, Jesus connects love of God (a very common idea in first-century Judaism, as we will see in a moment) to love of himself, which is a reflection of the fourth gospel’s high Christology that puts Jesus and God on similar or equal footing. In John 21, Jesus famously grills Peter (while also grilling some fish) about Peter’s love for Jesus. In fact, compared to the rest of the New Testament, the Jesus we meet in the Gospel of John comes across as fixated on love, and almost needy in his insistence that his followers should love him.

So, there is a lot in the New Testament about Jesus’ love and love for Jesus. But far more frequently, the Bible calls our attention to other kinds of love: love of neighbor, love of God, love of enemy, love of spouses, love of each other, love for the saints, love for siblings. It’s much more common for the Bible to ask us to love others than it is for the Bible to ask us to love Jesus. The ethical direction of the New Testament is turned profoundly outward, toward the world around us, and not toward Jesus himself. When the Bible asks us to love, it’s rarely asking us to love Jesus, and it seldom frames discipleship or faithfulness in terms of our love for him. Aside from the Gospel of John, it simply doesn’t seem to have occurred to the writers of the New Testament to think about our relationship with Jesus in terms of love.

The Bible might not speak very often about our need to love Jesus, but the Bible is forever insisting that we engage in difficult forms of love—the kind of love that happens in community and engages with other human beings. This demand that we love our fellow human beings surpasses even the demand that we love God. Even when the New Testament is asking us to love God, as happens in Jesus’ “greatest commandment” sayings in Matthew 22:37-39, Mark 12:30-31, and Luke 10:27, it’s tied to love of neighbor. In those sayings, Jesus is combining two passages from the Hebrew Bible. The first passage is a line from the “Shema,” a summary of Israelite belief and practice, which reads “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might,” as it says in Deuteronomy 6:5. The second passage is from Leviticus 19:18, which reads in part, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus was not the first or the last Jewish person to combine these two commandments into one, but his version of it dominates the New Testament conversation about love. It’s interesting that in his “greatest commandment,” Jesus doesn’t add himself into the mix. It’s not “love God, love me, and love your neighbor.” As a Jewish person of the first century, Jesus understood the Torah to be asking us love both God and each other, which he seems to have thought were inextricably connected.

To bring this point home, in Luke’s version of the “greatest commandment,” Jesus tells a story as a follow-up. This parable is missing in the other gospels, so Luke likely included it as a way to be even more specific about what Jesus meant by love of God and love of neighbor. We know this parable as the story of the Good Samaritan. The parable of the Good Samaritan doesn’t mention love, but the whole story is prompted by the question by the lawyer who was chatting with Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?” If we are supposed to love our neighbors, it’s important to know who they are. Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan in response, to draw the circle large, including even unexpected people in the category of “neighbors” we should love.

When Jesus does this in Luke 10, he’s standing on the solid bedrock of Israelite tradition. The man he’s speaking with is a lawyer, who was probably not a civil attorney but an expert in Jewish law. So Jesus and the lawyer converse on those terms, appealing to the Torah as a source of authority, and the examples Jesus gives (priest, Levite) are categories found in Jewish law. As experts in Torah, both Jesus and the lawyer would have known the Shema and the passages calling on Israelites to love their neighbors as they love themselves. By giving the “greatest commandment” and then telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus was simply calling himself, the lawyer, and the onlookers back to the first principles of Jewish ethics: love of God and neighbor.

Closely related is the admonition to love our enemies, which Jesus teaches in both Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:27 and 35. It’s one thing to love your neighbor, but loving your enemies is more difficult still. Again, here Jesus is on solid ground with his tradition; in Proverbs 24:17 and 25:21 and Exodus 23:4-5, the Hebrew Bible commands people to have compassion for their enemies and to help them when they are able. That’s not quite the same thing as loving an enemy, but these teachings are part of the “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew or the “Sermon on the Plain” in Luke, where Jesus is already intensifying certain sayings from the Jewish law. So it makes sense that he would make these sayings more intense too, moving from helping or having compassion for an enemy to loving them.

There are lots of other passages in the New Testament that ask us to love various people: neighbors, enemies, friends, spouses, siblings in Christ, children, the family of believers, the saints, and above all, each other. There are some passages that ask us to love Jesus, and more that ask us to love God, but those handfuls of passages are overwhelmed by the Bible’s calls to love other people. When the New Testament speaks of love, it’s usually commanding us to love other human beings, in a way that’s rooted deep in the texts and traditions of ancient Israel. Contrary to the way we sometimes speak about religion today, when “I love Jesus” or “I love the Lord” is a way to say that we are religious, the Bible is not very concerned with whether or how we love Jesus. It’s much more concerned with whether and how we love each other, and how that love shows up in our actions and our lives.

So why do Christians speak like that, saying that we love Jesus as a way to say that we are religious? I think it’s a reflection of the way Christianity—and especially North American white Protestant Christianity—has evolved into a self-centered religion. When I say self-centered, I don’t mean to say that it’s selfish, although sometimes it might be. Instead, I mean that it’s a form of religion that’s centered on the self, preoccupied with our individuality and our individual relationships with Jesus. Christians say things like “I have Jesus in my heart,” “I’m saved,” “I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” or “I love Jesus” because Christianity has turned into something that’s very focused on each person’s one-on-one relationship with Jesus. We have individualized religious practice, making it a matter of each person’s unique connection with Jesus, so that everything up to and including salvation is between Jesus and us. Even when we go to church or participate in other group religious offerings, we talk about it in these individualistic terms: “I need to get fed,” we say, or “I want to feel like I’m in God’s presence.” This way of speaking is especially prominent in forms of Christianity that descend from the European Protestant Reformation that began about five hundred years ago, because the Reformation tended to emphasize the role of individual faith, individual holiness, and individual reading of scripture above communal practice. This tendency has only intensified as the centuries have gone by.

What’s so wrong with that? In one sense, nothing is wrong with it. It’s good for people to feel a personal connection to Jesus, and to feel like they are known to God and special in God’s sight. Especially for people who have been told by Christians or by the Church that they are not valued by God, because of sexuality, gender, marital status, race, theology, or some other thing, claiming God’s love is essential. But it’s also important to keep in mind that in the Bible is always pointing outward, away from the self and toward other people, as a way of structuring ethics. Jesus and his spiritual forebears understood that we should never practice religion in a vacuum, sealed off from each other, but that our religiosity can and should be expressed in our care for the rest of humanity. It’s never only about us, in other words. It’s never about us and how much we love Jesus; it’s about how much we love others.

There’s another story told in three of the gospels, in Matthew 19:16-30, Mark 10:17-31, and Luke 18:18-30, that is similar to the story of the lawyer. This one features a man—a wealthy man, described as a “ruler” in Luke—who wants to know how he can inherit eternal life. In response, Jesus rattles off some of the key parts of Jewish law. Specifically, Jesus lists some of what we know as the Ten Commandments: “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother” (Mark 10:19; the different gospels list these slightly differently). What’s remarkable about this list is that Jesus lists only the parts of the Ten Commandments that have to do with how we treat each other. There are other things on that list that Jesus could have cited, of course: have no other gods before me, don’t make idols, honor the sabbath and keep it holy, do not take the Lord’s name in vain. But when asked about how we can inherit eternal life, Jesus leaves out the commandments that have to do with our relationship with God, and cites only the ones that have to do with how we relate to other human beings. The word “love” is never used in this passage, but that’s what Jesus is getting at: the most important things about living life as a religious person are not about how we treat God or feel about God, they are about how we treat each other.

So I don’t love Jesus, or at least, I don’t think whether and how much I love Jesus matters very much compared to whether and how I love you, and whether and how much I love every other human being. The Bible doesn’t make very much space for an individualistic, me-and-Jesus way of being Christian. Instead, the Bible is always calling us to live in a way that encompasses and cares for everyone, even the people we don’t feel like caring for. It would have been very easy for the writers of the New Testament to frame Jesus’ story in a way that makes Jesus the object of our love and worship, directing all of our attention and love toward him. Instead, the New Testament is always directing us outward, asking us to love not only the people who are close to us but strangers and enemies too. I don’t think that’s accidental. The New Testament reflects the way Jesus and his followers, as first-century people in the Jewish tradition, thought about love: as something that should be difficult, outward-facing and deeply communal, and more important than everything else.