Fantasy Jesus

When I was a Mormon I had a great love for Jesus Christ as he was portrayed by my church and in the scriptures (even though my reading was biased by my belief, which I didn’t realise then, of course). Anyway, the other day I heard a Christmas carol being sung and I experienced a few brief moments of nostalgia for those warm happy feelings I used to have as a believer when I thought about Jesus.

As I considered this some more, I understood that the feelings I had once had about Jesus were based upon two things – my own desires and a very clever marketing campaign. I was more than happy to believe that Jesus loved me and sacrificed his life for me. I used to feel very emotional when I thought about this. Who wouldn’t want to believe that they were loved unconditionally and that someone thought they were special enough to suffer and die for? I thought about the words of the hymns I used to sing, and how they reinforced this image of Jesus as our loving Friend, the one who made the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf. I remembered the church talks and lessons I used to hear, where Jesus was constantly portrayed as this loving, compassionate, selfless person. How he blessed us with his grace, condescending to step down from the lofty heights of godhood to become one of us, so that he could understand our sorrows and help bear our burdens. If one believed everything that was taught about Jesus, it was impossible not to love him.

Of course, that was the whole idea. All the information available to us from Bible compilers and the religious leaders who interpret the scriptures according to their own belief agenda is highly selective and aimed at inducing feelings of love and gratitude towards the person designated our “saviour”. It’s a master class in selling – selling an idea, a dream, a personality.

My feelings about Jesus were not just influenced by the great marketing job carried out by my church and by the scriptures, of course. Probably the greatest contributor to the way I felt about him were my own perceptions and ideals. In a way, Jesus was like a famous celebrity that I had never met personally, but who I had heard enough about to believe that I did actually know him in a personal way. In his book – Breaking the Spell – Daniel Dennett tells of a TV programme that he once saw, in which young children asked what they knew about Queen Elizabeth II:

The answers were charming: the Queen wore her crown while she “hoovered” Buckingham Palace, sat on the throne when she watched telly, and in general behaved like a cross between Mum and the Queen of Hearts.

To these children, this was the way the Queen behaved. Not only her actions, but her very personality, may well have been vastly different from their imaginings, but this is how they saw her, and that is what they believed her to be. It’s the same for believers in Jesus. We get a picture of the kind of person he must be, based not only on what we have read, but how we have interpreted those stories and related them to our own experience, ideas and wishes built up over our lifetime.

The “Jesus” that I was so fond of may have been different from the “Jesus” that another Christian believed in. The way that Jesus is perceived and experienced must surely vary from individual to individual. Even those who knew him personally and spent a lot of time with him (supposing that the man we refer to as Jesus of Nazareth actually did exist), couldn’t know him definitively, any more than we know our partners or close friends completely. There is always going to be room for us to wrongly attribute certain characteristics, qualities, motives and emotions to other people, even those who we think we know well. How much more likely are we to have mistaken ideas about someone who we have never met and only have second hand accounts of at best?

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I used to believe things about Jesus that made me feel warm and secure and loved, but they weren’t based on any kind of fact or even any intimate knowledge. That Jesus was a combination of advertising hype and my own personal desires. I believe this is the same for all believers. Gentle Jesus, Lamb of God, the Good Shepherd – all comforting images that simply reveal humankind’s own hopes and needs rather than offering any accurate insight into the person (real or mythical) at the centre of the Christian faith.

IslaSkye