Jesus Loves You

This phrase is cliché. It’s on bumper stickers and t-shirts, and people read it everyday without any proper context. Similar to the “Life is good” slogan, it can come across as  trite and insensitive to the human condition. Picture a woman who finds out, shortly after her son dies in war, that she has terminal cancer. While driving home from the doctor appointment she sees a “Life is good” sticker on someone’s car. “I know. And it’s being taken from me!” may be one of the things that goes through her mind. She might read “Jesus loves you” on a sticker and think, “Great. Where is He now?”

On a smaller scale, even as a believer and follower of Jesus (who is apparently my “homeboy” now as well as my savior), I often feel a frustration when I read “Jesus loves you.” This is because the concept—the truth—it is trying to communicate is usually missed and almost completely held back by the unusual context in which it appears. Also, the name Jesus has been severely bastardized.

Let me try to explain. I’m pretty sure that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is a brilliant painting, but I wouldn’t know from experience. Even if I saw it in person I doubt it would impress me. It’s on postcards, postage stamps, in textbooks, floating all over the internet. Almost everyone has seen it, and it has no magic left. When I look at the painting, instead of sensing an aura of mystery surrounding the subject’s smile, my mind is overwhelmed with foreign thoughts and connotations - Dan Brown’s book perhaps, an awareness that I am only viewing a duplicate and not the original, or maybe thoughts about problems in academia and the art world. The Mona Lisa has lost its meaning, and it certainly can’t be expected to make an impression on people simply because they are told it is a brilliant painting. They have to experience it themselves.

If Jesus is just a good man, a white hippie-looking prophet with a weak and passive expression on His face, and you’re told that he “loves” you (let’s not forget that we “love” pizza, “love” that phone, “love” that song, “love” siblings and parents – who we don’t actually like very much), how can you not feel a painful disconnect?

In addition, Jesus is often viewed as the cop. “Would you do that if Jesus was watching?” This is the kind of phrase that makes kids swim in guilt and want to rebel further. Here Jesus has been painted as part of the Gestapo. He’s standing there holding a baton, and he “loves” you. Like a father who begrudging bails their delinquent son out of jail while sighing in disapproval and grounding them for a month, God “loves” you. This is such a lie! And the horrible thing is that it’s how most people—even many Christians—view God and His son Jesus.

What if, instead of standing over you like a police officer, Jesus stands next to you with holes in His hands and a wound in His side and says He loves you? Jesus came to save the world, not to condemn it. (John 3:17)

Maybe deconstructing and throwing out some of our wrong assumptions and ideas about Jesus is one of the first steps to embracing and experiencing Him, not the hippie or cop Jesus, but the all powerful and loving son of God who lived as a human and knows first hand the most difficult things we will ever experience in life.