Lent Reflection #4

Last week, I started this series of Lenten reflections by saying that I'd be blogging 6 days a week, but I'm not going to do that.  It's going to be 5 days (Mon.-Fri.) which lines up with my Bible reading plan, which is on a 5 day/week schedule.  

If you're a Christian, it's pretty obvious that a lot depends on what you believe about Jesus.  I have found, paradoxically it seems to me, that the older I get and the more I study Scripture, the less certain I am about exactly who Jesus is.  I've come to understand that so much of what I've believed or thought I knew about Jesus in my life was actually shaped (warped?) by a bunch of stuff that actually had nothing to do with Jesus: culture, politics, denomination, my own selfish point of view, etc.  Don't get me wrong, I still very much believe in and depend on the grace that God gives us through Jesus Christ - his life, death, and resurrection.  I believe more than ever that Jesus is Lord over all creation.

Not Jesus.

What's changed is that I don't believe that Jesus simply validates my own little narrow worldview.  All the stuff that we can get so wrapped up in and upset about (politics, theological squabbles, worship style, petty church stuff) seems so small and unimportant when I read Colossians 1.  That chapter convicts me that I'm often tempted to make Jesus a personal mascot or one of those little religious figurines I can keep in my windowsill or on my desk.  My limited worldview and woefully incomplete understanding tempts me to make Jesus into a Precious Moments figurine.  Well, in Colossians, Paul ain't having it…

Jesus is a big deal in Colossians.  Here's a sample of who Jesus is/what Jesus does in Colossians 1:

• He's the image of the invisible God - want to know what God is like, look at Jesus
• In him and for him, all things were created (see John 1 for more details…)
• He is before all things and "in him all things hold together" (I love that phrase - makes me think of Paul in Acts 17:28 - "In him we live and move and have our being." It also makes me think of Yoda's explanation of the Force, but that's a whole other blog post)
• He is the head of the church
• He is the firstborn from the dead (the first to be resurrected from the dead)
• He has first place in everything
• "In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell"
• God has reconciled all things to himself through Jesus
• Through "the blood of his cross", God has made peace

That's a lot. It's pretty obvious that when we try to enlist Jesus to endorse our political or theological convictions, we make him way too small.  Small enough for us manage and manipulate.  Or maybe we make up an idol, slap the name "Jesus" on it and worship the stuff we like about ourselves.  

Is that too harsh?  

Also not Jesus.

Too bad.  It's Lent. 

We should all repent for trying to make Jesus our personal mascot.