What Jesus is Like

what we believe determines our freedom

Jesus was on my mind when I awoke this morning, and the path he put me on for this day is to write about him here.

My last post was a hot mess, and I felt an immediate vulnerability hangover. So often, we are taught to be ashamed of being human. In my experience of my Christian faith, I was taught to be superhuman - to deny every aspect of my humanity, and it always felt like losing. When Paul would write about himself versus the super-apostles (2 Co 10), I would feel a bit of dissonance. “Aren’t we supposed to be more than human?” I would wonder, though I didn’t have good language for it then. This way of viewing the world taught me to hide myself because there was no way I could ever measure up.

Even if we’ve come from the same tradition, this may not be your experience. However, I know enough about how people in my tradition are formed to know I am not the only one who has held this question inside themselves.

how we are formed informs how we come

Emily P. Freeman

writes in her new book, How to Walk into a Room, “how we are formed informs how we walk into rooms.” The context behind this quote is that we never walk into a room on equal footing as others in the room. She writes, “There are narratives at play and relational challenges at work and memory upon memory running for free just beneath the surface.”

This means that most of us often do not have the same thoughts or ideas about what God is like. I believe a good preacher and bible teacher is always framing what God is like around what Jesus is like, but it is not the case that every teacher or bible teacher teaches from Jesus as the means of interpretation. Not every bible teacher, leader, or preacher knows how to frame their interpretation around Jesus, even those who’ve graduated from seminary and know how to pick apart the bible systematically.

Interpreting through the lens of Jesus

Currently, I’m using the lectionary portion of the Book of Common Prayer to frame my time with Jesus. What I love about the BCP and often liturgical traditions is that they are Christocentric. The Gospel will be read last in the readings, but it is considered the highest of the readings (at least from my limited understanding). My thought is that the gospels tell us what God is like. We need to deeply understand the gospels and the person of Jesus to understand every other part of Scripture. Jesus is always telling us what God is like. Scripture says that Jesus is the image of the invisible God.¹

I consider Paul’s letters and other epistles as commentaries on Jesus’s life. Jesus helps us understand everything the Old Testament says and does, both in the law, history, and prophets. Knowing Jesus is the key to understanding Scripture.

Jesus shows us how to be human

Most of us don’t know Jesus very well because of how we’ve been formed, even if we’ve been at the church from day one of our lives. In The Divine Conspiracy and John Mark Comer’s book Practicing the Way, Dallas Willard says that Jesus is the fullest expression of what it means to be human. Jesus is the fullest expression of God AND the fullest expression of humanity.

When Dallas Willard writes about this in Conspiracy, he interprets the Sermon on the Mount as God showing us how to be human. We usually read the Sermon on the Mount as a list of ways we fail at being human. Sure, Jesus’s example of humanity is a high calling, but seeing humanity through this lens is much more life-giving. In grad school, my teacher challenged us to think of Jesus as enfleshed/embodied even now as he sits at the Father’s right hand.

Holding space in spiritual direction

Because people come into a room in different ways and think differently about the Living God, as a spiritual director, I hear all sorts of things about the narratives people believe about God. Although I often want to teach directees about the true nature of Jesus, the goal of all spiritual direction is to hold space for people to come as they are. My job is to be agenda-free and to ask Jesus, Father, and Holy Spirit to be with us and do their work in the directee as I hold the space for my directee’s exploration of God.

Although I am the spiritual director and a spiritual director needs to be attuned to themselves and God and have a sense of wisdom about who God is, sometimes my directees come into the room with a more profound sense of who God is than I have. The Trinity is present with us, and we are three: the director, the directee, and Trinity. I may have a sense of being the one who is supposed to be wise, but I am also constantly learning from the directee.

Even agendaless, my job is to ask questions to help people think outside the box of how they were formed or to move them back to God. I am taught to pay attention to God by paying attention in the deepest way possible to my thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and intuitions. I became interested in spiritual direction because my friend Stacy called out my ability to listen and ask good questions. This is how I was already showing up in the world.

Though I pursued my Master’s degree first, I considered pursuing spiritual direction even before that because my natural posture is listening. I love discipleship and listening, and spiritual direction is a way to marry these two great loves. But even though it is my natural posture, I am still learning and unlearning how to show up as an agendaless listener.

I desire to be a safe place for the directee to present their whole selves and their life without God so that they can untangle what they believe about God. One major thing my therapist and spiritual director have done for me is hold me in 100% love. They might be imperfect humans who make mistakes, but I believe the space they give me models love for me in a way I never knew before meeting with them. Whereas most people judge me, try to alleviate my suffering, correct me, fix the problem, or even encourage me, these professionals hold space to love me where I am, and it’s my honor to attempt that for others. Just by being present, they model God’s love to me. Their ability to be nonjudgmental has reframed how I show up to everyone else in the world. As a result, I can now be nonjudgmental, too.

How therapy is different than spiritual direction but still helpful

a therapy session

Yesterday, I went to therapy. I advocate for any help you can afford: a therapist, spiritual direction, and whatever else. My job as a spiritual director is similar to that of other mental health advocates. Still, I know how to refer directees to therapy if something comes up that needs a different kind of professional help than what I am offering.

I wanted to explore anxiety with my therapist. I talked to her about my spiritual director role, training, and vulnerability hangover. She spoke to me about why I might be choosing to feel anxious. “Choosing” is not a word I would say about my feelings, but it was appropriate for her to ask this. We talked about threats. She asked, “What is threatening you (which brings the anxiety)?”

This question is unlike what I would discuss in a spiritual direction session. However, the work I do in therapy helps me as a spiritual director, just like spiritual direction and supervision do. She helped me understand the level of attunement my teacher had taught me in a way that helped me move forward as a director instead of staying stuck.

Our exploration of anxiety helped me understand my vulnerability hangover and helped right my nervous system back to a regulated state. To share vulnerably is to invite people to see you as you are. The threat of sharing your true self and actual struggles is rejection. The opposite is connection.

In therapy, one goal is always recovery - how long will it take you to recover from an event that sets you back? I can recover from events that get me down much quicker than I once did, and that tells me I’m headed in the right direction.

how a spiritual director may think about the same thing in a different way

Where my therapist might talk about recovery, a spiritual director may think in terms of desolations or consolations (our walking toward or away from God and in-between). People may have seasons of desolation or consolation, but we usually experience both in different ways all in one day. Lest I think I am all the way free (because this journey with God sometimes feels that I have arrived and am arriving), Monday reminds me that I’m still becoming free. Pressing into tender places slowly is how we learn to grow, and people grow in different ways and speeds.

I’m tender to vulnerability right now because I’m doing new things and showing up in new ways. That tends to make me feel like the spotlight is on me, and though I often need to show up in ways that highlight me, I hate to be spotlighted. Monday reminded me to be kind to myself in my tender spots. I can show up to steward my call in new ways because I have agency and autonomy. Agency and autonomy feel like new ways to be in the world.

What Jesus is Like

My friend Amy B (I know so many wonderful Amys) often reminds me that I wrote in a past post that Jesus is the most non-anxious person in the room. He is also always the most attuned person to the Father in the room. I fully believe that Jesus, in his humanity, was attuned to every thought, feeling, body sensation, and intuition that grounded him to the Father and made him less anxious. This is the way we move and live and have our being.²

Sometimes, directees come to me and do not relate well to Jesus, the Father, or the Holy Spirit. Their idea of God’s wrath often makes them afraid of God and prevents them from living entirely free in God. I always want my directees to live fully free and fully loved, but I hold space for them just to be. It is not my job to correct them, or even it seems at times to direct them. The Trinity is the actual director. I listen to Jesus, Father, Holy Spirit, my directee, and I’m just a gentle companion as they find their way home.

When I am teaching or with people, and they are not sure about what God is like and are struggling between different ways to see him, I like to ask one of these questions:

Which way of thinking about God helps you believe the best about God?

Which way of thinking about God helps you feel the most free?

1. Colossians 1:15

2. Acts 17:28