Letting Jesus Be Mysterious

Who was Jesus of Nazareth?  What did he mean or want to do?  Sure, he was God's son, saved us and made us holy in his joining of us, and us to him.  He lived, died, and preached a beautiful doctrine.  Is that all there is to know?  These and other things are true, but say so little about the man.  They speak only of facts.  They are historic data and theological judgment, both of which have value, but people are more than what they say or do, even people who are God's sons.

The writers of the Gospels tell us what they think.  Theologians and some mystics are ready with opinions.  Is that enough?  Is it enough to know less about Jesus than about so many lesser people?  Maybe it is, and maybe there is no answer.

Maybe no one can tell us what we might want to know.  Maybe it is that way because he wished it were so.  Or perhaps he did not think we would, or should, be interested in him as he was -- but only in what was said and done.  Maybe he wanted to stand aside from the message lest he obscure it.

Maybe it is unimportant what he was like, or what he looked like.  It may suffice to know that he was, and in some way was all that we wished him to be.  He was prophet, revolutionary, teacher.  A man of prayer, of vision, of dreams and ideas.  He wanted there to be a difference, a newness, and tried to name this new creation.  The specifics of this in each life are not always clear, and might only be further obscured were we to know more about the man.

Were we to know more we might want to model ourselves on him, and that cannot be done.  We are not him, but ourselves.  We cannot become him, only more completely us.  If there is a model available it is found in the message, and once found it can be fitted to the people we are -- a people living, preaching, and trying to understand what was said or done.  But the man is something else.

I doubt we should hope to be or to act as he did, squeezing out lives into what his might have been.  Trying to act as Jesus did is as impossible as trying to talk or look as he did.  We are not Jesus, except in an analogous or spiritual sense.  Any person -- be in you or me or Jesus -- fulfills himself, sanctifies his being -- by being himself.  Better to let Jesus be the mystery he came to be.