Needing Jesus

Start with a man.

A young man, to be more specific. He lives in a small but well-furnished apartment in a gentrified neighborhood of Austin (or Chicago, or Brooklyn, or Portland). He’s 26. He’s single, he’s got friends, and he works a reasonably well-paying job with a tech start-up, a consulting firm, or perhaps a non-profit. He eats good food, reads good books, listens to good music. In general he’s a nice guy. He’s not a jerk. He recycles. He has reliably soft-progressive opinions. He voted for Bernie then for Biden. You’d enjoy his presence if you spent an evening with him.

This young man is not opposed to religion. He’s open to spirituality, even mysticism. One or two friends have dabbled in witchcraft. Though he rolls his eyes at evangelicals, he doesn’t hate Christians. He’s known a few believers who checked the “rational” and “decent” and “not constantly proselytizing” boxes. That said, he’s not particularly drawn to Christian faith, though he doesn’t blame anyone for being so. His life is already in satisfactory order. He’s a nice person, a good person, who treats people well enough. He’s living his one life the best he can. Besides, it’s the churches that are off-putting. Who would volunteer to join one of those?

My impression is that there is a long-standing Christian response to our hypothetical young man. It’s that he’s not “really” happy. Or perhaps he’s not “really” nice/good. Because the only true happiness comes through knowing God, and no one—“not one”—is genuinely good in this life, at least apart from Christ.

Now there’s truth in that, certainly in its desire to change the terms of the discussion: e.g., what makes for happiness? what makes for virtue?

But I think, at least today, perhaps always, that this response is inadequate. Because the young man in question doesn’t live in accordance with Christian (much less Platonic or Buddhist or Marxist or . . .) teaching on the good life. He lives in accordance with a vision of the good to which he is, in fact, approximating quite closely. That vision has its source in late modern capitalist society, and it says that what makes for happiness is health, affluence, autonomy, entertainment, fun, friends, and city life with a decent job and correct opinions. Guess what? He’s got that. In spades. To boot, no one hates him, because he’s not a jerk. So he’s nice on top of having run the gamut—really, the gamble—of the happiness benchmarks. To say in reply, “nuh uh; meet Jesus,” is surely wrong as a strategy. It might be wrong on the merits.

Chesterton writes somewhere that it’s nonsense when Christians say a man can’t be happy in this life without faith. Of course he can. Natural happiness is available to all, at least in principle. What Christianity offers is supernatural and eternal happiness. There’s no doubting that the latter bears on the former. But the former is not obviated by the latter, that is to say, its possibility is not utterly erased either by grace or even by sin.

It seems to me that churches ought to imbibe this truth as deeply as they can. Why? And what would that mean? A few preliminary answers:

First, it would awaken churches from their non-dogmatic slumbers. In other words, churches would stop being scared to talk about—to clarify that so much of the faith comes down to—heaven, eternity, life after death, etc. In my experience many pastors see these and related ideas as very like the enemy, because they turn the eyes of believers to the great hereafter instead of to the here and now. I haven’t yet figured out what’s going on here, apart from a partial misreading of N. T. Wright.

Second, though, there’s a flip side. Because churches are antsy about emphasizing heaven, they focus almost entirely on earth. Sometimes that has some good consequences: social justice, serving the poor, partnering with other institutions to help ameliorate various social ills. But one unintended consequence is implying, at times quite strongly, that the main thing Christians are concerned with is this life, in particular making this life good. At that point you’re not far away from presumptively affirming middle- and upper-middle-class folks’ affluent lives of entertainment and consumption as just about the apex of what one can expect from this world. The marks of that apex include Netflix, exotic food, travel, funny podcasts, household amenities, and lightly held correct political opinions. A church doing its job would hold up a mirror to such persons—of whom this writer is the worst, to be clear, being the chief of sinners—and say, This is not the good life. The good life is the passion of Jesus Christ. Take up your cross and follow him. In following him, you will find death but, afterward, life eternal with God. If a church isn’t doing that, I hesitate to say whether it’s a church at all.

Third, part and parcel with affirming affluent Christians in their lives of leisure and pleasure is affirming as well that they are good people, just like everyone else they know. Bad people, if such there are, include murderers, thieves, rapists, and those neighbors with the wrong political sign in their yard. But that’s not you; how could it be? To which churches ought instead to respond with one great Barthian yelp: Nein! Not only are Christians not “good people” by Christian lights. Church is not about “being good people.” Church is AA for sinners. I go, stand up, and introduce myself by saying, “Hi, I’m Brad. I’m a sinner.” I keep on saying that till the day I die, hoping and trusting in God alone for the grace that might not only heal me, if in fits and starts in this life, but completely, body and soul, in the life of the world to come. That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame, y’all.

Which means, fourth, that we owe the proverbial young man a much better explanation of why he ought to go to church—of why, in short, he needs Jesus. He needs Jesus for the same reason you and I do. Not because we can’t find provisional contentment in daily life; not because can’t be nice people without the Bible. No, he and you and I need Jesus because we suffer from an unchosen, perhaps unconscious, but nonetheless unavoidable and universal condition. We are sinners. We are in bondage. We don’t need to learn how to be nice and we don’t need a dollop of affluence to nudge us toward earthly fulfillment. We are sinsick and we need the cure. The whole world does. For this world is sodden and weighed down with the burden of sin, sickness, suffering, injustice, idolatry, and death. An upper-middle-class life of money, entertainment, and pleasure has no power to relieve us of those things. They are masks and bandages hiding wounds and scars that are open and bleeding, even if—especially if—we don’t know it. And if what we need is Jesus, the church is the place to find him. He’s what you get there, whatever else you get. And he’s enough. The people around you? Every one is unimpressive. A bunch of boring normies. In the words of Nicholas Healy, the church is nothing if not full of unsatisfactory Christians. That’s the point. The church is a house of healing, and it’s full of the sick (even if some of them have convinced themselves they’re well). The thing to realize is that you’re one of them, whether you like it or not. Nor do you have to gin up the energy or emotion or feeling to receive Jesus, who alone is the fix, the chemo, the medicine of immortality for your mortal soul. The church gives him to you, whole and entire, in the blessed sacrament and in the public reading and proclamation of God’s word. Christ visible and audible is both sufficient and objective: he’s enough and he’s real. He’s the only thing worth going to church for; but then, he’s the one thing needful, as Mary knew and Martha learned.

We might not be able to persuade our 26-year old sociable Austinite of his sinsickness of soul; we might not be able, through mere conversation, to convince him of his need, of the dark spiritual cancer within that, if he’s honest, he sometimes feels and worries and wonders about. But at the very least, the church can stop pretending in two ways. It can stop pretending that his life is so very bad, humanly speaking, without Jesus: it’s actually pretty sweet, on the surface. But it can also stop reinforcing that surface, that superficial shallowness, in its own life. The church won’t make him happy; it might make him less happy, at least in one sense. It certainly can’t promise to make him any nicer. That’s not what it exists to do.

But in its sacramental and liturgical common life, the church can offer him Jesus, and through Jesus, hope for a happiness in comparison with which his present modest and unstable contentment is a trifle. That hope transfigures this life, shedding light on our lives as well as on those of our neighbors, uniting us in the knowledge of the singular condition of need and dependence in which we all share.

What Jesus offers, in a word, is truth, and the truth will set you free.