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Dear Baby Jesus Biography
I've always have trouble understanding Jesus. I hear him referred to as "sweet precious Jesus" and I think, "What kind of Jesus is that? I don't find him in my gospels."
I love the scene in "Taladega Nights" (I don't recommend seeing the whole movie, unless you don't mind a lot of crassness.) when Will Ferrell is praying over dinner with his family, and prays to "Dear Lord Baby Jesus." This scene grows in hilarity as his friends and family members stop his prayer about 4 times to inform him that Jesus grew up and is no longer a baby. Will gets really mad raging that they can pray to "teenage Jesus, or bearded Jesus or whatever kind of Jesus they want" but that that he prefers his "Christmas Jesus". He finally continues his prayer rubbing in his belief in a "Dear sweet tiny tiny baby Jesus, with gold, golden fleece diapers... Dear eight pound six ounce, baby Jesus who doesn't even know a word yet..."
We all do this. We all make up Jesus. My kid's books really do this. They never portray Jesus as looking like a normal 1st century Israelite. While they've gone away from blond hair and blue eyes, he always has a purple sash and is very handsome, if not a little iffeminate.
A couple of days ago, I was reading one at breakfast to myself (which is a good practise by the way - reading children's books on the gospel has a power that speaks directly to our heart.) I was reading from one of my favorite series (Archway Books I think) about the blind man Bartimaeus.
I got excited as I looked at the illustrations. They were terrific! So earthy and real. When Bartimaeus finally is invited to come to Jesus he is lead to one that I assumed was Jesus. He looked like a 1st century Jew! It turns out he was probably Peter, always the illustrator's punching bag.
The real Jesus was sitting on a marble slab in a tiled square rimmed with big porcelain vases. He looked like Plato, brooding and handsome. He was the image of the ethereal and Romanized Jesus of western thought. And later after "beautiful Jesus" finishes healing Bartimaeus, the illustrator does something that really gets my goat, puts the goat in a sack and tosses him over a bridge.
Bartimaeus and everyone are celebrating in the market, with their cute/ugly cartoon expressions, a really beautiful scene, when Western Jesus totally ruins it by serenely walking through the square, with his purple sash and with the two finger medieval wave he does raised in greeting to some dude in a window shaking out his rug. I can only imagine the rug guy's thoughts, "Who? What weirdo is this? Why did he two finger wave at me?" I would have drawn Jesus celebrating with the rest of them. Poor cartoon Jesus, always destined to have no fun and to be no fun at all.
This sort of Jesus is so detached. An emotional robot. A figment of our imagination. Didn't Jesus have no "beauty or outward appearance to draw men to himself"? Wasn't Jesus one of us? Isn't that the ENTIRE point of the incarnation?
Thanks for letting me vent a little on my blog. If this is the way we picture Jesus, no wonder so many of us have trouble relating to him.By now nearly everyone has seen the Will Ferrell comedy, Talladega Nights. It features a drawn-out gag where Ricky Bobby and Cal both talk about the different ways they picture Jesus: from baby Jesus to drunken Jesus. It was a joke that caused some laughter-and some anger. I experienced both. At first, it is semi-offensive, even for a desensitized college student. Of course, I didn’t say anything around my friends. It’s easy to talk about sex or politics, but getting into religion/spirituality is a whole other story. Often, humor takes off the edge, making it a useful tool for evangelizing. The Bible tells us that every being is created in the image of God. Therefore, we have to take every thing we experience as another opportunity to creep closer to a thing called Truth. People complain about the Will Ferrell scene: it’s blasphemous, offensive, insulting—and I respect that opinion. It is tough to hear our thoughts and beliefs on prayer simply disregarded like that.
But at the same time, we have to try to glean truth from the experience. What can this tell us about our human nature, the deep flaws of the flesh? In the movie, Ricky Bobby tells his father-in-law that he prays to baby Jesus because that’s the one he likes the best. Cal takes it a step further, telling how he likes to picture Jesus: hammered at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert.
This is ridiculous right? They think they can just mold Jesus into whatever they want Him to be and that’s OK?
Wait, why does that sound so familiar?
A critically thinking person can see that the scene gives us a hunk to chew on about creating God in our own image. How many people kill, hate, lie or steal in the name of love? The scene illustrates the same point: people do screwed up things in the name of God, Jesus or religion in general, and then they rationalize it all, making things backward by creating a God in their own image; someone to sit on their throne in Heaven as the almighty yes-man.
God gave us a conscience. He didn’t send us down here by ourselves, controlled solely by flesh, because He knew what would happen. At the same time, as Bob Dylan tells us, “Every man’s conscience is vile and depraved.” The flesh interacts with the soul; it corrupts the conscience, grossly twisting things. We get what in psychology is referred to as cognitive dissonance: we, compelled by the flesh, do something wrong, and then, in retrospect, have to attempt to reconcile the thought process, or conscience, with the action we have committed. We have choices: change the behavior, acknowledging that it is wrong, or change the status of the behavior on the right-wrong scale in our minds.
As humans, we generally choose the latter. We cannot admit that we have messed up. We would rather walk around with planks in our eyes than to just say, "God, (or mom, dad, spouse, sibling or friend) I messed up."
The thing about Christians, though, is that we should be aware, more so than anyone else, that we are deeply, deeply flawed. We know our flesh is out for us and that no one can work their way through their sin. We must bow in a culture that likes to stand on stilts.
That disconnect between our standard and our behavior hurts. We have a view of God; we go against this view; we feel guilty; we change our view of God. The problem is, before God takes us anywhere near were we need to be, we have to give up the pride and talk to him. We have to know it will happen again, and that we cannot change our mindsets and views of God to justify what we have done. For this reason exactly we are told to verify everything in Scripture. God made our conscience—He knows that it can be manipulated.
So did Ferrell and company mean to specifically help out Christians who are distorting the characteristics of the Christian God? Probably not. Their thoughts probably went something like this: Hey, people do horrible things in the name of religion … lets make fun of it. As Christians, we can feel insulted, or we can try to learn something.
We can’t let the artist’s intentions control our reactions. We have to take the art away from the artist and take the Truth, however it comes. And the truth is this: I have a Jesus who gets pissed off and thinks about shooting people for petty things like the way they drive, but I’ve also met a Jesus who washes my sins away and loves passionately. And my hope is in the fact that the more I talk to the real Jesus, the more I move away from my mirror messiahs and the closer I get to something true and beautiful.
Dear Baby Jesus Biography
I've always have trouble understanding Jesus. I hear him referred to as "sweet precious Jesus" and I think, "What kind of Jesus is that? I don't find him in my gospels."
I love the scene in "Taladega Nights" (I don't recommend seeing the whole movie, unless you don't mind a lot of crassness.) when Will Ferrell is praying over dinner with his family, and prays to "Dear Lord Baby Jesus." This scene grows in hilarity as his friends and family members stop his prayer about 4 times to inform him that Jesus grew up and is no longer a baby. Will gets really mad raging that they can pray to "teenage Jesus, or bearded Jesus or whatever kind of Jesus they want" but that that he prefers his "Christmas Jesus". He finally continues his prayer rubbing in his belief in a "Dear sweet tiny tiny baby Jesus, with gold, golden fleece diapers... Dear eight pound six ounce, baby Jesus who doesn't even know a word yet..."
We all do this. We all make up Jesus. My kid's books really do this. They never portray Jesus as looking like a normal 1st century Israelite. While they've gone away from blond hair and blue eyes, he always has a purple sash and is very handsome, if not a little iffeminate.
A couple of days ago, I was reading one at breakfast to myself (which is a good practise by the way - reading children's books on the gospel has a power that speaks directly to our heart.) I was reading from one of my favorite series (Archway Books I think) about the blind man Bartimaeus.
I got excited as I looked at the illustrations. They were terrific! So earthy and real. When Bartimaeus finally is invited to come to Jesus he is lead to one that I assumed was Jesus. He looked like a 1st century Jew! It turns out he was probably Peter, always the illustrator's punching bag.
The real Jesus was sitting on a marble slab in a tiled square rimmed with big porcelain vases. He looked like Plato, brooding and handsome. He was the image of the ethereal and Romanized Jesus of western thought. And later after "beautiful Jesus" finishes healing Bartimaeus, the illustrator does something that really gets my goat, puts the goat in a sack and tosses him over a bridge.
Bartimaeus and everyone are celebrating in the market, with their cute/ugly cartoon expressions, a really beautiful scene, when Western Jesus totally ruins it by serenely walking through the square, with his purple sash and with the two finger medieval wave he does raised in greeting to some dude in a window shaking out his rug. I can only imagine the rug guy's thoughts, "Who? What weirdo is this? Why did he two finger wave at me?" I would have drawn Jesus celebrating with the rest of them. Poor cartoon Jesus, always destined to have no fun and to be no fun at all.
This sort of Jesus is so detached. An emotional robot. A figment of our imagination. Didn't Jesus have no "beauty or outward appearance to draw men to himself"? Wasn't Jesus one of us? Isn't that the ENTIRE point of the incarnation?
Thanks for letting me vent a little on my blog. If this is the way we picture Jesus, no wonder so many of us have trouble relating to him.By now nearly everyone has seen the Will Ferrell comedy, Talladega Nights. It features a drawn-out gag where Ricky Bobby and Cal both talk about the different ways they picture Jesus: from baby Jesus to drunken Jesus. It was a joke that caused some laughter-and some anger. I experienced both. At first, it is semi-offensive, even for a desensitized college student. Of course, I didn’t say anything around my friends. It’s easy to talk about sex or politics, but getting into religion/spirituality is a whole other story. Often, humor takes off the edge, making it a useful tool for evangelizing. The Bible tells us that every being is created in the image of God. Therefore, we have to take every thing we experience as another opportunity to creep closer to a thing called Truth. People complain about the Will Ferrell scene: it’s blasphemous, offensive, insulting—and I respect that opinion. It is tough to hear our thoughts and beliefs on prayer simply disregarded like that.
But at the same time, we have to try to glean truth from the experience. What can this tell us about our human nature, the deep flaws of the flesh? In the movie, Ricky Bobby tells his father-in-law that he prays to baby Jesus because that’s the one he likes the best. Cal takes it a step further, telling how he likes to picture Jesus: hammered at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert.
This is ridiculous right? They think they can just mold Jesus into whatever they want Him to be and that’s OK?
Wait, why does that sound so familiar?
A critically thinking person can see that the scene gives us a hunk to chew on about creating God in our own image. How many people kill, hate, lie or steal in the name of love? The scene illustrates the same point: people do screwed up things in the name of God, Jesus or religion in general, and then they rationalize it all, making things backward by creating a God in their own image; someone to sit on their throne in Heaven as the almighty yes-man.
God gave us a conscience. He didn’t send us down here by ourselves, controlled solely by flesh, because He knew what would happen. At the same time, as Bob Dylan tells us, “Every man’s conscience is vile and depraved.” The flesh interacts with the soul; it corrupts the conscience, grossly twisting things. We get what in psychology is referred to as cognitive dissonance: we, compelled by the flesh, do something wrong, and then, in retrospect, have to attempt to reconcile the thought process, or conscience, with the action we have committed. We have choices: change the behavior, acknowledging that it is wrong, or change the status of the behavior on the right-wrong scale in our minds.
As humans, we generally choose the latter. We cannot admit that we have messed up. We would rather walk around with planks in our eyes than to just say, "God, (or mom, dad, spouse, sibling or friend) I messed up."
The thing about Christians, though, is that we should be aware, more so than anyone else, that we are deeply, deeply flawed. We know our flesh is out for us and that no one can work their way through their sin. We must bow in a culture that likes to stand on stilts.
That disconnect between our standard and our behavior hurts. We have a view of God; we go against this view; we feel guilty; we change our view of God. The problem is, before God takes us anywhere near were we need to be, we have to give up the pride and talk to him. We have to know it will happen again, and that we cannot change our mindsets and views of God to justify what we have done. For this reason exactly we are told to verify everything in Scripture. God made our conscience—He knows that it can be manipulated.
So did Ferrell and company mean to specifically help out Christians who are distorting the characteristics of the Christian God? Probably not. Their thoughts probably went something like this: Hey, people do horrible things in the name of religion … lets make fun of it. As Christians, we can feel insulted, or we can try to learn something.
We can’t let the artist’s intentions control our reactions. We have to take the art away from the artist and take the Truth, however it comes. And the truth is this: I have a Jesus who gets pissed off and thinks about shooting people for petty things like the way they drive, but I’ve also met a Jesus who washes my sins away and loves passionately. And my hope is in the fact that the more I talk to the real Jesus, the more I move away from my mirror messiahs and the closer I get to something true and beautiful.
Dear Baby Jesus
Dear Baby Jesus
Dear Baby Jesus
Dear Baby Jesus
Dear Baby Jesus
Dear Baby Jesus
Dear Baby Jesus
Dear Baby Jesus
Dear Baby Jesus
Dear Baby Jesus
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