Does It Matter If Jesus Gets You?

The "He Gets Us" Campaign and the Old Question of How Jesus' Ethics Matter

How do we encounter Jesus? What do the ethics and way of Jesus have to do with it? And why is the founder of Hobby Lobby advocating for Jesus as a refugee? Plus, the March book club selection.

He Gets Us: 21st Century Version of an Old Question

At this year’s Super Bowl, an advertising campaign known as “He Gets Us” will be purchasing ad space on primetime television to promote better public relations for the Second person of the Trinity. The premise of the whole extremely well-funded campaign is very simple: short, declarative statements about Jesus’ identification with us, to inspire people to live in these kinds of ways.

If you’ve not heard of the campaign, I think you can still get the “Jesus was a refugee” t-shirt—for free!—in exchange for promising to do charitable actions.

Full disclosure—I got the shirt.

There have been lots of criticisms about the public relations angle of the whole thing—that God doesn’t need PR, and that this is simply one more iteration of a weird evangelistic move of trying to relate Jesus to the particular circumstance of certain people. And largely I agree—offloading the need for Christians to simply be faithful witnesses—which does not cost money— on to a public relations campaign funded by billions of dollars feels very much like a youth group move from my teenage years.

The tenor of the campaign itself emphasizes aspects of Jesus’ ethos usually associated with a more progressive platform: that Jesus was a migrant, a refugee, was misunderstood, was cancelled, had troubles with family, spoke loudly for love. But these are weird times, and so imagine the surprise when it was revealed that one of the big backers of this ad campaign was the Green family, founder of Hobby Lobby and the Bible Museum.¹ There are others behind this, but Green’s assessment of why he’s helping funding it was intriguing:

“You’re going to see it at the Super Bowl—‘He gets Us,’” said Green. “We are wanting to say—we being a lot of people—that he gets us. He understands us. He loves who we hate. I think we have to let the public know and create a movement.”

I want to leave aside the PR side of all this—of PR campaigns for religious reasons there will be no end— and look at the basic message of the campaign: that we connect with Jesus through Jesus’ morals.

This is the end-game of the He Gets Us campaign, I think: not just to make people vaguely aware that someone named Jesus did certain things, but to offer them a compelling entry point into taking Jesus seriously. It’s ultimately making a case for Jesus not by talking about humanity’s need for redemption (as with the evangelicalism of my youth), but by emphasizing the moral example of Jesus which connects Jesus’ ethics with our analogous situations.

It seems like a new strategy in play, but it’s one with some older roots worth exploring, to help tease out this question: in what way does Jesus’ moral example matter?

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This campaign, in one way, is just one more example of how the conservative/progressive divide is frequently meaningless. Both ends of the spectrum take this connection of Jesus’ ethics and our life for granted: it’s just a matter of which ethics. Is it Jesus’ moral purity or his eating with sinners? Is it his forgiveness of sinners or his call to repentance?² But both take for granted that the way into knowing Jesus is through his ethics.

An Incomplete Genealogy of Jesus-as-Moral-Example

Those familiar with the 20th century WWJD movement of the late 80s and 90s may not know that it was echoing a much older theological movement: that of the Social Gospel of the late 1890s-1920s. This movement, represented by Walter Rauschenbusch, Baptist minister in New York, emphasized the ways in which Jesus’ kingdom of God was a primarily ethical one: to belong to the kingdom was to be caught up in the way and moral teachings of Jesus. Consider Rauschenbusch here:

If, therefore, our personal religious life is likely to be sapped by our devotion to social work, it would be a calamity second to none. But is it really likely that this will happen? The great aim underlying to whole social movement is the creation of a free, just, and brotherly social order. This is the greatest moral task conceivable. Its accomplishment is the manifest will of God for this generation. Every Christian motive is calling us to do it. If it is left undone, millions of lives will be condemned to a deepening moral degradation and to spiritual starvation.

What’s tricky about this statement is that Rauschenbusch, here and elsewhere, does not collapse personal piety into social action, but he does see them as inextricable components for the spiritual life, and particularly, for understanding who Jesus is:

By his human life Jesus was bound up backward and forward and sideward with the life of humanity…Even the feeblest mind has some consciousness of the tide of life playing about him. The stronger and more universal a human personality is, the more will he consciously absorb the general life and identify himself with it…Jesus had an unparalleled sense of solidarity. Thereby he had the capacity to generalize his personal experiences and make them significant of the common life.

There’s some differences here that I won’t get into, but the premise of both the WWJD and its earlier predecessor is this: to know Jesus is to, as the great Social Gospel novel In His Steps puts it, “walk as Jesus walked”.

It’s the original He Gets Us: that Jesus is identified by particular moral actions, and through these things, we understand and connect with Jesus.

Jesus’ actions are the most significant actions our common life can consist of, Rauschenbusch writes. To know Jesus is to participate, then, in those actions that Jesus did. The difficulty here is that Jesus’ actions are depicted as those which are the most deeply human, with any sense of these actions being also revelatory of God a little ambiguous.

Put differently: do these actions signify anything beyond what it means to be fully human? Are Jesus’ actions, as God, for the sake of being in solidarity with humanity?

There are older threads that Rauschenbusch is drawing on: Adolf von Harnack’s formulations of the Kingdom of God-as-moral paradigm sets the stage for much of Rauschenbusch’s work, as von Harnack was his teacher. But long before this, one could point to—as Rauschenbusch does—St. Francis, Abelard and Anselm, and a host of others who makes similar kinds of points: to undertake an imitatio of Christ in deed is to gain understanding and to participate in Christ’s own life.

In Thomas of Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, from the 15th century, we find this:

As long as you live, you will be subject to change, whether you will it or not - now glad, now sorrowful; now pleased, now displeased; now devout, now undevout; now vigorous, now slothful; now gloomy, now merry. But a wise man who is well taught in spiritual labor stands unshaken in all such things, and heeds little what he feels, or from what side the wind of instability blows.

Or consider Augustine similarly, from the introduction to his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount:

If any one will piously and soberly consider the sermon which our Lord Jesus Christ spoke on the mount, as we read it in the Gospel according to Matthew, I think that he will find in it, so far as regards the highest morals, a perfect standard of the Christian life: and this we do not rashly venture to promise, but gather it from the very words of the Lord Himself. For the sermon itself is brought to a close in such a way, that it is clear there are in it all the precepts which go to mould the life.

In both Kempis and Augustine, the actions of Jesus here are not for the sake of God identifying with our condition, but that, in the actions of Christ, we might be identified with God. The wise man, staking all they have on putting “these teachings” into practice, withstands the storm that is to come, and death itself.

All of this, of course, is an old contest in the end about how we read passages in Scripture like “No one can be my disciple unless they take up their cross and follow me”, and “If you love me, you will do what I command”. When Jesus commends a very particular way of acting, what’s going on here? Is it Jesus connecting with us, or is it Jesus offering a way of us connecting with him?

Between Imitation and Evangelism

This very brief (and very incomplete) genealogy presents two different ways of parsing this:

1. That Jesus identifies with certain actions, such that we are able to understand Jesus by the action. Jesus’ ethics are a matter of connecting with us in our identity. The significance here is that whenever we see these behaviors that Christ did, we’re seeing how Christ is connecting with the world (the He Gets Us/ kind of Rauschenbusch version)

2. That Jesus’ nature is revealed by certain actions, such that by entering into those actions, we are able to join in the life of God. Jesus’ humanity takes up all of what it is to be human in it, such that he is the most human one, i.e. the one who is fully human without sin. Jesus’ ethics are a matter of displaying what it is to be fully human, a human fully alive in God (the St. Francis /Abelard/ Kempis/ Augustine version)

   The first, I think, does not connect doing the action with being transformed, in that Jesus is an exemplar who “gets us”. Jesus’ actions provide a touchstone for us to connect with Jesus, but toward what end? The second model also provides an identification between God and humanity, but for a different kind of end: an invitation to be changed. Jesus’ ethics reveal the nature of God, and compel us to be changed accordingly.

The challenge here is that Jesus frequently does things that make all of us uncomfortable. He does things, in other words, that do not seem to get me. I don’t want to hold my tongue or to refrain from hating my neighbor in my heart. When I’m tired, I don’t want to hear that I need to stay awake with Jesus. And when I’m content, I surely don’t need a word of repentance and preparation, that the beginning of the end is at hand. That people suffer in various ways, and that Jesus did too is the door to the good news, but not the news itself: the good news is that through this door lies God, who has already identified with humanity that humanity might be healed.

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Reading: more for class prep for a weekend intensive starting Thursday. Started Nihilism and Technology by Nolan Gertz for a few upcoming talks expanding out Bonhoeffer’s challenge to digital media. Katherine Schmidt’s Virtual Communion gave me good food for thought, but which I ultimately disagreed with.

Coming in March: if you missed last night’s discussion of Basil the Great’s sermon, don’t worry! In March, we’ll be firmly in the middle of Lent, which will be a great time to read Rowan Williams’ Where God Happens. Williams reflects on the wisdom that early monastics give us on hearing God with others, and I can’t think of a better theme to reflect on in the midst of Lent. Discussion date TBD.

1. This reflects more of my bias about Hobby Lobby than it does accurate knowledge about Green, who recently announced he was giving away the whole company to a trust with environmental priorities. I still don’t know what to do with that. I feel like I need to rethink everything I’ve ever thought about Hobby Lobby. People contain multitudes.

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