Wisdom 32 Why Jesus?

[HKHaugan]

Wisdom 32 Why Jesus?

 Aloneness raises the immediate question for us to present an answer to it, Jesus. Jonah’s condition is everyone’s condition. So, let’s digress to this question:

 

                                                           Why Jesus?

 

To really get a grip on this question, we have to look at the individual human condition. Three things standout about the human condition, aloneness, our perceived needs in that aloneness and how we deal with them. In this first part we’ll look at aloneness. The next two will deal with needs and how we meet them.

 The human condition is one of being born into a growing awareness of self-conscious aloneness, the needs arising from that aloneness, and facing the fact that the only answers to our visible dilemma are invisible.

 Action, a teenage hood calling for a gang fight in the constantly replayed movie West Side Story, is confronted by a local candy store owner who looks at him disgustedly and says, “When I was your age…” Action interrupts him shouting angrily, “When you was my age, when my father was my age, when my mother was my age…you ain’t never been my age.” Action is shouting for all of us. None of us has ever really been like anyone else. Right now, is when I am alive. No one has ever been alive like me. It doesn’t matter what other people are like, old, young, adults, kids, men, women, fathers, mothers---I’m the center of my experience and no one really knows me, has been like me or ever will be. What do I do with me? What am I all about? Action’s only hope was to be part of a gang, a gang that’s tough, a gang that’s number one.

 We are all born in a body, alone inside, never understanding or really grasping what is on anyone’s else’s mind. We all may have been young once but no one is ever the same in that youth or at any other stage of life. We are all born uniquely, live individually and relate personally the best we can. As we view one another it is all guesswork and assumption. People are ultimately mysteries to one another. The language we speak is a language of aloneness that has dialects of emotion, struggling for acceptance, fearing rejection, hoping for something better, dissatisfaction and the need to find completion, purpose. Economics, the social and physical sciences, poetry, philosophy and the study of language itself are dialects of our basic language of aloneness. That’s what makes our human word languages so frustrating. They never seem to adequately express the deeper inner being’s sense of the need to communicate who and what we really are.

 Ask parents why their kids seem like strangers to them from time to time. Ask kids why they believe their parents don’t understand them. Extend this into communities and nations and the problem of understanding and being understood is magnified beyond anyone’s ability to relieve it. Art, drama, literature, movies are all attempts to cross the aloneness barrier that besets every human attempt at interchange.

 Ben, the older brother of Eugene, the main character in the play adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s timeless classic “Look Homeward, Angel,” tells his searching younger brother, “Eugene, the world is not outside, the world is you.” In the same book Eugene ponders what he must have experienced as an infant,”…and left alone to sleep in a shuttered room…unfathomable loneliness crept though him…caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one really comes to know anyone…and caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never , no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.” Wolfe’s book pleads for an answer and for the last two thousand years He has been right there in front of us.

 Paul, in Philippians 2:5-11 captures this primary cry of every human soul and says that Jesus, God the Son, “…being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And, being in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death---even death on a cross!” In other words, He took the experience of our frustrating aloneness, lived in it, introduced a whole new spiritual way of seeing self, others and God, accepted death in order to reach our hearts and give us not only hope but a whole different way of looking at and living life. We are no longer at the mercy of aloneness because when He rose from the dead He proved that no one is ever alone or that they ever have to feel alone again. He is always there with us. The phone commercial that says ‘Reach out and touch someone’ is really a call to overcome aloneness. That is what God did. He sent His Son to reach and touch us. For those of us who let Him touch us we know we are no longer alone.

 Given a divided culture, growing world unrest, a media driven atmosphere and creeping fear within, aloneness is screaming from within for an answer. Broken relationships divorce, increasing physical problems and the horizon of uncertainty facing us every sunrise. Aloneness is real. Why are there so many songs about being alone, so called self-help books written, clubs formed, TV dating services emerging? Even atheists, in their struggle not to believe, form groups to find solace and justification in not believing.

 People are not able to deal with the one thing that threatens the interior of all human beings, aloneness. So, when Jesus answers Thomas’ question about where Jesus is headed He replies, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Here Jesus gives us the orientation for patterning our daily life, for reasoning and decision-making and for spiritual grounding----an ongoing personal relationship with Him. Will you let Him, allow Him, ask Him to touch you?

 Why Jesus?

As one person rightfully observed, “Why not Jesus?”