A Book's Beginning

We all like to be good at something. Well, I am the world's master at writing the first page or two of a book and then stopping. The following was going to be a book about exploring the interactions Jesus had with others.

I remember talking with my friend Eric about his conversion to Christianity. "I’ll tell you why I became a Christian," he said. "Jesus wouldn’t get off my back. He haunts me still. I can’t escape."

Author and Cambridge scholar C. S. Lewis said, "You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalene, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."

I don’t know if Lewis continued to feel his approach after converting, but I did. I still do. I’ll go weeks without praying, wondering why life is so stressful and miserable, when Jesus shows up. He knocks on the door of my limited attention span, urging me to commune with him.
He does the same thing in scripture. A crew of men try to sail through a storm, and there he is. Two guys walk down the road having a conversation, and there he is. A lady goes to draw water from a well, and there he is. He just shows up, and then it’s up to us to respond. "Well, a God descended," Dar Williams sings. "And now we have to live with what we did with what we saw."

Maybe it’s because Jesus has a habit of pursuing people that I want to know more about him.
I mean, who is he? The way he’s depicted in a lot of paintings, films, and tee shirts does not ring true. The beautiful man with flowing hair. The buff weightlifter whose pain is your gain. Mr. Magic on the playground. Such depictions seem off-base to me. But who am I to say? If it were up to me, Jesus would wear a jet-powered backpack, drink Guatemalan coffee, play a mean game of chess, and listen to Martin Sexton. Let’s face it. If it were up to us, Jesus would look a good deal like we want him to look.

But I want to know the real Jesus—the Jesus who woke up in the morning, pulled on his sandals, and walked around the sandy sick world that was Palestine. What were his thoughts? What were his passions?

I’m interested in how Jesus interacted with others, mainly because I think people are ultimately all that really matters in this world. In fact, the undeniable preciousness of people is one of the best pieces of evidence I can think of for the existence of, if not God, the sacred. It is when someone close to us draws near to death that this truth burns so brilliant, it blinds us from seeing anything else. Three years ago my grandmother came close to dying but eventually, thankfully returned home in good health. I still can see my grandparents in their living room a few days later, Grandpa rocking back and forth in his chair. "None of the rest of this matters," he said, waving his hand. All that matters is people.