Photo by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash
I must confess, in the aftermath of the He Gets Us Super Bowl Ad, I spent some portion of the week thinking about their slogan, “Jesus didn’t teach hate.” It’s the sort of sentence that sounds like it must mean something important, excpet that it’s so vague. Didn’t teach whom? Didn’t teach those people to hate what? Everybody hates some things. Some things deserve to be hated. It’s the perfect gotcha, though, because it does communicate rather perfectly what everyone today already “knows.” It’s like the mean girls in the cafeteria talking in half-phrases and gestures. They don’t need to use more words because everyone knows what they mean and adjusts their behavior accordingly.
Noodling around online during the week, I discovered it hasn’t only been Christians discussing the ad. There are articles in the New York Times, Vox, CNN, AP, and, this short interview on NPR in which Scott Detrow interviews Bob Smietana of the Religion News Service. A couple of lines intrigued me in the course of their brief conversation. Detrow asks about the intended audience for the campaign. Smietana explains [emphasis throughout, mine]:
Well, the audience is sort of what they call spiritually open skeptics, which are people who might be OK with religion but aren’t really excited about Christians. And so they’re trying to really focus people on here’s this Jesus, and he’s great, and he’s a refugee, and he understands you. And I think part of the idea behind the ad is that people have had bad experiences with Christians, especially in the last few years. And so they want to try and get the focus off Christians and back to Jesus.
Detrow is curious. What kind of “bad experiences?” Smietana explains:
So you could get people who say that they’re not accepted at their church because they’re gay or because they’re more politically liberal, right? They may not be accepted because of their race. Or they may have just seen a harshness because – over a failing. And we’ve had lots of fallouts with churches over abuse. We’ve had lots of fallout, you know, in the Catholic Church and more recently even among evangelicals, Southern Baptists. And so I think there’s been a disappointment, like, wait. We don’t think the way you treat us is what you say you believe. You say you love us, but we don’t feel that love.
I longed, at this point, for Detrow to delve into the question of love. That single line, “You say you love us, but we don’t feel that love,” is the key, the thing that gets to the very crux of the matter. What would it take for a skeptic, or someone who, like the two men in this interview, doesn’t know anything about the Christian faith, to feel that love? More crucially, what is the love of Jesus? How is it communicated? What does it do?
Those questions being beyond the scope of the interview, Detrow asks about the funding for the ad. Smietana explains that it’s the Hobby Lobby people and “a whole bunch of evangelical folks who’ve kind of joined them.” But also, everyone who’s given money is trying to be “pretty discreet” because “they really want to keep people focused on Jesus.” Detrow nevertheless presses. It would have been no less than 20 million dollars to run two Super Bowl ads. Smietana acknowledges this point, and then he says:
And I think spending that much money, again, is a kind of admission on their part that there’s a problem. And, you know, and there is a problem for organized religion in America. It’s declining, congregations are declining. And these ads, too, are way to chide their fellow Christians to say this is what Jesus is like and maybe we know it and maybe we’re not acting like Jesus.
Again I so longed, at this point, for Detrow to have asked Smietana who Jesus is and why anyone thinks we should act like him. They only had four minutes, though, and the shiny question of politics was far more alluring. Plus, he already knows what it means to be a Christian. To quote him in full:
I mean, we live in a world where every single personal choice you make gets grafted onto the political spectrum, and people use it to make inferences about where you are politically. It’s interesting that the basic boiled-down aspects of the New Testament – loving your neighbor, helping out people who need help, you know, lending a hand to a stranger – can be something that’s turned controversial and also viewed on that spectrum.
I am growing so weary of the “loving your neighbor is what Christianity is” meme. Smietana, it seems, is sort of disoriented at this point, because he, like everyone, imagines that “evangelicals” and other kinds of Christians, have confused politics with religion. He gives this muddled answer:
Yes. These are interesting things that people think, the helping your neighbor or being loving could be suspect. But I think it goes back to the problem that American evangelicals in particular face is that their political ambitions and their deeply held religious beliefs and ethical beliefs are in conflict right now. So the things that will help them win politically will alienate people. So I heard a – recently I was doing reporting on another story. I heard a megachurch pastor. The first half the sermon was how terrible the liberals are. They’re going to destroy your life, the first half. And then the second half was about their big evangelism campaign. And I thought, well, you have just told anyone who’s not in your church that you don’t like them.
He goes on, after being interrupted by Smietana:
And you hate them. They have already heard that. So they might hear your Jesus message. They are not going to be real receptive. If you tell people you hate them, they listen, and they leave, and they don’t come back. And the ad campaign may not solve that.
And in that vein, the interview comes to a grinding halt and they both move on to more pressing matters.
But it’s Sunday, and we can’t do that. If we comb back through NPR’s attempt to understand the lay of the land, we see three issues, or themes, that are quite perfectly addressed by the texts assigned to us today by the lectionary organizers—the feeling of love, the identity of Jesus, and the absurd position of the believer in an unbelieving world. These three points you can see in the various pronouncements of NPR:
- “You say you love us but we don’t feel that love.”
- The ads are a “way to chide their fellow Christians to say this is what Jesus is like and maybe we know it and maybe we’re not acting like Jesus.”
- “The basic boiled-down aspects of the New Testament – loving your neighbor, helping out people who need help, you know, lending a hand to a stranger – can be something that’s turned controversial and also viewed on that spectrum.”
- “But I think it goes back to the problem that American evangelicals in particular face is that their political ambitions and their deeply held religious beliefs and ethical beliefs are in conflict right now.”
- “If you tell people you hate them, they listen, and they leave, and they don’t come back. And the ad campaign may not solve that.”
Through no fault of their own, the people talking about Christianity in the year of our Lord 2024, don’t have a basic understanding of what Christianity is. They imagine it is the simple matter of communicating love—masquerading as acceptance—and avoiding the undesirable experience of hate. People should be nice to each other. Thus speaketh the He Gets Us Campaign, and, ironically, given that they are rightfully suspicious, NPR. In short, the prevailing Christian “message” preached by almost everybody is only tangentially related to the Christian gospel, and, where it does manage to say something, it inverts the truth.
What a gift, then, that our Lord Jesus, on this first Sunday of Lent, sought fit to set aside his glory and descend into the turgid waters of the Jordan River, demanding that his prophet cousin John baptize him. Baptism is a tricky business. What does it mean? On the surface, not only of the water, but of the act itself, it is a matter of cleansing. You are dirty and you need a bath. The bath, though, brings you suddenly and uncomfortably face to face with that most hated reality, death.
For what ought to happen when everything and everyone is so morally corrupt that almost no amount of water is sufficient for cleansing? Thus it was that Noah and his family bobbed along the surface of the water in a boat filled with a remnant of creation after the entire earth had been washed of the filth and stain of human sin. For those concerned about the environment, who constantly observe that human action affects the planet in negative ways, their anxiety and desire to halt the wreckage is only a pale shadow of the kind of feelings God had about what people were doing to his earth and to each other, feelings reflected in the cleansing he himself accomplished so many millennia ago in the flood.
Of course, the average NPR commentator probably doesn’t believe in a worldwide flood, any more than the kind of moral and spiritual pollution God is always “concerned” about. They want to eradicate carbon emissions. But God wants to eradicate unbelief. Unbelief that leads to “the wickedness of man” being so great “that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only wicked continually.” That is much worse than any of the bad things that anyone believes about people today, whatever their religious or political proclivities.
All these images are caught up in the act of baptism. You go into the water, submitting to that sign of death, and yet you come up, a new person and clean. All of Israel turned out to be baptized by John as a sign of their repentance, their desire not to suffer the same fate as all the whole earth in the time of Noah, who would not believe what Noah said, but perished in the flood. The people in John’s day admitted that they needed help. They plunged into those swirling, brown waters.
And then Jesus came along. But he wasn’t like them. He wasn’t the sort of man who had anything that needed washing away. The thoughts of his heart were perfect, righteous, obedient, and loving continually. He, who had never sinned—went down into all that water where so many people had been subsumed, on purpose, to leave their sin and wickedness behind.
So the first thing we might say is that Jesus does love people. But he loves them in a different kind of way than we expect. He identifies with them. But how he identifies with them changes their identity entirely. His kind of love and his kind of identification, in the words of NPR, is deeply controversial, and that is because, at its very heart, it includes a peculiar kind of hate.
What does the word “hate” mean? If you look it up in the dictionary, two other words appear—hostility and aversion. Surely the Lord Jesus isn’t hostile? How could that be so? And surely he doesn’t experience an aversion to anything—not so deep that he can’t overcome it.
If you have ever read the New Testament, or the Old one, you will know that God expresses deep hostility towards the one thing that corrupts and destroys not only the earth, but every human heart. And that is why Jesus let John lower him down into the waters of the Jordan. Not because he was a sinner, but because he was going to be the bearer of sin that corrupts and destroys the person.
This isn’t, if we are perfectly honest, about feelings. Do you feel the weight of your sin on any given day? I don’t. Most of us muck along through life with only the vaguest idea of our failings. We wake up. We work and eat and rest and bathe and then go to bed. The next morning we do it again. Sometimes we pay ten of twenty thousand dollars to go watch the Super Bowl. Other times we complain that Christians are so unloving because they won’t affirm that which the Lord hates.
And yet, if you happen to what to know who Jesus is, and what kind of love he not only teaches, but has for you, you can save all that money and go to church—a church full of people like you who don’t do what they ought, who don’t love what God loves, who don’t hate what God hates, who don’t have the power to live, who have, continually, to ask the Lord to cleanse their sinful bodies with his body, to wash the stain of sin away from their souls with his most precious blood. And he always does it, faithfully, patiently, over and over, Sunday by Sunday, because that is what kind of God he is. Everyone is welcome—but the price of admission is to so hate the things that separate you from God that you cling on, desperately, to Jesus.
Have a nice day and check out my substack!
