When you commit to a deep study of a complex subject, you become humbled in the vastness of the knowledge available and how truly little you understand the subject.

This is what I have to say about giving a 1 hour presentation about Jesus Christ.

You’d think that for me, a 32 year old Catholic who’s talked, prayed, studied and lived the faith for all of my life, I’d be able to ZIP ZAP through the bare essentials of who the Big J is and why He’s so rocking awesome to study and contemplate.

That was a dumb thought.

Forcing myself to explain who Jesus is and was in the context of the Nicene Creed is and was a daunting task.  I just finished the lecture about an hour ago and felt defeated.  Deflated.  Uninspired and sad.  A complete 180 from when I wrote it.  The euphoria I experienced writing it should have been bottled. I could have sold it as I’VE GOT JESUS IN THIS BOTTLE.  YOU SHOULD TRY IT.  Somehow, though, that euphoria didn’t translate into a lecture.  Before 30 people of various backgrounds and ages and beliefs, I felt inadequate and desperate.

Maybe I was trying too hard.

Maybe I should have prayed beforehand for help.

Maybe I don’t know Jesus at all.

Maybe I just can’t sum up the most complex figure in the history of the world in one hour.  (I’m such an overachiever.  I really thought I’d do a kick ass job…)

What people wanted to understand is the Trinity and Heaven.  How is God 3 person?  How is God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit all a part of ONE God?  And heaven …  how is heaven “here” in our midst as Jesus says, yet we are bombing the shit out of Libya and we kill each other everyday and we poison the ocean, burn our forests, and stuff chemicals in our bodies, and rip each other off, and push profit over people, prize material over the spiritual and bring people down and keep them down…how is THAT the kingdom?

Uh, well, has anyone ever heard of this word called MYSTERY?

It’s a real doosy to think about Jesus, the Trinity, and heaven.  I know.  I’ve been thinking about it all my life and I still haven’t got it figured out.

But, I believe there is something I can’t explain to a class of 30; how I know that all this shit is worth it and it’s leading me somewhere good.  I believe that in all of the limitations of my mind, language, time, and oral history, I still have this euphoria when I write about love.  When I write about this guy that walked around talking to the people that no one liked, when I write about this guy that lived to challenge systematic oppression, the guy who made servants equal to masters and turned water into wine, and raised the dead back to the living; the man who forgave everyone who asked and was nailed in his limbs for a simple message, “Love one another,” — when I write about him, a euphoria comes.

Why?

I don’t know!  Let’s call it mystery.  Just like everything else in faith.

I don’t know if Jesus had siblings.  I don’t know if Mary Magdalene was His honey.  I’m not sure why he’d pick Peter, the biggest goof of them all, to be the first leader (maybe to say that if Peter can do it, ANYONE can do it?)…

What do I know?

I know that someone was born in the most unthinkable of places – a flipping manger, for God’s sake – surrounded by manure, hay, feed, and livestock and then proceeded to live out the most unthinkable message of love and action and justice.  And then he died an unthinkably brutal death because the society of the day rejected this rebel, this revolutionary.  Jesus was a radical and he was executed for it.

I know that living out these values has brought me into a clarity, it’s given me a gift of prioritizing the world where I see the poor and marginalized as the answers and the rich as oftentimes the problem.  It’s given me the ability to believe the socially discredited and love the forgotten, even when I feel like a big failing and flailing jerk in attempting to do so.  That fact isn’t taught very often: to be radical in today’s society, you often feel like a wandering idiot.  To be counter cultural is to live experimentally, trying to look at things differently, trying to come at problems with a different lens.  I’m not always sure that it’ll work, I’m only sure that coming at it with the same lens that everyone else is going to look at it will not result in a new answer.

Being different means being uncertain and, unfortunately, living in uncertainty.

I’m not certain of anything about Jesus, despite what I teach.  I lead with faith, not certainty. 

I’m not looking to be right, though.  Just good.  And just.

Always just.

That’s what I know about Jesus.  And it’s not very much.  Apparently, though, that’s enough to live out in question for the duration of my life.