It’s the latest trend gripping the hearts of American Christians. Well, to be fair, it’s had human hearts in its claws for millennia. But it has taken on a strange flavor in these late modern times. It’s hilarious and sad to see it play out in my life. This trend I’ve seen rearing its ugly, scrawny head in American Christianity is the idea, fed to me as Gospel Truth by the culture in which I’m steeped: Little ol’ me is the end-all, finality of existence. I’m the important one. I have to follow my dreams and manifest my destiny. I look inside myself, choose my destiny, and take Jesus along for the ride to ensure my dreams really do come true. To ensure I never have to face difficulty I can’t control, because that is to be avoided at all costs!
This is where the fun begins. By insisting that Jesus be the coddler of my extreme expressive individualism, I actually create a Jesus that is a devouring idol of my own design. This Jesus then becomes, in so many ways, the Oedipal Mother. A Christ whose salvation only reaches the level of an overprotective, overbearing, smothering mother; always taking her child out of difficult situations, to the detriment of the child’s development. This “salvation” then, has nothing to do with my loving action in the world, or my development and maturity in trust and faith, but rather it is a salvation reduced to an overbearing care that is blind and dehumanizing.
This Oedipal Jesus of my creation reduces me to a helpless infant and literally attacks any development of myself beyond the stage of spiritual maturity that craves milk. My mandibles become so atrophied that meat is not even an option. But I desperately need my dreams to come true, because it’s all about little ‘ol me! Right? I mean, what other purpose does life have if my sweet dreams are not coming true!? So I relent; I give in to this false Christ. I let this openly oppressive and suffocating idol rule my heart, and I call it Christianity.
A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Fakes
This idea—this unending, unexamined emphasis on only me and my dreams—is the cause for this great catastrophe. It’s the idea that leads to the Oedipal Jesus. It leads to this sort of PokéGod that just happens to bear that Latinized Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name for “deliverance”: Jesus. It’s what our cultural moment has done to Christ, filtered him down into a shallow joke. Jesus. To shout that name sounds like I just heard some bad news, or that I should be wearing a big sign that reads “The End Is Near”. To say that name quietly just sounds like I really need something to go my way today.
Jesus. He’s the one I can call on to back up my agenda, my plans, my beautiful sweet little dreams. He’s the one I call on when I’m faced with the monsters of difficult emotions or hard times. And that’s all he’s good for. To keep me soft and incapable of actually facing entropy and chaos head on. To keep me thinking that life is about what I can formulate for myself and then rage against God and everyone else when I don’t get it. To rage in my impotent maladjustment to reality. To not be fully human, but some stunted, frustrated and immature creature that can only squeal like a terrible toddler at the slightest hint of discomfort.
Christ is then reduced to wish fulfillment—das Opium des Volkes—the sweet candy I reach for when things go sour, but he’s not of much use otherwise.
I can do all things?
But this Oedipal Jesus is not the Jesus of history, Scripture, or any form of orthodox Christianity. But the unfortunate truth is, like I said, this trend of the PokéGod, the Friendly Neighborhood Jesus, is what the popular conception of Christianity is today. This is even true for those who call themselves bona fide Christians. They’re the children stuck in the clutches of the Oedipal Mother Christ. They’re the ones buying the flowery pink cross from Walmart, thinking it would look great in their living room, but not giving a moment’s thought to where the cross actually hangs in their own life; if their cross is even being taken up and changing the way they live here and now.
Because how else am I to get what I want? I have to appease this devouring figure, if I want to stay safe. So I must adhere to this oppressive continuous suffocation, the idea that anything and everything must be sprinkled with my brand of Jesus Dust, so that I can have what I want. Appearing one way externally, but truly living for my own selfish wants deep within myself.
It goes like this:
Jesus is a friend of mine, so my litmus for his truth is how comfortable and unencumbered I am in my life; how in control of my life I feel. And if I do encounter something that makes me feel out of control, I just gotta pray and pray my little knees off until I am “rescued”. Then I can forget that it ever happened, learn nothing from pain and suffering, and go back to the “true peace” that Jesus wants for me. This “true peace” is me in control of my own self-serving-agenda-driven life, wherein I can quote Scripture, violently ripped out of context, and claim that this is what Jesus wants for me!
I can do all things (which I have determined are best for me and what I want in my designer life) through Christ (a fancy word for my friend Jesus) who strengthens me (he is only around to serve me and numb me to pain). Philippians 4.13
Never mind that the man who originally wrote that, St. Paul, was mercilessly killed for spreading some strange cult-like form of Judaism, wherein he claimed this Jesus guy was κύριος (“Lord” in Ancient Greek). He claimed this Jesus Christ was in full control of his life. And yet, St. Paul endured twice the forty minus one lashes with whips at the hands of the Judean authorities – and as I said, he met a merciless end. What’s that about? If this Jesus guy was his Lord, why would he let him go through such pain and leave him for dead? Maybe he wasn’t praying enough? A good God would certainly never let those who call him “Lord Lord” suffer, right? Never mind the fact that St. Paul, in all his writing, stresses the necessary element of suffering to real unshakable faith and full humanness, that is Christ-likeness. He says at the beginning of that letter, Philippians, “For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain”. Is that Christianity? Today we seem to think it’s better to emphasize chapter 4 of Philippians rather than hear all of what St. Paul has to say. We know better these days. Right?
Never mind the fact that all the apostles met grim ends. And never mind “the blood of the martyrs [as] seed” (as the second century Christian historian Tertullian wrote), or enduring the “desolation of the human race” with a “grandeur of spirit” (as St. Cyprian, the third century bishop of Carthage wrote of facing a deadly plague head-on). The reality is, undeniably bold encounters with pain, suffering and death are inseparable from the history of Christianity.
I could go on. But you get the point, at least I hope you do. Even a quick look at history quickly exposes this Oedipal Jesus, who is so easy to criticize, as an inauthentic Christ. He’s a distortion of what the Christ figure stands for, symbolically (as a manifestation of Transcendent Morality), functionally (as the death-to-self, life-to-others mode of being in the day-to-day lives of those who claim Jesus as Lord). And this Oedipal Christ, who given a chance will vanquish all room for mystery and thought from us his followers, must be appeased. He’s an insatiable one.
Savior of the Cynical
But the Jesus of history, the Aramaic speaking, Mediterranean peasant day-laborer, the one we read of in the theological portraits of his life we call the Gospels, is someone who reaches so far beyond the sappy W.W.J.D. billboard Jesus. He was and is the savior of the cynical and sinful, the chief of whom is typing these words now. The Real Jesus was and is a mystery. But still somehow has managed to work in the mess of all our reimaginings and reinterpretations of his words to still deliver the core truth: His sacrifice and resurrection. And we can live in the light of the ancient mystery of it all. He is the Universal Christ, one who transcends our cultural moment. He is above and beyond my pitiful attempts to prove or debunk.
And I admit, I fall on the cynical side. I like to point out the error, the heresy, the stupidity. Especially in myself, first of all. (I mean, just listen to the tone of these thoughts!) But unfortunately I see this Oedipal Jesus as a consequence of Evangelical American Christianity. Born in the USA, baby. It’s the brand of Christianity in which I was raised, and it always struck me as strange. And it’s in such shambles in these late modern times. It’s in bed with a broken and deeply problematic political ideology. It’s stripped—and proud to be so—of the wider Christian tradition. It has reduced the Gospel to cheap talk and no action that even slightly resembles the life-giving sacrifice of Jesus; it’s devoid of the true hope of Christianity, the hope of renewal, resurrection, “Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven”.
It nearly turned me off to Jesus altogether. Nearly ruined me. But I guess my own critical, questioning way of being caused me to realize rejecting Jesus altogether would be worse than unquestioningly accepting what I was fed as The Real Jesus as a child. So I’ve been able to escape the extremes, for the most part. And I still have so very far to go.
But this Oedipal Jesus makes for an easy target. So stop it. Embrace mystery, and find what is elemental here: Jesus Christ is the realization of what has been pointed to all through human history as the only way to find eternal life. Whatever that means. No really, I mean let’s figure out what that really means in our lives. Let’s discover salvific truth through loving action, not through this certitude that throws out all mystery. Because not fully knowing yet still moving forward in the death-to-self, life-to-others mode of being is infinitely better than the watered down helicopter parent Christ who’s a lousy savior and an easy punching bag.