Jesus Christ lived 33 years on earth and spent most of them in obscurity. It is hard to absorb this fact. The Son of God, entering a broken world, did not use his power to immediately reconfigure it, but chose instead to submerge himself in his circumstances and live as one of us.
He did this so well that many observers failed to grasp the truth of his nature. Most of his life elapsed in ways that must have seemed nondescript; only a few years are recorded. Christ’s biography can read as a few carefully detailed episodes—the birth in a manger, the dazzling public ministry, the Crucifixion and epochal Resurrection—situated at the opposite ends of three sparsely observed decades.
What did Jesus do with all that time? We can only hypothesize. What we do know is that Christ emerged from his undocumented years as a man fully acculturated to his environment. He quoted the literature of his people and observed their traditions. He understood their laws and their contested interpretations.
Whatever else he accomplished, it appears that Jesus diligently attended to the world he was born into, allowing himself to be shaped by a set of religious institutions and governing structures that he understood to be fatally flawed. The Word became flesh, says the apostle John, and dwelt among us (1:14).
If you believe that Jesus is God incarnate, that he entered our reality with both knowledge of its grimness and knowledge of his power to redeem it, his use of time may strike you as odd. His willingness to live alongside others remains one of his most provocative qualities.
I am trying to understand Jesus’ orientation toward his surroundings because I am reevaluating my relationship with his church. My congregation of 13 years recently dissolved in one of those commonplace tragedies that regularly decimate congregations of every description but are nonetheless singular and life-altering when you are the one involved.
Among the casualties of this dissolution was the racial-justice ministry I led. The process of establishing this ministry had been as contentious and protracted for our congregation as similar situations are for most of our evangelical peers. When acrimonious electoral politics and the slog of pandemic life exposed fissures that had long existed, I began hearing murmurs that this ministry was accelerating the church’s destruction.
People wanted to know if I understood the strain I was causing by asking our community to think about race. Although I had been recruited by church leaders, they also wanted to know if launching this ministry was my act of personal ambition, aimed at seizing control of the pulpit. Was I truly a Christian—or was I a pretender who was working to inject the congregation with my politics? These questions came from people I considered my friends. Some of them became so hostile toward my family and me that I wondered if I was hallucinating our interactions.
Our church leadership, exhausted by the situation, made an executive decision to terminate the racial-justice ministry. I found out about this decision, and about the end of my role, in a public announcement delivered at a Sunday gathering, effective immediately. In the aftermath I texted everyone who had criticized my work to ask if we could talk about what had happened. When a few of my friends responded and asked to meet, I drove over that afternoon. From outside their home, I watched them open their door. After a brief exchange, the door closed again.
The church had also been struggling with other problems. Within a few weeks, its difficulties compounded, and the congregation scattered. My family and I began visiting neighboring churches, trying to decide where to go next. It is hard to return to the church once you’ve seen what it is capable of doing to its members. It is also hard, once you’ve experienced the tenderness and affection that can accrue, to stop trying. In every new place, I am flooded with desire to belong—and with dread of what could happen when I finally do.
I was not planning to look for a new church. When I joined my old congregation as a college freshman, I assumed I would stay for the rest of my life. I had walked in on a Sunday service held in a campus recreation center. The pastor’s message was about shared life as a radical expression of faith and about Christ as one who bridges our differences.
I was moved; I joined the church that semester. I was compelled by its members and by the portrait they painted of Jesus—a Savior who had already transcended all forms of earthly acrimony and was inviting his followers to do the same.
Jesus was the kind of man who could discuss theology with a Samaritan woman in public, demolishing hierarchies of race and gender in an act of civility that rendered a glimpse of the kingdom he was here to announce. He could walk into a temple courtyard and overturn the moneychangers’ tables without apology, then use the newly vacated space to administer healing to the blind and the lame. There was no historically entrenched division he couldn’t overcome, no form of brokenness beyond his ability to repair.
Jesus mesmerized me with his brilliant, difficult goodness. He indicated that a world of conciliation and justice was within reach and that he was preparing his followers to obtain it. He blessed the poor in spirit, the peacemaker, the meek. He said that in his kingdom, the first would be last.
Jesus made the present age tolerable by declaring that another was at hand. To me, this meant I had no obligation to accept the world in its existing state. For the rest of my time in college, I threw myself into campus protests and prayer rallies with equal vigor. After graduation I took a series of nonprofit jobs, working in roles that addressed racial and economic inequities, and volunteered with my church on nights and weekends. Jesus, I presumed, called me to live as a refutation to my surroundings.
I spent five years praying for opportunities to pursue justice and equity work through ministry. When my pastor invited me to consider the racial-justice role, I took it as a divinely appointed gift. When my role ended and my church collapsed, I took it as a blow to my certainty that I had understood Jesus correctly, or at all.
In the Gospels, Jesus heals the sick and turns water into wine. He compels a mob to set down its stones. He is undaunted by the most immutable realities; they become malleable under his hand. These episodes from Christ’s biography are the ones I know best, and they have formed me for most of my adulthood.
In the aftermath of my church’s dissolution, I’ve revisited the Gospels and felt rebuked by how incompletely I’ve studied Christ’s life. These moments of tangible victory do not represent the whole of his story.
Jesus is rejected as vehemently as he is received, feared and resented as much as he is admired. Some rejoice in his ascendance; others plan for his demise. Crowds praise him; later they bay for his blood. He permits this, knowing where it will all lead.
Jesus is arrested and refuses to defend himself at his hearing. He is unjustly sentenced, then crucified. He forgives his accusers. He yields to his executioners. He dies. His authoritative power, so expertly wielded elsewhere, is completely restrained. When faced with a visceral manifestation of human depravity, Jesus allows it to annihilate him.
Evidently, he does not choose to transform every unfavorable circumstance.
As we visit new churches, I think constantly about Christ’s insistence on living among the people who will betray him and about his refusal to escape his captors. I find this newly irritating for reasons I can’t explain.
It is possible I am bothered by evidence of Christ’s willful, deliberate vulnerability. It is possible I liked him best when I believed he would always lead his people to bypass the depredations of ordinary life.
I want to claim that my allegiance to Christ stems from pure high-mindedness, that my passion for justice is an expression of my piety, that everything that happened with my church pained me simply because I cared for it so much. These claims are partially true.
My discomfort with Christ’s self-restraint suggests that I am also drawn to him for other reasons. I’ve taken his goodness and power as evidence that he will always generate the version of reality I long for. Christ healing the sick, Christ cleansing the temple, Christ teaching a Samaritan woman: I understand these stories as signs that he can overpower the effects of physical decay, institutional failure, and racial hatred and that when his followers encounter all these things, they can expect to prevail.
Since my church’s implosion, I’ve soothed myself by arguing that Christ will quickly reverse what happened. Soon, I’ve thought, he will repair us, and we will finish what we started. But in the intervening time, I’ve only seen more churches splinter over justice issues, ranging from their struggles to nurture diverse congregations to their inability to address problems of endemic sexual abuse. I’ve also seen these churches presented with opportunities for conciliation, which few of them have shown interest in pursuing. Now years have passed without these churches, or my own, displaying much evidence of repair.
I suspect that these opportunities for conciliation were Christ’s moments of intervention. Why didn’t he force us to respond? The answer is obvious when I revisit the list of miracles that I’ve admired and considered as revelations of Christ’s coming kingdom: There is no miracle in which Christ wields his power to manipulate human choice.
Jesus gives himself to a world that promises to brutalize him, and all available evidence indicates that he never once retracts himself.
He gestates in the body of a Jewish woman oppressed under Roman rule, and he’s born into an empire that targets infants of his description with state-sanctioned violence. His earliest moments on earth are fraught with hostility; even so, he remains.
He is raised by parents whom he loves, whom he understands will soon be unable to protect him. He absorbs the instruction of his religious teachers, aware that they represent a corroded institution that he will grow up to challenge. He must know that this is a world he will overturn and divide. Somehow, this does not deter him from immersing himself within it, from loving it as it is.
How often is he tempted to despise what he sees? How many times is he halted by occupying soldiers and given a burden to hoist onto his back? How many acts of cruelty are regularly performed in front of him, committed by the people he knows best?
How is it possible for him to know our world without wishing to escape it? What is he trying to tell us with his decision to stay?
Christ delivers an answer to these questions with his last 40 days on earth. Once he is resurrected, he returns to the world that killed him. In the weeks approaching his ascension, he chooses to conclude his time on earth as he began it: anonymously embedded in the rhythms of common life.
The final chapter of John’s gospel opens with Jesus standing alone by the Sea of Galilee, unrecognized by his disciples, waiting for them as they fish. These men, who have not yet apologized for abandoning Jesus to his death, arrive on shore to find that he has already stoked a fire and prepared a meal. Jesus applies himself to the work of serving breakfast and allots himself a few lines of dialogue in which he tells the men to eat.
In the ending of Luke’s gospel, Jesus falls into step alongside two men journeying from Jerusalem to Emmaus, then joins their discussion about everything they hoped for—and were disappointed in—concerning a crucified prophet from Nazareth. He articulates his own interpretation of the Scriptures, explaining why they needed a Savior who would suffer at the hands of a world he had known from its inception. The men listen and invite him to dine with them at their destination. Once they arrive, Jesus seats himself, blesses the meal, and administers the food with his own hands.
The tasks Christ completes before his ascension clarify the nature of his power: The world may kill him, but it cannot deter him. It may alienate him, but it cannot extinguish his essential goodness. The apostle John, who called Christ the Word made flesh, also called him a light shining in the darkness, which the darkness has not overcome (1:14, 5). If Christ’s early days raise the question of what he intended to accomplish with his time, his final days give an answer. He has formed his life into a sign and a wonder. He has lived as a miracle of sustained nearness.
When Christ appeared as only an invitation to transcendence, it was hard for me to envision a path forward within the church. My own church, so devout, so beloved, the recipient of so many hours of labor and care, had still been corroded by the uglier tendencies of the surrounding culture. If Christ’s trajectory led away from the common dysfunctions that no church and no group of people has fully overcome, then following him meant letting the possibility of communal life recede into the distance.
This can sound like a reasonable conclusion. Responding to Christ’s example of radical goodness may consist of shearing off our morally ambiguous entanglements. Yet this choice is not radical enough. Its logic is indistinguishable from the thinking that already pervades our culture.
Most of our contemporary idioms prescribe divestment as a cure for the problems endemic to life with others. Without needing the example of Christ, we can protest or defund the institutions we dislike. We can cut off toxic relationships. We can pull our children out of school. The idea that we should create distance between ourselves and the rest of the world in order to pursue ideals is not revelatory. If the conclusions drawn from a study of Christ’s life are indistinguishable from the conclusions that can be drawn without him, they are not sufficiently considered.
Christ’s life is too singular. It cannot be understood, nor can its effects be approximated, by any logic apart from his own. By most measures, it is a cipher: 30 years squandered, a premature death, a resurrection followed by gestures that seem frustratingly unsuited to God in human form. It is an illegible biography unless you suppose that Christ may have been doing what he promised to do from the beginning—to inaugurate a new reality.
Perhaps that way of being is crystallized in how Christ ultimately identifies himself to his friends. During the early days of his ministry, he frequently declared that the kingdom of heaven was at hand; after his resurrection, he seems to enact this statement by asking the apostle Thomas to place his fingers in his side. The summation of Christ’s message is found in a scarred, pitted body that allows itself to be pierced and returns to offer itself once again.
There is no way of interpreting Christ that justifies walking away from the world. To imitate him is to live with one another in a posture of steadfast, interminable approach.
Ironically enough, my resolve to emulate Christ weakens whenever I come back into contact with his people. My family and I are now attending a new church and taking steps toward conciliation with members of our old one. These interactions are cordial but uneven, making it hard for me to draw a connection between Christ’s acts of loving proximity and whatever it is we are doing when we are together.
Why Broken Friendships Hurt
The assumption of goodwill that existed between members of our old church is mostly gone. Some of the friendships within that circle have resumed; others have not. I feel a fresh wave of sadness every time I think about what our relationships used to be and what they are now. It is amazing to me that trust between people can be so painstakingly built, then so cleanly demolished. At our new church, lovely and welcoming as it is, I cannot imagine making the same investment and seeing it lost again without concluding that time spent with the people of God is anything but a waste.
Engaging with the church can be so painful that I want to argue I don’t need the church in order to consummate my beliefs. Any group of people will do. This idea falls apart as quickly as it comes together: I know, as much as I want to think otherwise, that I need to go back to the church because it is the ultimate proving ground for all that is conveyed through Christ’s story. If his proximity has a transformative effect, I expect to see it first among those of us who claim to follow him.
Returning to the church is nonnegotiable. Christ’s story is compelling enough to bring me to my knees, but without a through line connecting his biography to ours, it will always seem like an abstraction of goodness, existing in another dimension, incapable of making landfall in our own.
In the mystery of Christ in the Gospels and the mystery of Christ in his church today, I think the apostle Thomas and I occupy similar positions. I look at the church and wonder what, exactly, I am seeing. It is possible that Thomas asks a version of this question when he is confronted with Christ’s resurrected form.
Christ appears before Thomas with a gash in his side and punctures through his hands and feet. How can Thomas discern whether he is seeing a body in collapse or a body that has overcome decay and is passing into glory? Is this body to be mourned or celebrated, buried or embraced?
If the present-day church is the extension of Christ’s body, I can sense the degree to which it has been ravaged. Every church has been pierced, not only by our contemporary disagreements but also by the generational animosities we have inherited. Just so, when Christ presents his body to Thomas, it is mangled with the evidence of all he has suffered.
Yet it is possible for his body to mean more than one thing. I think about this as I remember the friends whose phone call I picked up and whose house I drove to after the racial-justice ministry dissolved. Before they closed the door, I had gotten out of my car and stood at the entrance to their home. I consider this my last interaction with my old church, and it plays in my mind like the ending to a tragedy.
My friends closed their door, and I drove away, but we also briefly faced one another. I had brought them a parting gift, and they thanked me before accepting it. Whatever grievances we could have revisited, whatever disagreements we could have chosen to litigate, we contained them long enough to conduct this exchange.
I could assign multiple narratives to the years spent with my old church, and the harshest ones would all hold a degree of truth. The most obvious would center on our moral frailty and on our community as a locus of mutually inflicted disappointments. The most thorough, however, accounting not only for our own story but for Christ’s, frames our time together not as a failure but as an unfinished gesture.
At the end of his 33 years, Christ’s body tells the full story of his life, of how he is both indelibly marked by our world and resurrected by the Holy Spirit. Perhaps his church is both these things: a reminder of our earthly inadequacy and a definitive sign that a new way of being has arrived. The people of God look like a broken body shuddering toward resurrection.
Our nation’s protracted racial reckoning has not come to a close, and no church anywhere has prevailed over the history we were born into. My friends and I have not resolved any of these problems, which preexisted us and will likely outlast us all.
Against this backdrop, however, even the quiet exchange on my friends’ driveway appears as a weak but unmistakable approximation of Christ’s signature miracle: In spite of everything, we had drawn each other close. The church, profoundly wounded though it may be, was not a waste of our time.If Christ’s nature is a revelation of nearness, for a moment together, we apprehended him.
Yi Ning Chiu writes the newsletter Please Don’t Go. Previously, she was the columnist for Ekstasis, Christianity Today’s creative NextGen project.
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