Deal With It!

While I was driving back from some place yesterday I passed a car with a window sticker that read “Jesus is alive, deal with it.” This slogan overlaid a big, cartoonish cross. For some reason, this really jumped out at me. In fact, I was so convicted by this slogan that I immediately rededicated my life to Jesus there at the intersection of Fair Oaks and Corson.

Actually, to be honest, I didn’t like the sticker at all. “Why not?” you may be asking. Well, it seems to reflect the fact that many people perceive the supposed good news of the Gospel as un-good, and that believers in that Gospel want to keep it that way. What the sticker presumes (I’m guessing) is that non-Christians don’t believe in the resurrection despite the preponderance of clearly obvious empirical data made available to them by so many eager apologists, and by that I mean, people with stickers on their car windows.

I suppose this kind of in-yo-face! religious zeal reflects the condition of competition and rivalry that, according to Henri Nouwen, pervades even our most intimate relationships, let alone our relationships to strangers. In There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis says, “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.” I see in this comment an insightful commentary on modern American society as a whole and western Christianity too. By saying “deal with it,” aren’t we telling others that Jesus’ resurrection is far from being good news about the incarnate reign of a merciful God in our midst and represents more an annoying intrusion of an exclusive and elitist ideology?

This attitude is reflected in exclusive claims to knowledge and the creation of who’s in/who’s out categories in the Christian church, doesn’t it? How can so many Christians (especially evangelicals) claim the blessings of God and condemn in broad strokes so many others who do not hold to the same beliefs? Here’s what I fail to understand about the narrow “salvation” claimed by so many of my fellow followers of Jesus: it presumes that the grace of God was limited by the emergence of Jesus. I cannot see why, for example, Jesus’ death would condemn the Jews (his own people!), merely because they would not accept him as Lord and Savior. I can just see Christians back in the second century with the words “Jesus is alive, deal with it” engraved on the back of their carriages just to incite their Jewish neighbors.

I hope that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus never represents something that must be dealt with, as though it was a harsh, exclusive and condemnatory fact, but instead a reason for joy and gratitude that we are invited into the life of God in the midst of our fractured, confusing and fallible lives.