I thought I’d met a true saint once. For the record, I’m not someone easily seduced by Christian celebrity. I’ve met too many well-known preachers, scholars, and activists to ever confuse talent with character. That said, this man felt like the real deal. He was humble, gentle, wise, attentive to other people. He dedicated his life to small, inglorious acts of service. When scandal erupted around him, I could only hang my head in despair. If not him, then who?!
Through numerous other such scandals through the years, I’ve had time to contemplate the lessons. None seems clearer than this—a deep vein of vulnerability must run through all of us. This realization calls for a bit of holy fear. I too am vulnerable—even if I can’t name precisely where or how. Faithfulness in the past is no guarantee of faithfulness in the future. New pressures or temptations can arise. Time itself can expose or create new weakness. To start off bravely is one thing. To finish bravely is another. I sometimes find myself grateful that life isn’t longer, that opportunity to betray my convictions at least comes with a built-in limit.
There’s no ‘proof’ anyone can offer for the divinity of Jesus. Like anything in life, we can only weigh the evidence—the testimony of first-century witnesses who walked and talked with him, the evidence of our own lived experience in seeking to do the same. Recently while reading Mark 6, I found myself moved by the response of the crowds to Jesus. They are desperate to get near to him, to hear from him, to touch him. In Jesus, it seems, they have finally found somebody worthy of their awe and honor.
It’s been my experience that almost everyone is on the lookout for a hero. Even cynical and disillusioned, some part of us still craves it—someone, somewhere, who can be what we ourselves cannot. We all want to find someone whose courage and integrity inspires us. We want to find someone wiser than us, who understands the things we don’t. We want to meet somebody strong yet good, a warrior with hands of a healer. Even—maybe especially—the bravest and strongest among us yearn for someone who is worth the dedication of our strength, our faith, our total allegiance.
Women clustered around Jesus, wiped his feet with their hair. Men rallied to him, followed him—or else greatly feared him. The strength of the reactions, the passion of the emotions, reveals something about the uniqueness of what they have encountered in him. The longer I live, the more central this evidence becomes to why I believe in Jesus. I believe in no small part because they did—the first century people who knew him best.
I have never met anyone of whom I would make even the smallest and humblest of claims that clustered around Jesus. There are beloveds all around me. But I cannot buy a hero. There is no one I know who would both preach with words of fire and accept responsibility for feeding people after (Mark 6:30-44). There is no one I know who would cross a heaving lake with authority and purpose and yet stop mid-stride to soothe somebody screaming about ghosts (Mark 6:45-52). There’s no person of power I know whose presence is distinguished first and foremost by the healing energy it brings (Mark 6:53-56). There is no one else like this—no one even vaguely confusable.
Those who were closest to Jesus—who grew up at his side, who worked and sweated beside him, who tasted food he had cooked, who saw him at his most tired, his most angry, his most vulnerable, who saw him betrayed, in pain, and helpless—saw nothing in him to make them doubt. Quite the opposite, in fact. What they saw convinced they were dealing with something extraordinary and unprecedented, something divine as it was human.
They’d found their hero. And so have I.
Every once in a while, I must throw an arm around my soul and remind it—One Hero is enough.
