I graduated from a Catholic grade school, which automatically allows for certain checked boxes. To be sure, you could read a different “10 Things You Know If You Went to a Catholic School” article every day for the rest of your life, and they would extol the praises of school uniforms, wrapping paper sales, school Masses, large families, memorized Bible verses, home-packed lunches and heavily chaperoned school dances.
I can certainly appreciate the fact that this system of rudimentary education provided the basis for my Catholic faith. However, as religious school educational pitfalls go, Catholic grade schools across the nation regularly commit an inexcusable crime.
Grade school butchered my understanding of Jesus Christ. Butchered. Jesus, to me, from the time I was old enough to spell His name to the time I graduated eighth grade and was forever thankful to never again color in a clip art picture of Him and His disciples, remained a cuddly 30-year-old man with a smile on his face and a newborn lamb in His hands.
I grew up trying to relate to this man! When I was five years old, I would run around my backyard and kick down mounds of fire ants, until they crawled all over my shoes, and I was trying to relate to a man who only had color after my box of 24 Crayons did their best to color in the shepherd staff in His hands! When I was nine years old, I was playing three different seasonal sports, and now grade school had me pulling apart cotton balls to stick to the lamb in His arms. I was a boy trying to discover the world, who absolutely lived for the dirt underneath his fingernails. This image of a spotless Savior works until you need Him. It works until you find yourself praying to a man you recognize only by His cartoonish smile and His unrealistic proximity to barn animals.
My understanding of the world was simple and accurate: my mom washed things so that I could make them dirty again. And my dad kept the refrigerator stocked so that I didn’t run out of energy while I did it. At home I would exchange my Jesus craft clothes for my “let’s make a mess out of reality” clothes, and the two worlds would never coexist.
So let’s revisit this image of Jesus Christ, and like a Bandaid from a wound let us remove the tender image of a smiling white man in a cloak, with a halo around His head, sitting on a rock with a lapful of children. We’re going to take this image of a physically perfect Savior, and flush it so far down the toilet of outdated Catholic educational mediocrity that to resuscitate it would be a crime against all things good and holy.
The realistic image of Jesus Christ puts the white Crayon entirely out of a job. The man walked everywhere. Only roads within the jurisdiction of Rome were paved with stones; all other walkways throughout Judea were marked only by dust. Upon entering the home of a stranger, the host would first wash the feet of those arriving, not out of some outdated custom, but because the toes and feet of travelers would blacken after even an hour of travel. You can forget the effeminate depiction of Christ when it comes to sleeping accommodations. By His own admission in Luke 9, “the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.” He braved freezing temperatures and unrelenting heat, and everything in between, all of which was characteristic of the area which Christ frequented during His three year public ministry. Christ’s body was familiar with shivers and sweat alike, a stark contrast to the grade school image of Christological perfection.
Jesus Christ, from the time He was old enough to heft a hammer until the age of 30, took after His Father in his native trade: carpentry. Even after He left His family, Jesus and His disciples survived by their own hands. Case in point, Christ was ripped. His family sold the work of the patriarch’s hands, a trade which necessitates the upper body strength to put into practice the art of manhandling wood. And lest we forget that Christ left such work behind at age 30, He called fishermen, who were accustomed to hauling nets which reached 250 to 300 meters in length. When full of fish, these nets required the strength of entire boats full of men to haul them ashore. Jesus Christ was jacked.
The Romans didn't crucify a wimp. They crucified a winner.
Why wasn’t I taught that Jesus Christ was so much more like me than I thought? Jesus liked to get dirty! He liked running around outdoors, and yelling, and hanging out with His best guy friends! He liked to dance, just like me! And somehow my grade school made the grave error of painting Christ as an untarnished shepherd, when the reality is all the more closer to the boy who was fast becoming a man!
Why does this somehow matter today? Because the spirit of that Christ still lives inside of us, and it’s important for us to understand that we didn’t inherit the spirit of a wimp. If the Bible is any indication, we inherited the spirit of a rugged, poignant, powerful, swift, joyful, transcendent boss.
During those moments when we worry that perhaps we simply do not possess the strength necessary to carry out the work of God, we need to remember that the image of a distant, Crayon-drawn Jesus isn’t the Savior who so personally gave His life for us. Jesus Christ understood the pain of a very real existence. The Spirit of the Savior that lives within us already understands the concept of pain. It also understands the concept of sacrifice, given that it once belonged to the Messiah who died for us. In the hardest moments, reach out to the Christ who slept on rocks, the man whose arms were quite literally nailed wide in love for us. Replace the Clip Art Christ.
