WWJD?…
What would Jesus do? …is not a question that can be asked, only one that can be axed.
It's like asking what Jesus would have done with the rest of His earthly life, if He hadn’t been crucified or, even more silly, what He would have done on earth had He not ascended to the Father. That’s like asking what would a man do if he could have a baby.
A question doesn’t earn the distinction of having meaning or deserving an answer, unless it is asking something about what is. What could be, what might be, what should be, all that is the stuff of fantasy. It's by wasting their time and efforts on fantasies of this ilk that many evangelical Christians find their churches drifting farther and farther from the Truth, despite their historic formularies.
“It’s not hearing the commandments, but keeping them,” that matters, that makes the essential difference between the follower of Jesus and the follower of religion. One follows Someone who is confessedly still Alive and Present. The other follows someone who has been written up and has now entered the realm of a historical personage that can be speculated about. Do you see my point?
To put the reality in the same frame of reference as the fantasy, we would have to ask, “What does Jesus do?” and in fact that is what I do ask myself and others, every day, over and over again.
How many times must I say this? “Jesus Christ is alive, and He is still the most active Person in the history of the world.”
No one and nothing can hold a candle to Jesus:
He is the Light of the world, and stranger than our gut will let us believe, by His own word, He has said of us,
“You are the Light of the world.”
What do you think He means by that? No, no, listen carefully—I didn’t ask, “What do you think He meant by that?” but “What do you think He means by that?” Jesus is not just in the past and in heaven.
Unfortunately for us lazy bones, He’s walking around here in this cemetery we call “earth” and speaking to the bones as holy prophet Ezekiel spoke in a type, “Put on flesh!”
What’s even worse for us, He starts with that part of the cemetery called “the Church.” And what do we do?
We lie there asking each other “What would Jesus do?” when He’s come right among us calling out as He did once to Lazarus and does now every day to each of us, “Come forth!” and as He did through an earlier Son of Man, “Dry bones, hear the word of YHWH. The Lord YHWH says this to these bones: I am now going to make the breath, ha-ruach, the spirit, enter you, and you will live…”
“What would Jesus do?” gives the lie to the resurrection of the Lord, on the basis that since He ascended and is no longer among us in His earthly body, we can talk about Him as though He were absent.
It seems that more Christians believe that the Lord is absent than those who believe He is present. Perhaps it’s not their fault, perhaps they’re just being humble and meek, afraid of offending the Lord, or someone, if they were too perky, and had the gall to think, speak, act and live as though what Jesus said about them were really true, “You are the salt of the earth,” and “You are the light of the world.”
Heaven forbid! Christ was talking about the saints! Now, where was I, oh yes, I was just asking myself, “What would Jesus do?”
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