Jesus Walks into a Bar...

Crawling the Detroit 2018 Santarchy with Jesus
By Melissa Walsh

My friend's cousin, Mike, went as Jesus. And all were amazed.

Jesus is standing next to me at the bar waiting for a drink. I just received my whiskey on the rocks.

He's wearing a white gown with red sash and sporting a headband made of twigs delicately wrapped with small flashing red lights. He has dark longish hair and a full beard. He appears to be in his thirties.

A beardless man wearing a Santa suit approaches, announcing, "Hey, Jesus. I'm going to order a water. Will you hook me up?"

Jesus laughs, eyes twinkling, as the bartender hands him his order.

"If you don't," the guy wearing the Santa suit warns, waving his finger, "I'm going to toss the water out on the floor and make you walk on it!"

I laugh with Jesus. He shoots me a wink and holds up a shot glass of clear liquid as if to make a toast.

"Happy birthday, Jesus."

---

Socializing with a tangible Jesus spun my beliefs into collisions in my mind -- common sense battling religious guilt. 

The above is not a weird dream. It's my true encounter with Jesus during Detroit's 2018 Santarchy pub crawl, where Christmas costumes were mandatory and ugly sweaters strictly prohibited.

My friend's cousin, Mike, went as Jesus. And all were amazed.

Socializing with a tangible Jesus spun my beliefs into collisions in my mind -- common sense battling religious guilt. Philosophical reason prevailed, allowing me to enjoy this experiment of making friends with Jesus.

The experience forced me to reflect: "If God appeared incarnate today, how would I react to encountering the fully divine in fully human form? Would it expose my pride? Or reveal my love?"

Years ago, I wrote a short story called Renaissance playing with the concept of a second birth of Christ to homeless teenagers in Detroit. But that was fiction -- my imagination fabricating vagary, while taking a theological stance of God's love for the poor, connecting Detroit's poor to the poverty of Jesus' hometown of ancient Nazareth, which was described by Reza Aslan in Zealot as "a tightly enclosed village of a few hundred impoverished Jews."

The Joseph of my story is not a carpenter. He works for food.

In fact, according to Aslan, the occupation of the biblical Joseph and son Jesus was a tekton, meaning a day-laborer, or "a class of peasants in first-century Palestine just above the indigent, the beggar, and the slave."

So contrary to how Jesus was portrayed to me in Sunday school as a child, he was far from being a guy from a good town with a stable middle-class job. 

We see in the New Testament detractors of Jesus' ministry asking, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?"

The biblical text also implies Jesus was illegitimate; people asked, "Isn't this Mary's son?" not "Isn't this Joseph's son?"

Americanized Jesus, who is portrayed with Euro-caucasian features, unfortunately emerged into our pop-culture as like a reality-show character, who is brought into jokes and whose name is used in cursing.

So during Santarchy 2018, I lived a scenario that rings of the first line of a joke -- "So Jesus Christ, Santa Claus and a reindeer walk into a bar... ."

I learned people are attracted to Jesus' pop-star image, as evidenced by the high number of selfie requests Jesus got. People wanted to joke around with him and toast him. They asked him lots of questions.

Fully human, but I suspect not fully divine, our friend Mike played the role well, just being a good guy -- kind and humble, and smiling a lot. He was curious about anyone he fell into conversation with. He wasn't rude, boastful, or argumentative. If he were fully divine, would we have known?

Jesus was magnetic, continually drawing energy of delight from crowds of partying Detroiters. Gleeful and drunken carolers on the bus dedicated each song to Jesus...

I, donning a vexing feminine reindeer costume, ubered Downtown with my friend dressed as a provocative angel, her husband decorated in a magi robe and headwear, and her cousin Mike sporting Jesus garments. Our driver presented no reaction to our outlandish attire. Without speaking, he tuned into Led Zeppelin and focused on his mission to transport us, opting for an alternate route along Kercheval. Only a true Eastsider instinctively avoids East Jefferson's many traffic lights and congestion.

We collected our Santarchy passes at Corktown's Gaelic League, where we also met my boyfriend dressed in a Santa suit, our friend sporting an elegant snowflake outfit, and her friend also dressed as an inviting feminine reindeer. 

"Now I have someone for reindeer games," I said while being introduced.

Gathered, our Santarchy clique entered one of the event's many rented school busses to begin the pub crawl.

Jesus was magnetic, continually drawing energy of delight from crowds of partying Detroiters. Gleeful and drunken carolers on the bus dedicated each song to Jesus, taking his requests, wanting to know if he was enjoying the singing.

From his smile, it appeared he was.

Each pub we entered, patrons and bartenders greeted Jesus, bantering about his birthday or making jestful prayer requests.

"Can you heal me from tomorrow's hangover, Jesus?"

When ready to crawl to the next pub, our group looked at one another, asking, "Okay. Where to next?" 

Then all looked to Jesus and asked, "What would Jesus do?"

But Jesus -- a proponent of free will -- left it up to us.

"Where ever? I don't care."

Jesus seemed to enjoy each of us and each person he met at each location.

Several commented, "You really look like Jesus."

"Thanks."

"Are you Middle Eastern? Jewish?"

"Mostly Polish," Jesus said.

Jesus was not a religious snob, leaning back and away, indignant, nose in the air, arms folded, a scowl of disdain on his face.

Biblical and other historical accounts of Jesus suggest he was not uncomfortable at a party. Jesus engaged all any where he went, no matter whom the norms of first-century Palestine prescribed as unimportant, unrighteous, unfit, or unclean. Jesus' response was consistent: grace in action and Love with a capital "L."

He engaged equally with the pharisee, tax collector, fisherman, doctor, leper, prostitute. He allowed children to approach him. He had tete-a-tete theological discussions with women. He did not patronize. He did not mansplain. 

He taught love. He offered hope. To all!

Jesus was not a religious snob, leaning back and away, indignant, nose in the air, arms folded, a scowl of disdain on his face.

The only accounts we have of Jesus communicating righteous rage illustrate his contempt for religious hypocrites and opportunists, whom he called "brood of vipers." He turned their religious law upside-down.

In Gravity and Grace, 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil described the concept of grace, which is central to Christianity -- or being a follower of Christ -- this way :

"All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass."

Jesus' words were best received by listeners craving grace. His radical message stressed tapping a mysticism and transcendent sense of justice to love the unlovable and to be loved -- to live out the faith of being beloved by the creator of the universe. Jesus taught, often in parables, on how to forgive and be forgiven. He showed that obedience in living out love for God and others is a manifestation of the belief in God's power and grace. Jesus called this lifestyle the Kingdom of God, and he called himself "Son of Man." (Though the Gospel accounts show Jesus clearly calling God "my father," he does not use the label "Son of God.") 

Jesus' parables challenged his listeners' thinking about God's relationship with humanity -- namely that God is good and redeems evil for good. Believers were urged to break from despair by putting their faith in the transcendent justice Jesus illustrated in his parables and with his very life. 

Though Jesus' message convicted many to live better, it did not aim to punish "sinful" or non-believing listeners by invoking guilt, as the sermons by too many mansplaining, illiberal, reactionary religious leaders did then and do today.

Religious guilt is a weapon used by those who know the Bible without knowing Jesus Christ, prominent 20th-century Christian philosopher C.S. Lewis would say.

According to William O'Flaherty in The Misquotable C.S. Lewis, Lewis warned against using the Bible to intimidate. Responding to a woman's letter to him in 1952, in which she asked if the Bible is infallible, Lewis wrote:

"It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons."

Lewis' friend J.R.R. Tolkien convinced him decades earlier that Christianity is the "true myth," leading to his conversion from atheism to becoming the renowned Christian apologist and writer.

Guilt disher-outers among American Christians preach an exclusive, arguably fiercely non-Christian message that Christians ought to isolate from "the world," supporting homeschooling to protect Christian children from "state-run schools" and "secular teachers" with a "politically correct agenda," or to build walls to keep "illegals" out, or to exclude "the gays" from services so as not to support "the gay agenda."

Jesus would call out this misguided drive for purity as foolish. He would oppose the behavior of these fools as anti-Christian, anti-Love. He might call them a brood of vipers.

In her book Permission Granted, Christian author Margot Starbuck puts it this way:

"The original injunction to purity was meant to keep God's people from becoming so much like the world that we were no longer salt and light in it. Our eventual sterile detachment would mock the divine intervention. Rather than propelling our salty, light-bearing movement into the world, we've used 'holiness' as a warrior to protect us from the world."

Jesus Christ, who did not protect himself from the cruel world that crucified him, never called his followers into detachment from the world to achieve holiness.

Jesus saw all, knew all, called all to engage with him -- from the disenfranchised and vulnerable to the wealthy and powerful -- with acts of love, intelligent discourse, and stories illustrating that in the kingdom of God, which he, the Son of Man, came to bring, transcendent peace and justice reign, and that through him all worldly troubles will be redeemed mystically and miraculously in what is seen and unseen.

Like our friend Mike, the real Jesus at the Santarchy pub crawl would engage anyone with or without a cocktail seeking to know him. He would validate each person's essence and challenge each person's reasoning. He would know each one and make himself known to them.

What might be seen are rebellious or lit-up party people. What might be unseen by us mortals, but seen by Jesus, would be the bitterness and loneliness of same party people.

Jesus would be the down-to-earth, intelligent, and witty mystic in the party community.

I asked the Santarchy Jesus, "Did you know that in the New Testament, when 'you' was used, most of the time it was plural 'you,' as in 'you guys' or 'you all'?"

He nodded, looking into my eyes, his eyebrows pinched with curiosity, urging me to continue.

"Yeah, so like when it says in the New Testament your body is a temple, it's really 'your' plural and body is singular."

"Interesting."

"Yeah, Jesus spoke to community as being one, prescribing 'You all need to love each other.'"

Virtue is not mutually exclusive to vice. Virtue is not a list of don'ts. Rather, virtue and vice are habits -- good and bad, respectively. And virtuous habits can rise powerfully in an environment of bad habits, because it is committing to virtuous acts that makes us peacemakers in a world skewed by vice.

People liked being around Jesus at a party because, even if he didn't turn the water into wine, he always brought in the makarios.

In Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, authors E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O'Brien explain that the "blessed are" phrases of Jesus' sermon on the mount are misinterpreted. The Greek word in Matthew's account of the Beatitudes for "blessed are" is makarios, which has no direct English translation. They said Bible translators struggled to find the word for feeling all at once "happy, content, balanced, harmonious and fortunate" and concluded "blessed" as the best fit.

"The English language prefers clear subjects for its verbs," they add. "So the missing puzzle piece in the Beatitudes is, How is one blessed? What goes without saying in our culture is that God blesses people. Consequently, we often interpret this verse to mean, 'If you are a peacemaker, then God will bless you.' But this isn't what Jesus meant. Jesus meant, 'If you are a peacemaker, then you are in your happy place.'"

Richards and O'Brien conclude, "Maybe the reason we North Americans struggle to find makarios in our personal lives is because we don't have a word in our native language to denote it."

Finding makarios is not a matter of winning a battle in a dualistic perception of the world as true or false, right or wrong, sober or drunk. People liked being around Jesus at a party because, even if he didn't turn the water into wine, he always brought in the makarios. Whether you believe Jesus as truly an incarnation of the fully divine and fully human or you believe him merely a great historical figure, all can agree in his virtuous humanity. Jesus' makarios would be magnetic at the bar, the party, strip club, homeless shelter, work meeting, university student center, line in the grocery store, picnic, middle school band concert ... anywhere.

So as a woman at Santarchy 2018, who was raised in America on Christian guilt, I had to shake off any sense of hanging out in bars with a guy dressed like Jesus as blasphemous. I had to acknowledge said guilt as manufactured from the poor theology of conservative mansplaining that aimed to twist my sense of logic and seduce my heart into slandering certain vices and overlooking others. I had to shake the temptation to lift petty religious rules and American-bred Christian-girl hang-ups above the law of Love.

Jesus loved relationships over rules and clearly modeled in the recorded history of his life that following rules or pursuing loving relationships are often mutually exclusive. His Love for a person practicing virtue or vice is unchanged. And that's not cheap grace. It's the full humanity of Christ being full divine.

1John 2:6 reads (NIV): "Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did."

What would Jesus do if his friends invited him to a pub crawl? He'd go and he'd engage with Love.

As Santarchy 2018 ended with the 2 a.m. closing of the bars, my boyfriend in the Santa suit and I, his reindeer date, ubered home after saying good night and Merry Christmas to our friends: the wise man, the angel, the other reindeer, the snowflake, and Jesus.

We found out later that our snowflake friend, who had not ubered to the event, felt too tipsy to drive her car home. She said fortunately Jesus was there to take the wheel and get her home safely.

Copyright 2018 Melissa Walsh