As strange as it may sound, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a particular Instagram Reel ever since it appeared in my feed a month or so ago. This has to do not just with what was said but how it was said. The emotion of it all. The, dare I say, authenticity. Unlike almost every other piece of content on the site, the clip was raw and unpolished, almost as if the subjects forgot they were being recorded, which, for someone like Shia LaBeouf, isn’t a typical occurrence. I’m referring to the actor’s recent interview with Andrew Callaghan, host of Channel 5 on YouTube (the relevant segment begins around the 1:01:05 mark):
Interviewer: What would you say to Jesus if you could meet him?
Shia LaBeouf: I wouldn’t say sh*t.
Interviewer: Really?
Shia: No, but I’d kiss him … I’d kiss him, I’d kiss his feet.
Now, it may not be extraordinary to hear a celebrity invoke Jesus’ name. But usually when they do, Jesus feels tacked on, like a piece of branding, or like a therapeutic savior who serves as the missing element in one’s quest for self-discovery and/or self-optimization. But watching Shia LaBeouf nearly self-combust with emotion at the thought of seeing and meeting Jesus brings me to tears, as it does him. “I wouldn’t say nothing,” he confesses. The sight of his Savior evaporates whatever words he has. His lips don’t even quiver. He just goes mute.
All he can think about doing is falling prostrate. “I’d kiss his feet,” he weeps. That’s a haunting line, not because feet are gross, and it’s unhygienic to think about puckering up in front of them, nor even because the guy from Even Stevens is suddenly making unimpeachable theological statements. It is haunting because Shia, never one to polish his messy existence, seems to acknowledge both his own mess and the grace that radiates from Jesus, specifically for sinners like him.
This is strikingly different than shouting out the Lord at an awards show, gold trophy in hand. Kissing Jesus’ feet is about the most embarrassingly Christian thing a person can do. The Gospels are riddled with folks collapsing at Jesus’ feet, from bedraggled lepers to distraught parents to ragged demoniacs to repentant disciples. There’s no better example, though, than Martha’s sister, Mary, who is famously said to have “sat at the Lord’s feet,” listening to his teaching, while her sister finished preparing dinner (Luke 10:39).
This portrait of devotion has served as sermon fodder for countless preachers, but Mary hanging on every word that falls from her Lord’s lips isn’t merely illustrative of piety or faith. It’s not only all she can do, but it’s also all she knows to do. Later on in the Gospel of John, Mary’s brother dies after succumbing to what seemed like a preventable illness. While her sister busies herself haranguing Jesus for his apparent tardiness, Mary crumples in front of him in a pool of questions and desperation (John 11:32).
For whatever else those scenes show us, they leave most of modernity’s religious impulses exposed for what they are: spiritualities of ascent. Martin Luther would diagnose these as theologies of glory, AKA the reflexive belief that pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and optimizing our faith are the roadmap to fulfillment, meaning, and purpose. Vulnerability and weakness are excised in favor of the latest rhetoric that results in “victorious Christian living.” The inconvenient irony of these spiritualities of ascent is that the crux of the Christian message is a crucified Messiah.
The Cross endures as the living paradox of grace and justice before whom men and women collapse in mercy. In other words, the prism by which we understand what it means to belong to the Father isn’t found in scaling newfound heights of piety. Rather, it’s discerned in the brutal image of Jesus’ feet riven with nails and caked with blood, the epitome of love reaching the unlovable and the unworthy.
The feet to which Mary clung and the feet that Shia is at pains to kiss belong to the one whose arms remain ready to embrace the beaten down and worn out. He enfolds disasters and dirtbags in a grace that keeps on giving. Weary and exhausted, we fall in front of a Savior who died that we might live. And the good news is there’s nothing left to do but receive that which Jesus is so eager to give, which is, as Dave Zahl points out in The Big Relief, his very self:
God’s grace, as revealed in Jesus Christ, is not tied to any human criterion of worth. If anything, God inverts our precious hierarchy of deserving and behaves in the most noncomplementary fashion imaginable, giving superabundant attention, approval, and love — his very self — to the wrong sort of people.(22)
The arduous and exhausting work of ascending is done, not by you but by him. Jesus holds out his very self as a gift, and the only stance that makes sense when you’ve been given something you know you could never have earned is what Mary and Shia did: collapse in a pile of mercy. Jesus’ invitation to come and rest in him has never been about cleaning ourselves up or performing a certain way before we get there. It has always been about falling. And in the uncanny relief of grace, Jesus remains unembarrassed by those who break down in front of him.
Grace is the relieving word that God’s unmerited favor extends to the unlikeliest of recipients. This includes unhinged actors with rap sheets and complicated pasts who can barely speak about Jesus without falling apart. It also includes you and me. God’s kingdom is crowded with the wrong sort of people, which is good news for us since there doesn’t seem to be any other kind.
I’d kiss his feet. I wouldn’t say anything.
Neither would I.
