Should Jesus Be “Relatable”?

I recently read an article about the Gospel of Matthew by an author who wrote that she likes the story in its twenty-first chapter of Jesus flipping tables and kicking money changers out of the temple because it shows “a side of Jesus that is fully human — he displays anger and passion — to which we can all relate.” Upon reading this, all I could think was that if “anger” and “passion” (which reads in this case as something inextricably tied to anger) are the distinctives that make us human, I’m afraid we’re in even bigger trouble than I had previously assumed, especially if the most Jesus can do for us is be “relatable.” While I personally don’t subscribe to the idea that Jesus was expressing anger here, as what we call “anger” is usually just a presenting symptom, or a mask, of something deeper,[1] this “relatable” (flawed) Jesus is one that I unfortunately keep running into.

Not long ago, I was at a church service where the pastor was preaching from the end of Luke 2, specifically the story of Jesus “lingering” or “staying behind” at the temple in Jerusalem after Passover when he was twelve. Mary and Joseph lose track of him for a few days before finding him in the temple, at which point Mary says, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety,” and Jesus responds, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” This is a great story. It’s the only canonical Gospel story of Jesus set between his infancy and the start of his public ministry, which is intriguing enough on its own, and it could be exegeted in any number of interesting ways. Even sticking with the relatability angle, one could talk about how flustered Mary obviously was, and how it shows that even the mother of Jesus found raising children anxiety-inducing at times. There is real grace in that for exhausted parents!

However, this (well-intentioned, I’m sure) pastor made it about how he found it refreshing that it showed twelve-year-old Jesus being “snotty” or “disrespectful” to his parents (reading a certain tone into Jesus’ response that isn’t in the text) because it made him feel better about his own kids’ indulgence in similar attitudes: “If the Son of God did this, then…” I’m sure the pastor was going for something akin to a sympathetic laugh from the congregation, but I think it was in the service of an insidious untruth. The idea that Jesus being fully human equates to Jesus being fallible.

In general, it is true that humans are fallible, but I’d argue that imperfection/the tendency to muck things up is not the defining feature of humanity, and that when we proclaim that Jesus is fully divine AND fully human, we are NOT saying that Jesus must be just as imperfect as the rest of us. I would argue that sin, though an ever-present reality in this world and the root cause of our imperfection, is not what makes us human, and is certainly not the defining feature of Jesus’ humanity.

Jesus did experience all the feelings, the highs and lows, the positive and the negative that we feel, and was tempted in the same ways by all the same things, but this is a far cry from fallibility. Rather he “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” This self-emptying was not a diminishment of Jesus’ divinity, but a consequence of it. His divinity leads to his humility, and humility and humanity are linked. In this way, our true humanity lies in our humility, lies in our own inherent servanthood to God and to our neighbors, and sin, though very real and destructive, is a distraction from true humanity. It is a bug, not a feature, and the solution to it is bigger than anything we can will on our own.

I don’t want to come off as lacking compassion for the people who find “relatable” Jesus compelling. In my experience, many of these people are coming out of grace-deficient, guilt-heavy, high-control faith communities, where Jesus was seen primarily as an unattainable model that they nonetheless still had to keep striving to be like (using only their own internal resources). So they see this imperfect Jesus as the answer because then maybe their attempts at emulation could get “close enough.”

However, any feeling of relief they might experience because of this will be fleeting, because it is ultimately only the downplaying of sin, a denial of the reality of our situation. Lowering Jesus to our level just a smidge will eventually run aground on the same despairing shores. A relatable Jesus that remains one to be emulated centers us and our ability over Jesus and his.

We can attempt to downplay the destructiveness of our own bondage to sin by playing up its effect on Jesus. But when we look to the rest of the Gospels and study the way Jesus interacts with others, we can much more readily see ourselves in the flawed people he interacts with than with him, who is always acting out of love. Seeing Jesus this way holds up a mirror to my own lack of love for others and my desperate need for his grace, the only thing that can get me to turn in repentance. This Jesus isn’t so much an example, but a gift. I don’t need a Jesus I can relate to on the level of my imperfections, I have literally everyone else for that. I need someone with the ability to forgive my imperfections and impute righteousness to me. Someone who can actually do something about the problem of sin, and start pruning and burning away my own contributions to the unfortunate reality of it. I need a savior, and thankfully that is what we have in Jesus, relatable or not.

[1] For more on this, check out Todd Brewer’s excellent 2021 Mbird Tyler talk.