The Spirituality of Jesus

For decades now, there has been an increasingly growing number of people who state a personal preference for spirituality over religion. While the pitting of spirituality and religion against each other might strike one as odd or ill-informed — how could a religion, of all things, not be spiritual? — the distinction between the two makes good intuitive sense. In these contexts, religion usually denotes something like an institutional church. The church is seen as repressive, judgmental, or dogmatic, a community antagonistic to the individual. Spirituality, on the other hand, aims for a more personal and immediate experience.

For those who sit within the walls of the church, it’s probably a little too easy to throw stones at the “spiritual, but not religious” crowd. Loosed from the appropriately restrictive confines of scripture and tradition, the results can sometimes appear more like a consumerist appropriation of religious expression, particularly non-western ones. But spirituality itself should not so easily be dismissed. The desire for a dynamic faith that outstrips mere propositional knowledge of God has deep roots within both scripture and theology.

The theologian Sandra Schneiders defines spirituality as “the experience of consciously striving to integrate one’s life in terms not of isolation and self-absorption but of self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives”.^[1] Stated a bit more plainly, Christian spirituality is concerned with the lived experience of life before God, of the ways in which one is shaped by God. Such a spirituality is necessarily dynamic, a revelatory encounter exceeds the strictures of the self to form a new horizon of knowledge of God.

What kind of spirituality did Jesus espouse? When Christians typically think of spirituality, they imagine everything from prayer and scripture reading to nature walks, labyrinths, or Ayahuasca retreats. These all promise to provide, to varying degrees, some form of revelation and self-improvement. However legitimate (or not!) these practices might be, Jesus’ own spirituality aims for far better than we can imagine and far more than we can bear.

Upon any cursory reading of the gospels, one is immediately struck by Jesus’ radically negative attitude to nearly everything. Shockingly so. The life Jesus commends is a slow-motion train wreck, where nothing ever goes your way and everyone hates you in the end. Where you lose everything that might have once mattered to you until you’re left with nothing. “Take up your cross and follow me,” he told his disciples. He wasn’t kidding.

Jesus only esteemed those who confessed their unworthiness, while confounding those who believed otherwise. He spoke of love, but only in its most personally costly form: unrequited and welcoming of exploitation. Jesus commanded strangers to sell everything they had. Earthly treasures had no lasting value. It is the foolish man who saves a fortune for an early retirement. Even one’s comforts and securities of one’s family must be abandoned. To Jesus, there was no such thing as achievement. That which is valued by others is detested by God. He encouraged prayer, fasting and charity, but only if they were emptied of all personal benefit. The second one thinks to commend you for your piety is the second it becomes worthless.

At every turn, Jesus commended suffering, loss, renunciation, and unrelentingly downward movement. The lower the better. But however negative Jesus’ attitude was, he did not believe the slow-motion train wreck would end in a heap of twisted metal.

According to Jesus’ spirituality, at the bottom of nothingness there is hope because that is where God arrives on the scene. The last will be first in the kingdom of heaven. Those who lose their life will find it. Death is always followed by resurrection. This is why miracles were such a hallmark of his ministry. To those who had no health, he gave healing. To those whom evil had conquered, he vanquished their demons. His miracles were free of charge because they were only ever given to those who could never repay him.

It is precisely within the experience of human limitation and ignominy that God resides. There is everything to be gained when everything is lost. For those brought low by life, the tears of remorse are never wasted, but holy. As Thornton Wilder notes in his short play, “The Angel That Troubled the Waters”:

Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.

Consequently, whatever “self-transcendence” one gains can never occur as an achievement, but as the uninvited and undesirable wisdom of failure and loss. The ladders we might construct toward heaven, whether it be through costly bourgeois religiosity or quotidian piety, ultimately have nothing to do with the God whose office is at the end of your rope. God cannot and will not be manipulated or exploited by our attempts at spirituality (no matter how earnest we might be). Instead, it is precisely through the diminution of the self — up to and including the point of literal death — that one is found by the God who became nothing for us.

Those who inhabit the “spiritual, but not religious” camp, having left the walls of the church for answers elsewhere, do so for a myriad of reasons. But I imagine that at least part of the exodus can be attributed to all the profoundly unspiritual things many churches concern themselves with, whether it be politics, self-referential piety, or moral purity. Perhaps what was most needed was the kind of dynamic and life-giving spirituality Jesus proclaimed, one that brings freedom to the captive, liberty to the oppressed, and good news to the broken.