A man with a plan or just a man?

My favorite romantic comedy of all-time is Notting Hill, hands down. In this movie Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant star in a modern-day fairy tale, about a wildly famous actress who falls in love with a humble shopkeeper. It checks all the boxes: the wacky friends, the lovable stars with electric chemistry and a skill for adorably awkward entanglements. The scene where Julia’s character Anna Scott, a version of her high-profile actress self, is standing before Hugh Grant’s character William Thacker, who is humble, coy, irresistibly charming, and hilariously loveable. Their relationship has gone back and forth up to this point as every good Rom-Com does, and then, at the climactic moment, in complete vulnerability, Roberts exquisitely delivers this beautiful, simple and elegant truth in hopes to secure her character’s love interest:

“The fame thing isn’t really real, you know. And don’t forget, I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.”

This line crushes me Every. Single. Time. I am such a softie! And it’s not just romantic comedies, it’s any story in which I’m let into a person’s lifelong love for something or someone. When Roy plays catch with his father at the end of Field of Dreams or when The Rookie Jimmy Morris receives the news that he is being called up to play in the Major Leagues, I become a puddle of tears. Have you ever allowed a story to resonate with you like that? Have you ever been sucked into something so much that your heart swelled, and you got that lump in your throat and those impossible-to-hide-tears welled up in your eyes?

Whenever I set out to preach during Holy Week, I hold the story of Jesus very closely. I cannot help that heart-swelling feeling. Some years I have been overcome with sorrow. It isn’t that I long to dwell on something so awful, but there is something off-putting to me when Easter decorations get set up immediately after the Friday service, as if his death can be quickly brushed away and covered up by lilies. And if church attendance on those Thursday and Friday services leading up to Easter are any indication, that is exactly how insignificant most Christians treat his death. Why? Because Christianity has made it so easy to skim past the humanity of Jesus’s death because of what his last day on earth allegedly accomplished. Jesus’s brutal demise must be one of the only ones in history for which humankind has wholeheartedly embraced. No matter how humble or grateful one’s understanding, to embrace Jesus’s death like our tradition teaches is to gloss over the atrocity of what it truly was: a moment of physical humiliation. Jesus didn’t just die. Jesus died violently and without dignity. Christianity does not hide this fact but celebrates it. When people suffer a similar fate in today’s world, I cannot look. But Jesus’s execution? Worshipped. If that feels uncomfortable when spelled out so blatantly, that’s because it should. How such a horrendous execution has inspired billions of people throughout the centuries is astounding—but it is not surprising given the brilliant damage control provided by the early Church. Their work was so convincing that the last day of Jesus’s life is called “Good Friday.” Did Jesus view his last day of life with an eye for the silver lining? It depends on whose written account you reference. The Gospel of John would likely answer in the affirmative, but not so much for the other three.

I have decided to put everything I have ever been told about Jesus’s death on hold. I need to step back and re-evaluate, because the longer I preach and teach about it, the less I want to embrace his death. When I encounter Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane in the night he was handed over and crucified, I am met with not Jesus as God or Jesus as superhero, but with Jesus as nothing other than just a grieving and anxious man, standing in front of his friends, asking them to stay awake with him. I encounter Jesus pleading for companionship, overcome with sorrow, and deep wrestling with his troubled faith in the face of an unthinkable moment. I know what the doctrine says about why this had to transpire, but I cannot find it in me to accept it.

The tradition says that in Jesus, "God became flesh and lived among us." Jesus looked like us, ate like us, walked on two feet like us, felt similar emotions, and suffered death like us. And yet, we’ve also been taught that Jesus wasn’t like us—he was also how Notting Hill’s shopkeeper William Thacker viewed the actress Anna Scott; Jesus was a celebrity, someone who was like us in appearance sure, but not really like us—Jesus was God. Somehow having that in the back of our mind when reading about his death communicates assurances for us to take all that suffering and death with a grain of salt, doesn’t it? Christians are taught to think something like: Well yeah, he suffered and was crucified—but this is what Jesus came to do, so…

Then what in the world is accomplished by including Jesus’s distress in the garden of Gethsemane? This is a different Jesus—a Jesus who was nervous. A Jesus who was hesitant of what was coming his way. The Gethsemane Jesus longed for strength as the darkness of death loomed over his thoughts. The Jesus of that story conveyed a character who did not remember that he was God and therefore invincible somehow. The Jesus we meet in that story is just a man under life-changing distress. But none of that really matters anymore because the Christian tradition invites its followers to read that story from our point of history and to not have to truly feel any of it if we don’t want to. Why? Because Christianity assigned Jesus’s death a purpose--not just any purpose, but a purpose that directly benefits those who believe it to be true.

The more I study and tell this story, the more it feels staged and part of someone else’s plotline to serve their purposes, not Jesus’s. From Judas to the Last Supper to the forgiveness sealing act of Jesus’s suffering and death, I want to know: Is any of this really real?