Jesus is…

Allowing google to automatically fill in the rest of the sentence, the top responses to the sentence Jesus is <blank> are the following:

Jesus is

  • my valentine
  • reason for the season
  • born
  • love
  • Lord
  • the way the truth and the life
  • coming soon
  • my superhero
  • the answer
  • Savior
  • God
  • real
  • my friend
  • just alright

It turns out that Jesus is my superhero and Jesus is just alright are actual songs, which is why these phrases, unexpected to me, come up so often in searches.

The picture of Jesus that one gets is that He is God, Savior and Lord, while also being loving and our friend. Although this is thankfully nothing quite like the image of Jesus as your buddy (cf. buddy Christ), the picture painted here does not leave a lot of room for anger. It’s not that we expect Jesus to be nice, but we also aren’t searching for anger or much humanity, other than a willingness to be my friend. Recognizing that our image of Jesus is affected by how we and others talk about him (along with how we talk about the anger of God in the Old Testament), we are looking at an aspect of Jesus that we often ignore in the hopes that this might help us to know and love God more fully.