I know I run the risk of being “that guy” – the idiot seminary professor who is just a little too picky, especially when it comes to offering criticism. I’m always sensitive to what one of my old teachers said about evangelism: “I like it the way I do it better than the way you don’t like it.” There is a lot of truth in this.
But that brings me to the subject of my column, the now much-discussed “He understands us» commercials aired during the Super Bowl. First, let me offer a note of appreciation: I am generally For anything that evokes the subject of Jesus, our Lord and Savior. There is no world in which we talk too much about Jesus. So yes, let’s give the benefit of the doubt to those who want to find ways to introduce Jesus into American culture and conversation.
Still, let’s just say: There were some notable problems with these ads.
“He Gets Us” framed evangelism with a left-leaning tinge, communicating the respectability of certain sins over others in our culture (although I’m not sure the ad even communicated that respectable sins were sins at all). Christians wash the feet of women in abortion centers and, apparently, the LGBT community. This all seems harmless and charming if Christianity is simply about washing your feet. But it is also about speaking the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15).
But notice who has unwashed feet. It’s curious that the Christians in these ads never showed themselves washing the feet of a rude MAGA rally attendee. They weren’t at a truck stop porn store in Alabama. They weren’t in a trailer park full of single mothers. They didn’t show up to scruffy, drug-addicted factory workers in Ohio, or to a white nationalist militia meeting in Michigan. If Jesus is truly for all sinners, we should also want right-wing racists to convert, right? How would we react if Jesus washed someone’s feet in front of the Capitol on January 6?
What the ads end up doing, implicitly if not explicitly, is communicating that the socially elevated sins of the left are the ones Christians are being asked to evangelize about, not the low-status sins of the deplorable right, because , it seems, they are the ones to blame. those who are truly beyond the reach of redemption.
But that’s the beauty of Jesus: there is no partiality as to the degree or type of brokenness requiring his redemption. If you are reading this, you are a sinner who deserves God’s wrath (Romans 3:21-26). Your conscience, if you are honest with yourself, is tainted with guilt because you know that you have violated God’s law and justice. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, what your social status is, or any other characteristic we can think of that creates social hierarchies: you, my friend, are a sinner. The good news is that Jesus died to receive the punishment you deserve. But Jesus did not stay dead. God raised him from the dead (Acts 13:30). The good news is that if you repent of your sins and believe in Jesus, you can have eternal life beginning right away.
Jesus loved the outcasts, the broken, and the socially unwanted. He was the friend of sinners (Matthew 11:19). So should we be. I too want to be a friend of sinners. But I also don’t want my friendship with them to be interpreted as friendship with the world, which these ads can easily blur the lines of (1 John 2:15).
From a technical point of view, however, I think there is a mistake in what the advertisements are advocating. I don’t remember Jesus washing everyone’s feet in general, but only his disciples (John 13:8-10). Foot washing is considered a practice by Christians for other Christians. Yet there are many other ways to express the same ethics as these ads, but with more precision. How about this: love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-39).
The conditioning effect of these ads in defining and reaffirming the social castes of American sin, however, is really something. This could have been communicated, but it was not. The truth is that Jesus redeems sinners left and right, whether they are high or low in status. All people are equal in their need for Christ (Romans 3:23).
We always run the risk of downplaying the biblical Jesus in favor of a culturally sanitized Jesus. H. Richard Niebuhr once criticized liberalized Christianity for its abandonment of the categories of anger and justice. “A God without wrath brought sinless men into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministries of a Christ without the Cross,” Niebuhr wrote. Let us always be vigilant in sharing the good news of the Gospel. Let us not take an X-Acto knife to elements of the gospel that are inherently offensive to the world (1 Corinthians 1:23).
