Christian Challenge at MSC

(This is a guest article contributed by Remy Currier, a student with us at ChallengeMSC, that was originally published on theooze.com.  Please, check out the original article HERE, and take a look at some of the comments left by readers there.)

Last year, my college had a big end-of-the-year party with a hypnotist, vendors, bands, food, and games. One of the vendors was a Christian clothing company, and their booth was set up right next to my Campus Crusade group’s table, so, at some point during the day, a friend and I wandered over to their table. The guy who owned the company was a young, seemingly cool guy with tattoos and a backwards hat – the kind of guy who looks just alt rock enough to be “Seeker friendly.”

So my friend and I started talking to the guy while we looked at some of the tee shirts he was selling. We had been visiting with him for a few minutes when my friend picked up one of the shirts, a black tee with a screen print of a gas mask on the front and a logo on the back, and asked the guy what the gas mask symbolized.

“I kind of had the idea of how, like, Jesus is like a gas mask that we put on to filter out all of the crap that’s in the world,” he explained.

Personally, I was shocked. Not because Gas Mask guy is anyone special, and certainly not because his view is unique or different. I was shocked only because of the absolutely ordinary opinion he held. It's an opinion of Jesus that we all run into, and some of us hold, for better or for worse.

I kind of feel sorry for the Gas Mask guy. For me, it seems as if his Jesus is awfully small. It seems to me that if all Jesus is good for is just to be our gas mask, then Jesus isn’t really worth very much.

And yet Gas Mask guy can probably back up his position with verses. And let’s face it, Gas Mask guy isn’t all wrong, he’s just missing huge chunks of the story. And, really, it seems to me like he’s really missing out on what makes Jesus so great – The fact that, in encountering the risen Christ, we begin a journey on a path of becoming one with Jesus. It seems to me like he’s too busy worrying about heaven and hell and the evil in the world to see the underlying beauty of the whole thing – the fact that it’s really not about heaven or hell at all; instead it’s about God coming into the world to reunite us to Him.

I guess I really feel sorry for Gas Mask guy because it seems to me like he’s just trying to escape the world. Like Jesus is just there to protect him from the world while he’s here and to be his ticket into heaven when he needs to get there.

For me, when Jesus says in John’s gospel that he is the Way, he doesn’t mean that he’s our ticket into heaven. For me, he’s saying that he is so much more than just a gas mask to put on. He’s so much more than just a bridge to walk over on my way to heaven. He’s so much more than just a means to health and wealth. Jesus is the Way. His teachings and his life create a Way, a path in which to walk, and a guiding companion for that path. But even more than that, Jesus is God. Jesus is the God who was willing to come down into a broken mess in order to restore that mess back to the way God intended.

And so I think that’s really the problem with Gas Mask guy’s idea of Jesus. He’s got Jesus, but it’s Jesus by the numbers. And that’s one thing that God always has tried to keep us away from. I feel like God’s real message for us, the message of the Gospel, is that religious pills don’t work. That God wants something other than right theology or religious practices or sacrifices or being moral. God wants to love us, and for us to love him back. God wants to reunite creation with Himself, and, ultimately, I think that’s what Gas Mask Guy is really missing out on – God’s mission of reunifying everything to Him.