Who Stole Jesus?

We all know that the Grinch stole Christmas but who stole Jesus? According to an AP story last month we now at least know who found Him! In Detroit of all places.

Thu Jun 5, 2008, 12:57 PM ET

A Detroit woman has found Jesus … in an alley.

The pastor of a church in the city says its stolen 8-foot Jesus statue was recovered from bushes in an alley about two blocks away.

Patricia Bowers says she notified the church late Wednesday that she had seen the statue the previous day after she had gotten off a bus.

Bowers says she didn’t realize the green-hued, plaster statue had been stolen until seeing news reports Tuesday night.

The Rev. Barry Randolph says the only damage to the statue is a broken hand. The cross it was attached to suffered major damage.

A church member noticed the statue missing Monday. Randolph says thieves may have thought the statue contained copper, which often is stolen and sold as scrap metal.

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press.

When I was a seminary student many of us were pretty certain that theological Liberals like Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson who had written Honest to God, a thin book that had ignited a firestorm of debate, had tried or were trying to steal Jesus of His divinity. In Robinson’s case it was through a mind-numbing and fuzzy critique of the Medieval Church’s belief in a three-storied universe, which seemed fairly threatening at the time but in retrospect was a straw man argument that didn’t really address the topic at hand; God. Today such concerns might be directed at the Jesus Project (a methodical, decidedly agnostic, approach to understanding the historicity of Jesus) or come in response to bestselling books that put God on trial, like Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

Some would argue that Hollywood has stolen Jesus or, at minimum, the power of His name, by gratuitously inserting profane usage of Jesus Christ into almost any movie made that is not rated G. Can you imagine the outcry if names for God in other religions were treated in the same way?

After the Crucifixion, the religious authorities were concerned that His disciples would steal Jesus – while His followers, notably Mary and Martha, believed that it was the Jewish leaders who had done just that.

Parents, when sending their kids off to college, are concerned that skeptical professors will try to steal Jesus from their children. Only 8% of Americans consider themselves an atheist – so why do they all seem to be employed in higher education? I kid. (Sort of.)

Many Christians believe that Jesus has been stolen from the public square by a radical fringe that uses the courts to enforce a much more expansive view of the “separation of church and state” than Jefferson ever intended in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802.

The Death of God Movement, inspired by Nietzsche’s infamous sentence in Thus Spake Zarathustra, “God is dead … and we have killed him,” didn’t actually believe God had died literally or physically. But they did believe that the “idea of God” was no longer adequate as a system or inspiration for morality or finding ultimate meaning in life.

Is it possible to steal Jesus? to kill God?

We know that if God is God, if Jesus is who He says He is, then such questions are ridiculous. So why do they keep coming up?

Is it possible Nietzsche was on to something – at least on a personal experiential level? Faith, the requisite for knowing God, almost by definition – a confident belief and acceptance in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person or idea – seems to imply that we, by choice, can steal from Jesus His divinity and power; at least for our own lives. That raises too many theological questions to even pretend I could address in a quick blog or a lifetime of sitting in front of a typewriter.

But the question of whether someone has stolen or can steal Jesus is worth noting on a personal level. For we truly do live in a profane and secular day when it’s easy to just go with the flow of soft belief. So if you show up at church one Sunday morning or find yourself pondering the meaning of life in the middle of the night while staring at the ceiling and can’t seem to find Jesus, don’t go looking for Him in an alley in Detroit and don’t point an accusing finger at others.

The place to begin is found in the face you see in the mirror.