This is the Jesus that I want to follow.

We don’t celebrate and admire and worship Jesus because he was a religious man.

Jesus believed in asking questions. He believed in challenging what he was taught and presenting new ideas. 

He didn’t walk into temple, sit down and listen mindlessly, then walk back out again to spout the rabbi’s words to others. He walked into temple as a young man and told his elders, his rabbis, the men of authority in his life that he wasn’t sure they had it quite right. He told them what he thought; he told them they might be wrong and challenged them to think about it.

He believed that the static and stagnant traditional ways that things were always done were not necessarily the best ways.

He believed that people mattered more than laws or rules or rituals. He believed that God was more about loving than about judging and condemning. 

He believed true religion was about the fruit you produced with your life to touch others, rather than the effect you produced with your words to impress others. He believed and practiced speaking what was true instead of speaking what was popular. 

Jesus was constantly reaching down to pull others up, while everyone around him was reaching up to pull themselves up—in status, in favor, in prosperity, in popularity.

Jesus was always saying yes to those that everyone else said no to. He said come to those that everyone else told to go. Jesus was touching people, talking to people, sitting down and eating with people that everyone else avoided like the plague, revolted and disgusted by their poverty or sickness or social status.

Jesus demonstrated who God was, showed us how to follow God, how to honor God, how to serve God, not by being a faithful follower of the rules, not by obeying the words of his religious leaders, not by keeping tradition, but by speaking in brutal honesty, by pouring out overwhelming mercy on others, by living every moment of his life as a servant to the world around him.

This is the Jesus that I love. This is the Jesus that I celebrate and remember at Christmas. This is the Jesus that I want to follow.