He Totally Gets Us
but do we get Him?
I didn’t watch the Super Bowl so I missed the airing of the controversial “He Gets Us” ad put out by The Servant Christian Foundation, a non-profit for Christian donors seeking to spread the message of Jesus. If you haven’t seen it, here’s your chance:
This commercial, promoting the Christian path as unconditionally loving and tolerant, created real division among the devout. Many Christians decried its suggestion that Jesus accepts all choices and lifestyles, objected to its reduction of Christian living to washing feet (presumably metaphorically) without judgment. And honestly, some of the critiques I saw made valid points.
For example, one noted that Jesus washed the feet of His disciples, not of people who rejected or schemed against Him; those people He admonished for their faithless hearts and self-serving deeds. Another noted that Jesus chiefly taught repentance, this in response to the ad’s assertion that “Jesus Didn’t Teach Hate,” which is literally true, but in context suggested that to hold moral boundaries is to be inspired by hate. Still another noted that with the multiple millions of dollars spent to produce and air the ad, Jesus would have fed the hungry and served the needy rather than self-promoted. (I couldn’t decide if that was petty or true.)
My personal reaction was that “He Gets Us” was trying to get a profound message across: that we are all God’s children and He sees each of us, loves us wholly and wants us to follow His lead of loving and serving one another. He wants us to find connection with each other, through Him. By leaning so hard into culture war stereotypes though, it came across (to me, at least) as predictable to the point of cringy, a political invitation more than a religious one. I also believe that in equating moral boundaries with hatefulness it does misrepresent Jesus and His message. As one of the critiques put it: Yes, Jesus loves and meets every person exactly where they are . . . but He doesn’t just leave them there.
In other words, there’s far more to following the example of Christ than humbly washing the feet of the perceived Other.
Which brings me to the second video of the controversy, titled “The Christian Super Bowl Ad They SHOULD Have Made|He Saves Us.” This is a response video that went viral when it was released a couple days after the Super Bowl. I honestly found this take a lot more powerful in its message, but even in offering a deeper perspective I thought it still missed the mark. Take a look:
The obvious strength in this portrayal of Christ’s message is that it shows actual people whose lives have been transformed by the Gospel, by reorienting themselves to His Way. The YouTube page itself provides links to each of their stories so viewers can discover the details of their individual faith journeys.
Still, I winced.
I think its purpose is obviously to demonstrate how positively life-changing it can be to find God and surrender to His path. It’s a beautiful and worthy message. Yet it felt too sweeping and simplistic in its hard-to-avoid implication that people caught up in the hatred and violence of jihadism, racism, or gang-banging are spiritually of a piece with those who are gay or transgender, addicted or “New Age.” Given standard Christian doctrine I’m not surprised to see this equivalency, nor would I say there isn’t still a valuable message being offered—that God is there for everyone, always, to heal and uplift no matter what their direction or struggles.
But the personal problem of evil in our lives isn’t as easily discerned by our choices and lifestyles as this montage would suggest. Believing as I do that Emanuel Swedenborg was Divinely inspired, through 30 years of genuine spiritual experiences, with insights into the nature of God, of His Love and revelation, I look at what he says about the nature of evil and about our personal relationship to it while in this world. In section 3993 of his work Secrets of Heaven we read:
The evil we possess comes in various kinds, though. There is evil that cannot mix with goodness, and evil that can. The same with falsity. If it were not so, no one could ever be regenerated [spiritually reborn]. Evil and falsity incapable of mixing with goodness and truth are what oppose love for God and love for one’s neighbor. It includes hatred, vengefulness, cruelty, resultant contempt, and the distorted convictions growing out of these. The evil and falsity capable of mixing with goodness and truth is that which does not oppose love for God and love for one’s neighbor.
He goes on to cite examples of these differences, but the basic idea is that our self-serving inclinations and beliefs can be mitigated by our individual orientation to goodness and truth as long as we don’t close our hearts to God. As long as we don’t harden our spirit to oppose His essential nature, which is Love, by attaching our selves to ways of being and thinking that are utterly contrary to it. This means that, more than our knowledge of truth, what matters most is the overall direction we are going within our hearts. Do we notice and resist the compulsions within ourselves that pit us against Him, that block our hearts from opening to the Love that is His Being with us?
Going back to the response video, it seems obvious that hatred, vengefulness, cruelty, and contempt—and all the distorted ideas that serve to justify them—are the driving energy behind jihadism, racism, and gang violence. The kinds of evil and falsity that proliferate on those paths are such as cannot mix with goodness because they oppose its very source: love itself; left unacknowledged and unrestrained, they will eventually turn a person against God because they cannot share space with the reality of His compassion and peace, His mercy and forgiveness.
It’s also obvious to me that the same is not true of being gay or transgender, of being an addict or New Age seeker (or any non-Christian). Those practices and states of being are not invariably driven by anti-God energy like hatred, vengefulness, cruelty, or contempt. Indeed, there are untold reasons why an individual might end up living outside of Christian morality and teachings, even if they were raised in them. So that fact alone of a person’s life does not signal they are on a path that’s so fundamentally opposed to the nature of God that they are moving themselves beyond reach of His truth and love. These spiritual paths are not all of a piece.
More to the point, every single one of us, including Christ-followers alike, has a self that is naturally disposed towards hatred, vengefulness, cruelty, and contempt, to using all manner of justifications—including the Bible itself—to convince our selves of our own right-ness and the wrong-ness others. One need not be a member of a violent organization to indulge the kinds of self-conceit that defy agape, the selfless love of God and the neighbor to which we are called.
In fact, section §1079 of Secrets of Heaven warns us of this way of being and draws a clear distinction between people who live from faith alone—which means, in truth without love—and those who live from faith that is connected with charity—in truth united with loving-kindness. We learn:
errors and perversions . . . are the only things that people [who adopt faith separated from charity] can see in another individual. But it is different for people who have the faith that comes of charity. They take notice of good qualities. Whatever evil or falsity they may see, they excuse it, and if they can, they work to correct it in the offender . . . .
Where neighborly love is absent, self[centered]-love is present, along with hatred [think: uncharitableness] for anyone who does not cater to oneself. That is why people who lack neighborly love see nothing in their neighbor besides that neighbor's evil. If they see anything good in the person, they either dismiss it or put a bad interpretation on it.
People governed by charity act in an entirely different way.
These differences form the distinction between the two types of people, particularly when they enter the other life. Those who lack all kindness . . . want to examine and in fact judge everyone and crave nothing more than to find evil . . . .
Those who are guided by kindness, on the other hand, hardly even notice evil in another but pay attention instead to everything good and true in the person. When they do find anything bad or false, they put a good interpretation on it. This is a characteristic of all angels—one they acquire from the Lord, who bends everything bad toward good.
This tells me that the path to God is one of learning how to be spiritually generous: focusing on the goodness we see in other people, on whatever truth we see guiding them, and putting the best interpretation on whatever we see that is contrary in them. It is cultivating a spiritual posture of assuming the best, of excusing as much as possible, of prioritizing mercy and connection while trusting that the Lord is leading, not just ourselves, but them as well.
This doesn’t mean we cannot have boundaries, that we must embrace moral relativism and accept indiscriminately all beliefs as morally equal, tolerate every choice or behavior as benign, spiritually harmless. In fact, it’s notable that that very Secrets of Heaven passage makes the point, in regard to people who operate from kindness: “Whatever evil or falsity they may see, they excuse it, and if they can, they work to correct it in the offender.” The implication is clear: it is not uncharitable to distinguish right from wrong, nor unloving to seek to reorient someone we perceive to be floundering morally or spiritually, who is hurting themself, or hurting others.
Of course, the question of what that kind of loving or help looks like is quite the thorny topic and one I want to write about further; ditto the question of what “evil” or “sin” actually is.
But the point here is that evils and falsities do not all equally obstruct our sight of God or derail us from the path to dwelling with Him. The heart of Christianity—the message of Jesus—is inspiring precisely for the radicalness of His mercy. The beautiful, unfathomable magnitude of it. His message calls us each to live in humble trust that His Hand is holding everyone, His Love bending each of our hearts towards what is good and true to whatever degree we will let Him, regardless of outward appearances. He calls us to awareness that the inclination to indulge thoughts and feelings that deny Him—the kinds of thoughts and feelings that can ultimately destroy our inclination to receive His goodness or value His truth—is universal in every one of us.
In that respect we are all spiritually of a piece.
The Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works. ~ Psalm 145:8-9