Why I am a Christian

I can think of a lot of reasons I would NOT use. No hard-hearted rejector of the poor makes me a Christian. No self-righteous Donatist ever made me feel like I should go to church. Nobody who mocks other religions makes me feel holy, and I've never felt the presence of the Lord in the presence of a rant about gays, welfare bums, lepers, Samaritans, or whoever has become the fashionable target for the righteous. "Noone is righteous, not one," St. Paul's words echo through me as I write this.

It comes down to the figure of Jesus, for me. Jesus is a very appealing figure - the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount are godly to me in a way that no other text has approached, as are the words of one of his later disciples in 1 Corinthians 13.

If I had never heard of a God, and had to make up the characteristics of a deity, I do not believe I could do better than the traits of Jesus - the kindly healer of lepers, the blind, and even the dead. The lamb that lays down, and turns an evil thing at the hands of Pilate into the gift of love. That, quite simply, is why I am a Christian. My faith is not a rejection of what others believe, or what they are. My faith is an embracing - an embracing of what I believe the beatific possibilities are.

God is a mystery. We "know now in part, but then we will know fully" even as we are fully known, as St. Paul says. St. John sums up God's very existence as "God is Love" and that resonates for me - allowing me to know the unknowable and fathom the neverending depths of majesty that are God. I can be both mystic and mystified, lost and found, poor and wealthy, humble and exalted.

God is like the flames of love at Pentecost, fire falling on every man and woman, whispering urgently that God loves each and everyone, and urging mankind to respond in kind. "A new commandment I give you," Jesus tells us, "Love one another as I have loved you."

Ultimately, can we aspire to anything better? That simple truth - God is love - is a Christian truth that leads me home to Jesus every time, all the time.