How I Met Jesus (The Jesus I Fell in Love With)

by Tony Duppong - ReWireU Director

When I share my “how I met Jesus” story - it usually starts something like this… In college, I was fascinated by charismatic revolutionaries…

As it is for many young adults, college was a deeply formative experience for me. The small, sheltered world of my youth was obliterated by an expanse of new ideas, ideals, perspectives, and experiences. My years in college would be the soil from which my lifelong appreciation for history, arts, philosophy, literature, and the human experience would first take root. My reference points to the world around me expanded immensely.

I was beginning to learn that not everyone experienced life as I experienced life. I became aware of inequality. I learned about oppression. I studied the philosophies that perpetuated injustice. I met people who didn’t have the comforts and privileges that I had. I learned that in order for some people (like myself) to have comfort and luxury, many other people would know exploitation, violence, poverty, and suffering.

This bothered me. It still does. And when something causes disruption to some area of life, often the natural inclination is to take action to resolve the disruption somehow. Some people choose a side, identify with it, identify with the group holding the same belief, convince themselves that their side has some justification or moral high ground, and then find solace in the collective conviction that the disruption is someone else’s fault and therefore someone else’s responsibility. Other people will choose to ignore the disruption like it's an annoying younger sibling and hope that it just gets bored and goes away. My approach to “dealing with” my disrupted frameworks was to dive in and devote myself to finding solutions.

The Broken Machine

I didn’t know it then, but there was a detrimental flaw to this approach. My devotion depended entirely on an assumption that these “social issues” (like poverty, global hunger, racism) were entirely systemic issues and therefore, required systemic solutions. I was drawn to politics and political sciences because, in my mind, society was like a machine with many interconnected parts. Social issues were evidence of a faulty system. If a part of the machine was broken or insufficient, it needed to be replaced with something new, upgraded, or reimagined all-together. I would intellectually hover around questions like: Why are there people starving in the world when there is plenty of food in the world for everyone to eat abundantly? I was convinced that something must be broken in the system - that’s how these things happen. Some cog in the society machine wasn’t working properly. I figured, solving the world's problems was a matter of engineering on a socio-political level.

My major in college ended up being English Literature. Political Science was my minor. It was the literature that exposed me to the humanity piece that my political science logic was missing. Through literature, I was exposed to history, culture, perspectives of life from different times, different people, and different experiences. Literature exposed me to the interconnectedness of our stories and taught me about how the connection between my story and your story is far deeper than our socio-economic proximity. I read Native Son, Grapes of Wrath, The Souls of Black Folk, Langston Hughes, and poetry from Indigenous Americans on reservations. These were the paths that led me to Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Dr. King Jr., Franz Fanon, Emiliano Zapata, Dorothy Day, Mahatma Gandhi, and many more. Some were guerrilla warfare freedom fighters, some were philosophers, some were pacifist mystics, some were preachers - but all of them lived for a cause that was bigger than they were. And often, they died for that cause too. Each, in their own way, was a revolutionary. It wasn’t the romantic “underdog” story that captured me. It was something deeper. I wanted to walk with them and talk and ask questions. I wanted to know what their quirks were - what made them tick? I wanted to hear their stories. I think, deep down, I wanted to know what it took to give all of yourself - to fully abandon your life for something you believed was right, good, and true.

What does it take to change the world?

That’s what I was really after.

Inevitably, somewhere between my junior and senior year in college, my captivation with world changers and revolutionaries led me to the historical character of Jesus. My first exposure to Jesus (beyond the Sunday school stories I heard as a kid) was as a revolutionary leader - right in line with all of the others I had sought out and studied. To me, he fit quite nicely as he related to other historical revolutionaries. His culture and people were oppressed and colonized by the regime of an occupying global superpower.

He associated with and identified with the poor, marginalized, and exploited. He criticized wealth and power, corporate greed, and political corruption. He was a young, dynamic, charismatic leader that people followed and adored. He was a gifted orator who spent more time teaching than he did organizing. He eloquently shared an alternative vision for a new way of life and called for a new allegiance. He could even be put in the category of so many other revolutionaries who were executed by the state for their subversive disruption and disobedience.

A Different Kind of Revolutionary. A Different Kind of Revolution.

“Rabble-rouser Jesus.” “Disturber of the Peace Jesus.” That was the Jesus I was first exposed to. I liked him… you know, in the same way I “liked” the other revolutionaries I was learning about. But then, I started to notice that there were some glaring pieces of Jesus’ story that didn’t “fit” with the typical revolutionary narrative. For instance… Often, throughout history, as marginalized movements challenge systems of power, when the de-facto leaders of the revolution are killed it usually doesn’t take long for the entire movement to dissolve. Take the leader out, end the uprising. But Jesus didn’t seem to conform to that narrative.

This is where Easter and Holy Week got really interesting for me. Jesus seemed to flip more than tables in the Temple that week. He flipped the entire revolutionary paradigm. First, the Romans were masters in the art of quelling a potential uprising. They had to be. The method of crucifixion, while abhorrently brutal, was an effective demonstration of power and control to any would-be insurrectionists who might try to challenge the system. It should have worked. It had worked before. Jesus should have died on the cross and his disciples should have snuck out of town carrying their fear and trauma back to their village homes and labor jobs. The message should have been loud and clear; “No other king but Caesar, no other kingdom but Rome!”...

But something went wrong. They couldn’t kill him.

That’s not a small statement. The Romans residing in Jerusalem at that time were majority politicians or soldiers. They were there to represent Caesar, establish rule and law, and keep order. When a Roman politician ordered an execution, the soldiers were trained to carry it out. Pilate flaunts his power and confidence to the crowd as he spoke to them after his soldiers mocked and beat Jesus - “Shall I crucify your King?” The undertones of a question like this shouldn’t be missed; “I am a king killer! I can and I will! Is this really what you want?”

But, he couldn’t. Or at least, he couldn’t keep him dead.

Resurrection Day is when the revolution started. Jesus’ revolution - that is, the subversive Kingdom alternative to the political empire and religious institutions - didn’t really start until after the leader of the revolution was executed by the state. That’s odd - especially for that time in history. To his followers, Jesus wasn’t really dead at all, which meant that Jesus was who he said he was! From that first day of the resurrection, the movement of the early church grows and expands in spite of and in defiance of all other logic and force that would otherwise suggest that everything should have ended on the cross.

The colonizing, occupying empire executed the leader of the potential uprising… and the energy and conviction of his followers amplified instead of dissipated.

The execution flopped. The mockery of crucifixion suddenly flipped to a mockery of the crucifiers.

From here, further attempts to quell the growing movement of Jesus followers successfully caused the movement to go underground and remain decentralized. This should have also worked to cripple the movement. Yet, the more underground the movement went, the more it grew. The more secretive and underground the movement became, the more subversive and threatening it became. The more force the authorities flexed, the further it scattered and decentralized the movement’s key players. The more scattered Jesus followers became, the further the message of Jesus and his Kingdom was proclaimed. Apply pressure and the movement will inevitably stop - but not so with this revolution. The more pressure, the further the spread, the greater the influence.

And it still hasn’t stopped.

That’s the Jesus that first caught my attention.