Who Cares What Would Jesus Do? Or WCWWJD?

April 9, 2010 — -- Now that the History Channel has shown us the "Real Face of Jesus," some may be inspired to get real about following the man behind the face.

There is no shortage of books and preachers proffering remedies to lagging discipleship. One book published more than 100 years ago still insinuates evangelical tentacles into the praxis of believers.

"In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?" by Charles Sheldon, published in 1896, is a book about a homeless man's challenge to a church community to act like Jesus in their daily lives and to evaluate their actions in light of his example. While some in the book make admirable life changes, half the novel is about their attempts to drive out saloons -- hardly an exigent concern to our modern sensibilities, especially because we know that Jesus liked a good glass of wine. But, no matter, the book has sold 30 million copies.

The phrase "What Would Jesus Do?" had a renaissance in the 1990s as the ubiquitous WWJD was slapped on bumper stickers, bracelets, posters, coffee mugs, and yes, even underwear. It spawned a whole new group of followers who saw value in attempting to forecast and then to imitate the actions of the man from Galilee.

The would-be Jesus doppelgangers remain strong, as recently evidenced by many asking What Would Jesus Do? of bishops and priests who failed to act with holy diligence to stem the sex abuse crisis in the Church. Perceiving the actions of the hierarchy to be less than Christ-like, many proposed that a more serious deliberation of the Christological query might have saved Church leaders from their Waterloo.

With apologies to the fans and marketers of WWJD (and to Thomas a Kempis' "Imitation of Christ"), all of this Jesus copy-catting sorely misses the point. We are not Jesus. And Christianity is not a brand. Jesus never had to contend with Lady Gaga, electric cars, "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" or Blackberry outages. He was never married, never a parent, never a woman and never fell victim to sinfulness as the rest of us do. The point is not to extrapolate the actions of Jesus and then fit them into a 21st century redux. It is rather to consider the words and actions of Jesus as informing our own, and then to act in unique, thoughtful and Christ-like ways.