Restless
The Church Has a Jesus Problem
I believe we are a moral crisis. Maybe we have been for a long time. The rumblings have been building for decades, and what was festering beneath the surface is now in full view.
I have heard people justify anger and resentment and violence in the name of Jesus. I have heard arguments made against empathy itself—that the scourge of Western civilization is this idea that we ought to give a damn about anybody else. I’m not building a straw man here. I have seen these things on social media, on the TV talking heads show, in the news app on my phone, in all the places people go to display how little they know and how much they’re willing to share it.
Over the last fifty or so years, the church has been developing justifications for excusing ourselves of the responsibility to love those who are different from us. There is in the gospel a clear mandate to act in charity—not charity as in giving things out, but charity as the virtue. Somewhere along the way, we started giving ourselves permission to ignore what Jesus clearly said so we could maintain our own structures of power.
And the structures are always the same. Power over others. Scarcity mentality. Us versus them. Violence to achieve our goals. We have enough food in this country. We throw away staggering amounts of it while people starve. There are twenty-eight empty homes for every person sleeping on the street in America. The problem has never been scarcity. The problem is hoarding. And we have baptized the hoarding as divine favor.
Vice President JD Vance claimed recently that Jesus taught a hierarchy of love. His exact words: “There’s this old school—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” He then added: “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders.”
Jesus didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything close to that. What Jesus said was, “You have heard it said, love your friend and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemy.” Paul reiterates it. Love those who persecute you and treat you badly. There is no hierarchy. There is no ordering system. The whole point is that the love of God extends precisely to the person you’d rather it didn’t.
Last September, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade suggested on air that we deal with homeless people who refuse government services by giving them “involuntary lethal injection.” His exact words: “Just kill ’em.” When the clip went viral and the backlash came, he apologized. But listen to what he apologized for. He called it “an extremely callous remark.” He was sorry for being rude. Not for being wrong about human beings. For being impolite about it.
That’s the tell. The dehumanization wasn’t the scandal. The rudeness was. We have so thoroughly normalized the idea that some people don’t count that a man on national television can suggest executing the homeless and the only real offense is his tone.
This is a practicing Catholic who professes to follow Jesus. The Jesus who said, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.”
The instrumentalized Christ
The church didn’t get here overnight. But at some point we stopped looking to Jesus as the one through whom, as Paul writes to the Colossians, all things were made and in whom all things hold together. We stopped seeing him as the site where God and humanity are reconciled. We stopped looking to him as the author and finisher of our faith. And we started treating him as a means to an end.
We instrumentalized Jesus. The one who holds all of creation together—we made him a tool. “I will deploy Jesus when it suits me to achieve the goal I have for my own benefit.” And that goal, almost always, is power, wealth, and privilege. Think about the scale of that category error. This is not a prophet we’ve misread or a teacher we’ve selectively quoted. This is the Logos, the Word through whom everything that exists was spoken into being, and we have reduced him to a mascot.
The Jesus who clears the temple, who calls the Pharisees whitewashed tombs, who tells a rich young ruler to sell everything—that Jesus is inconvenient. That Jesus disrupts the power structures we’re trying to protect. So we’ve tamed him. We tell the story of Jesus in a way that always, conveniently, ends up confirming whatever we already wanted to do.
And the people we know—the ones we recognize as good people, who nevertheless say things or hold positions that run counter to the Word of God—they have been formed this way. I want to be precise about that word. Formed. Not just influenced. Not just misled. Formed, the way you’d use the word in spiritual formation. They have been catechized—slowly, over years, through sermons and talk radio and Bible studies and political rallies that opened with prayer—into a faith where Jesus is not the center but the instrument. They were formed by leaders of movements. They were formed by faith leaders within their own communities. They were formed, in some cases, by people they trusted with their souls. And what they were formed into is a Christianity where Jesus exists to serve their purposes rather than the other way around. Some of them were trained by eschatologies that taught them to suspect peacemakers and celebrate military might in the name of the Prince of Peace. Some of them were trained by prosperity gospels that told them their wealth was God’s blessing and poverty was God’s judgment. The pipelines are different, but they all arrive at the same destination: a Christianity that has the form of godliness but denies its power.
Helpless creatures
Human beings are helpless creatures. We are selfish. We are also capable of being kind and generous and overwhelmingly good. That tension lives within the heart of every human person.
There’s a debate in theology about original sin. Is humanity fundamentally good or fundamentally evil? Some people say we can’t call human beings cursed because God created everything and called it good. Others insist on total depravity. I think we have to hold those ideas together, because both are obviously true. Left to our own devices, human beings will do incredibly destructive things if they benefit us personally. Also true: left to our own devices, human beings will do incredible acts of courage and grace.
There is within us a war. Paul talks about it when he says, “The thing I want to do, I don’t do, and the thing I don’t want to do, I do.”
That’s why I keep using the word “helpless.” Too often we go all-or-nothing on this. “Utterly depraved.” Or, “How dare you, human beings are just fine.” But helpless is something different. Helpless doesn’t mean weak. It doesn’t mean worthless. It means I cannot referee my own internal war. I cannot, by sheer force of will, make myself stop reaching for the thing that destroys me. The pull toward the immediate desire, the immediate need, the path of least resistance—it’s inexorable. And the only one who can break its grip is not me.
This is, incidentally, what God has been responding to since the beginning. When Adam and Eve grasp at what wasn’t given to them, God doesn’t destroy them. He clothes them. When Cain murders Abel, God doesn’t kill Cain. He marks him for protection. The whole arc of Scripture is God encountering human helplessness and responding not with punishment but with presence. Not by fixing us from a distance but by moving closer. Always closer. Until, in Jesus, there is no distance left at all.
Augustine put it better than I ever could, at the very beginning of his Confessions: “O Lord, you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”
That is the crux of the matter. We are made in God’s image, but we are corrupted by the brokenness of the world around us and by our participation in that brokenness. We always feel the cognitive dissonance. We know we’re built for something better. And yet the restlessness drives us. It drives us to accumulate, to dominate, to build walls. Every act of instrumentalized faith I described above is a symptom of restlessness. The politician constructing a hierarchy of love so he doesn’t have to love his enemy. The television host reaching for the easiest solution—just kill them. The prosperity preacher baptizing greed as blessing. Hearts that haven’t found their rest will grab at power, because they don’t know what else to do with the ache.
The escape ramp
The only salve for that ache is Jesus. He is the escape ramp from this headlong, hurtling dive into the abyss of self-destruction. And he works in two ways.
First, Jesus demonstrates the better way. His teachings throughout the Gospels show us the path of righteousness, the way of life that is in sync with the kingdom of God. And what we discover most of the time is that living that life is incredibly difficult because of the moral completeness it embodies. The Beatitudes aren’t a checklist for getting God to like you. They’re a portrait of what humans look like when they’ve been so formed by the kingdom that the world’s allure has lost its grip on them. You will be poor and lack for nothing. You will be hungry and always full. You will be a peacemaker and always strong. It’s a vision of life so opposed to the way the world works that the same words we use to describe “the way things are” don’t even have meaning within the kingdom of God.
Second, Jesus is the gate. He says in John 10, “I am the door for the sheep.” The only way to enter the kingdom of God is through the person of Jesus Christ. Not around him. Not by approximating his ideas. Through him.
We fail in both directions. We fail by trying to follow the path Jesus lays out without actually trusting in Jesus. And we fail by ignoring that path because it’s too damn hard, taking the path of least resistance that creates destruction for ourselves and everyone around us.
What we see playing out in the world right now—all of it—is that internal struggle written large across how the world works.
And here’s where I have to be honest: this critique cuts both ways.
You can level it against the right by pointing to the support of clearly uncharitable ideologies, the desire to revoke the most basic aid to meet the needs of the poor and the homeless. But if you’re reading this, you probably already know that critique. You’ve already left those churches. You’ve already seen the contradiction.
The harder word is for us.
Because the temptation on our side isn’t to domesticate Jesus into a mascot for power. It’s to reduce him to a mascot for our causes. To strip him down to a first-century social activist and then wonder why we’re so tired.
I’ve watched it happen. I’ve felt it happen in myself. You pour everything into the right fight—the protest, the mutual aid network, the advocacy campaign, the angry tweet thread—and at some point you realize you’re running on fumes. Not because the work isn’t good. It is good. But because somewhere along the way the work became the thing you trust instead of Jesus. The activism became the yoke, and it is heavy, because you’re carrying the entire weight of the outcome on your own back.
And it burns people out. I’ve seen it burn people out of ministry. I’ve seen it burn people out of faith entirely. They leave the church they grew up in because the theology was bad, and then they leave the progressive church they found because the activism was exhausting, and then they leave Jesus altogether because nobody ever told them the point wasn’t to win. The point was to follow.
Just one more march and we’ll get there. Just one more election. Just one more viral post that finally makes people see. That expectation is its own form of restlessness—a restless activism that mistakes movement for transformation. It’s the same ache, the same grasping, just dressed in better theology. And if the source of your hope is your own effort, then your hope has an expiration date.
There is no practical solution that fixes this. We can staunch the bleeding. We can dam up the river. We can try to make things better. But at the end of the day, the only path to peace is Jesus.
And I’m not saying that as permission to give up. We still persuade. We still persist. We still vote. We still protest when necessary. But we do all of it leaning on the strength of Jesus, not expecting anything to happen because our efforts finally crack the code. They won’t.
The daily walk
The bad news—and there’s good news wrapped around it, so stay with me—is that what I’m describing, this laser focus on Jesus, is not a one-and-done thing.
It’s a daily struggle. That’s why there are so many examples throughout history of people who created rules of life and spiritual exercises, because they found things that worked for them and shared them with others. Everything from reading your Bible every day to saying a rosary. These are all things people do in order to make that connection with Jesus, every day. This is what Jesus means when he says, “Take up your cross and follow me.”
You don’t have a little talk with Jesus and then it’s over. You don’t go down to the altar rail, sign your contract, receive your get-out-of-hell-free card, and go about your business. Every day is a renewed struggle between how I want to be and how I know I should be.
There are really only two modes. Self-worship, self-direction. Or following Jesus, leaning on Jesus, trusting in Jesus.
God’s kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven every single day, in every single heart, as we conform ourselves to Jesus. And in that ongoing formation we become more and more truly complete image bearers of God. That’s what Wesleyans call sanctification. The Eastern Church calls it theosis. I like to talk about it as union with God.
It doesn’t happen overnight. Can’t happen overnight.
And here’s the thing I keep learning: sanctification is release, not achievement. The burden is light because you’ve stopped carrying the weight of winning. The world’s wisdom—striving, defending, dominating, calculating, always on guard—that’s the heavy yoke. That’s the millstone. And we’ve been told it’s just how life works. Jesus says otherwise.
But continuing to think this way can help us have hope in the middle of these moral crises we see around us. It can also help us develop love and kindness for those whom we want to hate. Because I want to hate some people. I do hate some people. I want some people dead. Let’s just say it. I think if we’re being honest, all of us can identify someone we think the world would be better without.
I can't let that be the last word. Because if that's the last word, then perhaps somebody wants me dead. Maybe they have as good a reason as me. So I have to keep the focus on what I can do in this day, in this hour, in this moment—not following my own desires, but keeping my eyes on Jesus—that’s the walk.
You can get it wrong. I get it wrong most days. That’s not the point. The point is we keep going. And as we keep going, as imperceptible as it may be sometimes, we are being transformed. We are becoming the people Jesus intends us to be.
Because as Paul says, the one who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it on the day of Christ Jesus.
If we don’t start with our own hearts—with our own daily, grinding, unglamorous refocusing on Jesus—then everything else we do is just performance. The form of godliness without the power. We can maintain all the external religious practices, preach all the right sermons, march in all the right marches, and still be living as if God doesn’t exist.
So start with your own heart. It’s restless. But there is rest.