As I’ve been out of an official Christian pastor role for almost a year, I’ve been wrestling with the question of why Jesus needs to be part of my spirituality. And I keep coming back to his rebelliousness.

The scene that plays over and over in my head is when Jesus is on trial before the high priest and after he gets slapped for being disrespectful, he says what did I say that was untrue, which makes me think of all the marginalized Christians who get disciplined by the church.

Jesus was constantly salty to religious authority which is why it makes no sense for him to be the property of authoritarian religious orthodoxy. I think that many Christians have a relationship with their doctrine about Jesus rather than Jesus himself.

The rationalism of western Christianity often ruins it and keeps it from bringing about the liberation that grace is supposed to bring. Uptight performers of orthodoxy have not been set free by the blood of Jesus.

The point was to make us people who don’t walk on eggshells, who aren’t douchebags about following policies and speaking correctly but have the lightheartedness to pivot continuously in order to show a wide variety of people hospitality and solidarity.

When Christians think that Jesus speaks only through the Bible or only in Bible verses that are easy to recognize, we cut ourselves off from the divine voice that makes itself available to be our intuition and is way more easygoing and mischievous than seems becoming of God.

It is that mischief that I see in Jesus. Sure he has to nod to Torah and his religious tradition in order to have any credibility to say anything else, but it’s penultimate to guiding us into an existence of actual freedom in which we flow with divine idiosyncrasy.