WWJD? What would Jesus do?

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. passes through a picket line outside Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta on Oct. 19, 1960, while under arrest by Police Capt. R.E. Little, left rear, following protests of lunch counter segregation. “Being a follower of Christ, for King, meant the courage to depart from the status quo,” Aaron Rosen writes. On King’s right are Atlanta Student Movement leader Lonnie King and Spelman College student Marilyn Pryce. Holding the sign is Spelman student activist Ida Rose McCree. Associated Press, File

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aaron Rosen of Searsport is a professor, director of The Parsonage Gallery in Searsport (Instagram: @parsonagegallery) and author of What Would Jesus See?, to be published in June by Broadleaf Books. This column is an adaptation of a selection from that book. His wife, the Rev. Dr. Carolyn Rosen, is priest-in-charge of St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Ellsworth.

Growing up Jewish in central Maine in the ’90s, I remember this phrase was ubiquitous: bedazzled onto T-shirts, stitched into friendship bracelets and scrawled across baggy jeans. Whatever fashion sin was being committed, WWJD was a part of it. At the time I didn’t think much of it, and it didn’t strike me as particularly original.

Now, a full generation later, trained as a theologian with a specialty in interfaith dialogue, I see something different and surprisingly relevant in this innocuous acronym. At its core, the question “What would Jesus do?” is a profound, even radical, one. In one form or another, it has rung in the ears of centuries of martyrs as they endured trials and torments for their faith. And it is the theme of some of the greatest works of devotional theology, most famously Thomas à Kempis’ 15th-century classic, “The Imitation of Christ.”

In the 20th century, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. returned again and again to the need to recapture the fiery passion for justice that was the great refrain of Jesus’ ministry and that burned so brightly in his early followers. “By opening our lives to God in Christ,” King declared in one sermon, “we become new creatures. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists.” Being a follower of Christ, for King, meant the courage to depart from the status quo, to imitate the original nonconformist, the true revolutionary: Jesus.

Looking around today, the question “What would Jesus do?” doesn’t seem to be sparking the sort of nonconformity King was talking about. How, then, might readers of the Gospels in the 21st century reignite this kind of revolutionary fire, which holds people to higher – one might say, productively impossible – standards? How might Christians escape the logic of self-justification, whereby WWJD starts to mean simply WWID – what would I do?

As a practicing Jew married to an Episcopal priest, I often find myself up late on a Saturday night, after we’ve extinguished the candle for Havdalah – the ritual concluding Shabbat – thinking with my wife about what she’ll preach the next Sunday morning. More than most Jews, I imagine, I spend a lot of time thinking through thorny passages of the Gospels, asking how they might be relevant to my life.

Week after week, I find myself struck, above all, by the strangeness of Jesus’ vision in the Gospels. Jesus routinely upends conventions of looking, thinking and doing, within his own context as well as ours. While a recent spate of Super Bowl commercials tried to convince viewers that Jesus is just like us, what strikes me instead is how willing he was to take unorthodox leaps of faith and reason in order to destabilize easy pieties.

Ultimately, the enduring capacity of Jesus to stun and befuddle is a revelation in its own right. As clear as he can be at times – especially regarding how we should treat others – it seems that the Jesus of the Gospels does not want to be, or will not allow himself to be, completely recognizable. With uncanny foresight, Jesus not only avoided the full comprehension of his peers, he took evasive maneuvers for the future, many of which remain effective to this day.

Rather than focusing only on what we think we know about Jesus, it’s helpful to remember how speculative those explanations really are. As the Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam once said of Dante’s cantos, one can’t read the Gospels “without aiming them in the direction of the present day. They were made for that.” But the Gospels are no almanac, and Jesus is no weatherman. His long-range forecast is both urgent and indeterminate. He invites us to extend his insights into ever-new periods and contexts. But the responsibility remains with us to fill in the picture.