Is Jesus relevant today?

Why Jesus?

In the February, 2006 cover story, "The Passion of Kanye West," Rolling Stone magazine features Grammy award winner West with a crown of thorns on his head. The image is a parody of Jim Caviezel's portrayal of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ.

Although West is known for his irreverence, having drawn fire for suggesting that he should be "a part of the Bible," a near fatal automobile accident in 2002 set him on a search for life's meaning. In his hit, "Jesus Walks," West reveals an inner struggle where he admits that the wrongs in his life have kept God distant, yet he still speaks of his need for Jesus. A few verses in the rap tune, "Jesus Walks," relate West's struggle:¹

I ain't here to argue about his facial features Or here to convert atheists into believers I'm just tryin to say the way school need teachers The way Kathy Lee needed Regis that's the way yall need Jesus…

And I don't think there's nothing I can do to right my wrongs Jesus Walks with me with me with me with me I wanna talk to God but I'm afraid cause we ain't spoke in so long ...

To Kanye West, Jesus is real, but irrelevant to his personal guilt and need to connect with God. If Jesus is who he claimed to be, the Creator of life, we would expect him to be relevant to our lives. In fact, Jesus said that he came to bring us a life beyond our wildest dreams. If that is true, we would expect him to provide answers to our innermost questions:

- "Who am I?" - "Why am I here?" - "Where am I going?"

"Who am I?" is a question that shockingly confronted Academy Award winner Jack Nicholson. Abandoned by his father as in infant, Nicholson was led to believe that his grandmother was his mother and his mother was his older sister. He grew up believing their story until at the age of 37 a Time magazine researcher exposed the truth.

Left without a sense of his own roots, Nicholson sought his identity in pleasure---living for the moment. He states, "I resist all established beliefs. My religion basically is to be immediate, to live in the now… I envy people of faith….I pray to something…up there….It's part of being human, I guess."²

Madonna attempted to answer the question of, "Why am I here?" by becoming a diva, confessing, "There were many years when I thought fame, fortune, and public approval would bring me happiness. But one day you wake up and realize they don't….I still felt something was missing….I wanted to know the meaning of true and lasting happiness and how I could go about finding it."³

Others have given up on finding meaning. Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the Seattle grunge band Nirvana, despaired of life at age 27 and committed suicide. Jazz-age cartoonist Ralph Barton also found life to be meaningless, leaving the following suicide note: "I have had few difficulties, many friends, great successes; I have gone from wife to wife, and from house to house, visited countries of the world, but I am fed up with inventing devices to fill up 24 hours of the day."⁴

Pascal, the great French philosopher believed this inner void we all experience can only be filled by God. He states, "There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which only Jesus Christ can fill."⁵ If Pascal is right, then we would expect Jesus to not only answer the question of our identity and meaning in this life, but also to give us hope for life after we die.

Can there be meaning, without God? Not according to atheist Bertrand Russell, who wrote, "Unless you assume a god, the question of life's purpose is meaningless."⁶ Russell resigned himself to ultimately "rot" in the grave. In his book, Why I am not a Christian, Russell dismissed everything Jesus said about life's meaning, including his promise of eternal life.

But if Jesus actually defeated death as eyewitnesses claim, (see article 6) then he alone would be able to tell us what life is all about, and answer, "Where am I going?" In order to understand how Jesus' words, life, and death can establish our identities, give us meaning in life, and provide hope for the future, we need to understand what he said about God, about us, and about himself.

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This is an excerpt from Y-Jesus Magazine. Click here to see Y-Jesus Magazine.