He Get Us (Even when we don't get him)
The hidden Good News in controversial advertising.
What seemingly looked like AI-generated images caused my phone to blow up during the Super Bowl. He Gets Us, LLC has paid for prime ad space during the big game for the past few years. And each year, my phone blows up as soon as these ads are finished.
The text messages I receive can be divided into two camps:
“I wish they’d spent the money on the ad actually to help the poor or do something Jesus would do.” (Virtue signaling)
“You know, Jesus wasn’t a commie.”
The dividing line on Jesus seems to fall when Jesus does not fit within our financial or political expectations of him. We all want Jesus to be our Jesus. We want Jesus to care about the things we care about, to be about the things we are about, and to be against the things we are against.
We want our Jesus to be for this and against that.
We want to fashion God in our image instead of remembering that humanity, all of us, were, have been, and will continue to be made in God’s image.
“Any pattern of thought that in any way abstracts God ‘himself’ from this person [Jesus], from his death or his career or his birth or his family or his Jewishness or his maleness or his teaching or the particular intercession and rule he as risen now exercises, has, according to Nicaea, no place in the church.”[i]
Or, to put it another way from Jenson: “Modernity was defined by the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal storyteller. The experiment has failed.”
Trying to tell the story of God from the vantage point of one “camp” or the other misses the point that the One who was crucified on a tree atop a hill on the outskirts of Jerusalem. As soon as we attempt to disconnect the message of Jesus from the person of Jesus, we have missed the point.
Yes, I know the ads are funded by Hobby Lobby co-founder David Green[ii] and others actively working to undo the rights, even the “imago dei-ness” of the LGBTA+ community. And yes, I know the Jesus portrayed in the ads is connecting with people many conservative evangelicals wish Jesus would ignore. This part of the conversation is necessary but not for me to figure out.
What I find most interesting in these ads and the response is that in our disagreements over the ads themselves, the funding of He Get Us, LLC, and the amount of money being spent to say that Jesus understands what you are going through is that even through our inability to understand God, God still understands us fully.
Jesus gets us, even if we don’t get him.
Jesus understands that we have a hard time forgiving, even if he offered forgiveness with his last breaths.
Jesus understands that he is the fulfillment of the Law (all of the things that needed to be done so that humanity could get “right with God”), even if we insist there are things others must do before God will accept them.
Jesus will never forsake, abandon, or forget us, even while we will deny knowing him, ignoring him when he stands in front of us with a sign asking for something to eat.
The irony of the ads is that other than the obligatory reference at the end, Jesus was not invited to his own commercial. As my friend
put it, “It’s only images of us washing our feet which, devoid from the cross, is a symbolic mishmash of do-goodery ness that has little to do with the Gospel. They might as well have shown images of random people eating at a table together.”Stanley Hauerwas sums up the point: “Without the cross and resurrection, life is shit.”
The beauty of the He Gets Us ads is how they remind us repeatedly that while He gets us, we often do not get him, and there lies the Good News of Him getting us: Jesus gets you, even when you do not get him. Jesus loves you, even when you do not love him. So whether you are doing harm to people in the name of Jesus or you are a commie Christian, know that before you get Jesus, Jesus loves you. And maybe that’s a better starting point than AI-generated images and an unexplained slogan.
[i] Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God
[ii] https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/11/us/he-gets-us-super-bowl-commercials-cec/index.html
So well said. Thank you.