Vachon Imagined

For those of you who don’t believe in Jesus, good.

That means you confront things. You’re skeptical. And skepticism is not a rejection of life. It is the refusal to accept something simply because someone told you it was true.

It also means you understand something important: this man named Jesus, now celebrated and interpreted through religious law, isn’t physically happening here in the way you and I are happening.

You can’t shake hands with him the way you shake hands with your neighbor. You can’t curse him out the way you might curse out an erratic driver.

And that’s okay.

The disbelief is good.

The skepticism is holy.

Why do I say skepticism is holy?

Because when you strip everything else away, what remains is life.

And nothing more is required.

Jesus confronted religious law. In the Bible, we encounter the Pharisees, a religious movement deeply concerned with Torah, tradition, interpretation, and observance. But Jesus repeatedly confronted what happens when being right becomes more important than mercy, when certainty becomes rigidity, and when religious identity becomes a fixed image of oneself.

Rigidity without mercy becomes pride.

And this is why Jesus remains relevant today.

You might say, Well, I can’t shake hands with him.

Technically, I suppose that’s true—physically.

But Jesus understood that he was not merely his physical body. He understood something that we still struggle to understand: education does not necessarily make you wise, and knowledge does not necessarily mean understanding.

Life is life.

Knowledge is powerful, but it does not come only from a book. It comes from within your own heart, your own mind, your own body.

From you.

Jesus was not special because he was separate from everyone else.

He was powerful because he understood that he wasn’t.

To make himself special would have required separation. It would have required judgment: I am this, and you are that.

Instead, he shared what he knew.

Not to make himself a God, but to show people what they already were.

And this is where skepticism can become holy.

Because when you remove the labels, the doctrines, the religious laws, the arguments, the certainty, the need to be right, and even the need to believe, something remains.

You.

Life.

You don’t have to believe in Jesus to experience that.

You don’t have to believe in God.

You don’t even have to agree with me.

In fact, don’t.

Question it.

Confront it.

Feel it for yourself.

Because anything that is true does not become more true because someone convinced you of it.

And anything that is alive does not require your agreement to be alive.

The wisdom you are looking for is not somewhere outside of you.

It is already here.

And everything else is an addition.

Religious law is an addition.

Education is an addition.

Labels are an addition.

Even belief is an addition.

None of these things are necessarily bad.

But when we mistake the addition for life itself, we become less able to see the wisdom that was here before we named it.

Before we memorized it.

Before we were told what to believe.

Life was already here.

And so were you.