By James Gómez in Misfit Faith — 23 Aug 2023

5 Characteristics that Model What it Looks Like to Follow Jesus

If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you will have seen the two videos where I posed the question, “What does it mean to follow Jesus?” If you haven’t seen those videos, no worries. Here’s where you can find Part 1 and Part 2.

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I appreciated the response of @sasquatchmansfield, who said,

“Love God & love your neighbor. Of course, then you have to define who God is and what it looks like to love people…the bible, is there for us to know God and what he's revealed his nature to be. and from that, we see what love looks like too.”

What I most appreciated was the sincerity and honesty of the answer. So often, we take something simple and make it complicated to the point of confusing or unhelpful. In particular, within a Christian context, we often argue and split theological hairs justifying a specific position or tribal view that we never actually do what God commands.

So, back to my question, “What does it mean to follow Jesus?” Or, using Sasquatchmansfield’s words, “What does it look like practically to love God and love people?” Based on the life and model of Jesus, I agree with Marcus Borg that five primary characteristics tangibly demonstrate what it looks like to follow Jesus.

Speaking of the late New Testament Scholar Marcus Borg, I want to share that this list comes from Marcus Borg’s and N.T. Wrights, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions p. 243. Borg also unpacks each characteristic in his works;

1. A Life Centered in the Spirit

Life in the Spirit is consciously and intentionally participating in a relationship with God. Rooted within a centering in the Spirit is the character of God as known through Jesus. We learn about what God is like through the alternative wisdom teachings of Jesus in his aphorisms and parables.

As we learn more about what God is like through Jesus’s teachings, we also see the character of God revealed through the life and ministry of Jesus. If we lived in the time of Jesus, we would see a consensus, regardless if someone believed Jesus was God or not, that Jesus was a wisdom teacher and healer. Through the teachings and healings of Jesus, we learn that God is compassionate and deeply concerned with justice.

Intentionally centering our lives in the Spirit begins to transform us in multiple ways:

Our sense of self-identity is transformed as we recognize we are not solely what our culture says we are. This can often be a source of courage that can liberate us from some social anxieties and expectations of what others say we should be.
Our relationships with others are transformed so that we are not so self-consumed or focused on our survival and well-being. By not focusing on ourselves, we become more sensitive to seeing the Spirit in everyone we encounter. This leads us to act with increased compassion toward others and a more extraordinary passion for distributive justice.
Our relationship with the world becomes transformed as we no longer associate following Jesus with the afterlife but with manifesting God’s kingdom in this life. This transformation helps us not see the earth and creation as something to be dominated by humanity but cared for and cultivated.

At the center of following Jesus is intentionally seeking to center ourselves within the Spirit day-to-day and moment-by-moment.

2. Lived By An Alternative Wisdom

I want to be clear that the wisdom referred to here is not conventional wisdom but a completely different kind of wisdom. Marcus Borg explains how alternative wisdom differs from conventional wisdom,

“Jesus was not primarily a teacher of information (what to believe) or morals (how to behave), but a teacher of a way or path of transformation. A way of transformation from what to what? From a life in the world of conventional wisdom to a life centered in God.” (Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith, p. 75)

Within Judaism, it is Moses who brings the law. In Taoism, Lao Tzu teaches “the Way,” within Buddhism, there is the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, and for Christians, we have Jesus’s aphorisms and parables.

In Jesus, we receive his wisdom from memorable one-liners (aphorisms) and stories (parables). Through these one-liners and stories, Jesus transforms wisdom from the wisdom of a dying world to the wisdom of rebirth and resurrection found in God.

At the heart of Jesus’s message is not a belief system, a moral code to be obeyed, or a standard to live up to. This is what is found in conventional wisdom. Again, Marcus Borg explains,

“The gospel of Jesus — the good news of Jesus’ own message is that there is a way of being that moves beyond both secular and religious conventional wisdom. The path of transformation of which Jesus spoke leads from a life of requirements and measuring up (whether to culture or God) to a life of relationship with God. It leads from a life of anxiety to a life of peace and trust. It leads from bondage to self-preoccupation to the freedom of self-forgetfulness. It leads from life centered in culture to life centered in God.” (Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith, p. 88)

3. Marked by Compassion

Two of Jesus’s most recognized aphorisms teach us that the primary quality of God is God’s compassion.

Matthew 5:48 (NRSV), “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Luke 6:36 (NRSV), “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

Matthew is making an ethical affirmation of what is known as the imitatio dei or the “imitation of God.” The point is a moral imperative to live according to God’s character.

Though most English translations use the word “merciful” as the NRSV does, a better, more contemporary word is “compassion.” “Mercy” or “merciful” communicate a more judicial meaning. It implies wrongdoing and mercy being shown to someone deserving of punishment. This view emphasizes God as a law-giver or monarch and humanity as guilty sinners or undeserving peasants.

However, “compassion” is an emotion and a way of acting. Emotionally, compassion is similar to empathy, which means “to feel with” the feeling of another. Compassion can also be an act that applies to situations where there’s been no wrongdoing. For example, compassion can be extended toward victims of war, sickness, injustice, or a natural disaster.

Nowhere do we see the compassion of God on better display than in Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Sons. In this parable, we see God as a loving parent yearning for his son’s return, and when the son does return, the parent is “filled with compassion.” However, the scandal isn’t that the father extends compassion to the son who returned but also to the dutiful son. The father cares deeply for both sons, meets them where they are without strings attached, and extends compassion to both.

Being marked by the compassion of God rejects common cultural categories like wealthy or poor, attractive or unattractive, exciting or boring, etc. The compassion of God teaches us that categories like good and evil are often oversimplifications shaped by cultural conventions than God’s character.

4. Concerned about Justice

Compassion is not solely defined in individual terms but also has social implications. Compassion applied at the social level leads to being marked by acting to change social injustice where we encounter it.

Marcus Borg explains how Jesus teaches God’s passion for justice is most seen in the kingdom of God. Specifically, we see at least three passions for justice in the context of the kingdom of God:

God’s kingdom is for the earth: The kingdom of God is not concerned with an afterlife. Through Jesus, the kingdom of God was inaugurated in the here and now. It is now through Jesus’s followers that this kingdom continues to be manifested in everyday life.
God’s kingdom has political and religious implications: Borg explains the kingdom’s political and religious implications this way, “As a political-religious metaphor, the kingdom of God referred to what life would be like on earth if God were king and the kingdoms of this world, the domination systems of this world, were not.” (Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary p. 187)
The kingdom of God is about a transformed world: In a transformed world, the earth and its people are not exploited, injustice and violence cease to exist, every person has enough, and nations no longer war. At the heart of a transformed world is the end of the domination systems that have existed since the dawn of human history.

5. Lived with an Alternative Community of Jesus

Though Jesus’s teaching applies to individuals, it is not individualistic. As a Jew, Jesus would have seen the concept of a covenant not exclusively between us and God but also between each other. By design, the community is required to live a compassionate life centered in the Spirit.

Marcus Borg says it this way,

“For us today, life in the community of Jesus nourishes life in the Spirit. Our worship together celebrates and mediates the reality of God, our learning together draws us deeper into the way of Jesus, and our acting together seeks to incarnate “the dream of God,” namely, compassion and justice in the world of the everyday.” (The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, p. 245)

Living in light of the 5 characteristics of following Jesus flows out of a desire to intentionally be in a relationship with God as known in Jesus. Centering our lives in God transforms our lives in the here and now and is primarily about growing in intimacy with God and others. What’s at stake is not reward or punishment, a future in heaven or hell, but lives transformed through increased intimacy with God, who is always present.

Hey! Thanks for taking the time to read my work. If you found this article helpful and want to show your appreciation, I’d love it if you bought me a cup of coffee to fuel my next post.

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