Why is Jesus Important?

Within any normative understanding of Christianity, the figure of Jesus Christ is seen as central. Jesus, who is believed to be God Incarnated – God who takes the form of human flesh and becomes one of us – remains the basis on which Christianity conceives of itself as offering a unique vision of the world as it is and as it will be. The “prologue” to John's Gospel offers the overarching and supposedly all-encompassing biblical description of who Jesus was and is for Christian believers. Alongside the notion of Jesus being as he was and is, within normative Christianity, is the sense that Jesus continues to live across all time and space; that individual Christian believers and communities, for that matter, can have their own experience of and engagement with the figure called Jesus. Each of us can re-imagine Jesus in the context of our individual lives and the experience of being a human being within history.

My own personal existential quest for imagining Jesus arose in my early teens. It is a story that was once impossible for me to tell, but through repeated telling, often re-enacted for the majority White students (often training for ministry) I teach, I have learnt to control the visceral and emotive power of this narrative.