How Utterly Different

A Christmas meditation on the Jesus no ideology can contain

(This post also appears on my other site SpEx.so)

A year ago, I wrote about Jesus — who he was, and who he is — as my anchor in life and in the growing chaos around us. Over the past twelve months, the world has not calmed. If anything, it has become more unstable. Ideologies harden, propaganda multiplies, and the pace of opinion accelerates faster than wisdom can keep up. There is more noise, less depth, and a growing sense that the ground beneath us is shifting further.

And yet Jesus remains. Utterly. Radically. Different.

He is my place to stand when everything else feels uncertain. He is the measure by which life makes sense, the source of identity and meaning when borrowed certainties begin to fail. He is not an escape from the storm, but the liferaft within it — and the quiet assurance that the storm does not have the final word. He is my hope not only for this life, but for a life yet to come.

This Christmas, I find myself returning to Jesus — not sentimentally, but deliberately, and desperately. The King of creation comes into the world, unlike any other. Not as power and ideology expect. Not as culture demands. As the world seems to devolve, I find that he does not recede. He becomes clearer and nearer. More sharply opposed to what is distorting our culture and our times. More compelling, not less.

So I offer this updated reflection on the Christ of Christmas, as we step once more into the liturgy that receives him tomorrow, on Christmas Day.

—

Jesus was unlike any other leader,

past or present.

Not simply better. Not merely wiser. But wholly other.

Fully God.

Fully human.

He lived without disguise,

died without resistance,

and rose without revenge.

And yet it is not only this that arrests me now.

He did not rape, torture, or kill.

He did not abuse the vulnerable.

He did not lie to survive,

cheat to win,

or steal to secure himself.

He did not manipulate crowds,

coerce loyalty,

or terrorise enemies or take hostages.

He raised no armies.

He incited no violence.

He had no political sponsors

and no machinery of power behind him.

He did not court the rich

or flatter the influential.

He stored up no wealth

to insulate his life

or guarantee his future.

Instead, he took the lowest place.

He knelt.

He washed feet.

He touched the unclean.

He ate with outcasts.

He crossed boundaries others fortified—

religious, ethnic, social, and gendered.

He honoured women.

He welcomed children.

He demanded the protection

of their dignity

and their bodies.

How utterly different.

And this difference matters so much now as it did then.

For we live in an age where identity is forged through opposition,

where belonging is secured by enemies,

and meaning is sustained by grievance, offence and denial of reality.

An age where politics has learned to behave like a religion,

and ideologies demand devotion, loyalty, and purity tests.

Many now turn to movements

to tell them who they are,

who they must fear,

and who they must oppose.

Intensity is mistaken for truth.

Outrage becomes a moral currency,

as identity politics creates people as tools of cultural warfare.

But Jesus does not offer an identity

constructed against others.

He does not gather followers

by naming enemies to be defeated

or tribes to be defended.

He does not baptise our causes,

sanctify our anger,

or lend divine authority

to our resentments.

He will not be reduced to a symbol,

deployed as a slogan,

or conscripted into our campaigns.

He is life.

He is truth.

He is reality itself—

the ground beneath my feet

When every ideological platform begins to crack.

Those captivated by ideologies

promise clarity but deliver captivity.

They offer belonging

at the cost of complexity,

certainty

at the price of love.

Jesus refuses our categories—

left and right,

progressive and reactionary,

pure and impure.

He stands before us,

not as an idea to agree with,

but as a person to follow.

Not as an identity to perform,

or someone to baptise, and recognise our self creations

But as a life to receive.

To follow him is to be loosened

and delivered from every false certainty

and re-anchored in love.

To belong to him is to be freed

from the exhausting labour

of self-justification and self-generation.

This is why he unsettles us still.

He cannot be captured by our movements.

He will not be weaponised for our causes.

He remains stubbornly,

mercifully,

real.

And in a world addicted to ideology,

He offers something rarer,

and far more costly still:

a life,

a way,

a truth

that we can actually stand on.

This Jesus captivates me. This Jesus consumes me.

To see him as he is leaves me only one response:

my soul,

my life,

my all.