I have been staring at this ask for a week now, anon, trying to figure out if I actually had an answer that wasn’t a keysmash and a gif of an explosion.

For all the time I spend trying to articulate the ineffable about my faith, Jesus is the one topic I’m wary of. My idea of him is so wrapped up in what I am and what I love and what I long to become, that it makes it difficult to speak on the subject without actually inviting you inside my head. But I’ve never actually tried to articulate any my feelings, so maybe it’s about time I did.

Long ago, I read a fictional biography of Mary Magdelene. I remember it because 1) it started out with her being possessed by demons and I thought that was the coolest, and 2) throughout the story, Judas was portrayed as trying to seduce her. In all honesty, I was probably too young to really appreciate the book, but I do remember a single moment of absolute clarity: when I realized that Judas didn’t love her. It wasn’t that he wanted to possess her, or resented her place within the apostles. Rather, he was terrified of all-consuming love that Jesus offered, and seducing Mary was his way of running scared.

And of course. Because it doesn’t make sense, that love; it throws your whole world off-balance with its sheer enormity. The idea that God thinks about you, not passively and distantly, one among his many children, but…that he knows all your secret places, your hidden thoughts, and he celebrates them because they are yours, and because you are His. How much safer, how much more reasonable, to just be romantically interested in someone.

That’s where my feelings about Jesus begin. With terror and love.

I think his charisma must have been astonishing—people sensed something in him, something they were hungry for. I think there was something about him that reached inside you, pulled you deeper into yourself and lifted you up, he made you want to be a better person because he believed you could be, believed you already were. He was this perfectly ordinary Jewish man with dusty sandals and well-worn parables, but when he spoke…I think it didn’t matter how big the crowds were, it felt like he  was speaking to you, only ever you, in all your uniqueness and remarkableness. He saw our potential and he saw our light, and he loved us so overwhelmingly, so absolutely and perfectly—

I think he liked people, too. I think he liked telling stories with them and travelling with them and meeting their children and hearing their jokes and just being around people. Fully human and fully divine is what the Catholic Church teaches, and I love that idea to distraction. Because as terrifying and mighty as divine love is, the whole point, the whole purpose of Jesus is that God was here. God was us. Omniscience is omniscience, but Yeshua-ben-Yosef lived, where God only knew. He had friends and family, he ate dates and drank wine and got tired and wanted things and loved things and had preferences and held grudges and marveled at the springtime and observed mitzvot and watched friends die and suffered and wept and got angry and lived and loved and liked the way we do, because that’s the point.

I think he liked to laugh. That’s always what I come back to, at the end of the day. I think he liked to laugh. I think he was delighted by us, for we are fearfully and wonderfully made, an equal venture between God and ourselves, and he could not help but be enraptured by his children. He had always loved us, since our very beginnings and through all that followed, and Jesus was his way of proving it. His way of saying: You are broken and sharp-edged and fallible and I love you so much that I will break against you and let you devour me like carrion crows and I love you so much that even then, I will not leave you.

So that’s where I end, with Jesus as a love letter to humanity from their Creator. And I think he liked to laugh, because lovers so often do.