I have a theory about Jesus.

Or, more accurately, I have a theory about us.

I think your favourite side of Jesus might tell me something about you, and possibly something you don’t know about yourself yet.

Let me explain.

There are a lot of different sides to Jesus in the Bible. There is the gentle Jesus who welcomes children, touches lepers, and refuses to condemn a woman caught in adultery. There is the angry Jesus who calls religious leaders hypocrites and flips tables in the temple. There is the contemplative Jesus who disappears into the wilderness to pray, the revolutionary Jesus who talks about kingdoms and power, the suffering Jesus sweating blood in Gethsemane, and the rather terrifying Jesus who talks about judgement and tells people to take up their cross.

They’re all Jesus, of course. But I’ve noticed that most of us have a favourite.

For me, it was always the Jesus who cleared the temple.

I loved that story growing up. There was something heroic about Jesus walking into the centre of the religious establishment, seeing something he believed was wrong and refusing to quietly go along with it. He overturned the tables, disrupted proceedings and pissed people off. Nobody seemed able to intimidate him or convince him to keep his opinions to himself.

I think, if I’m truthful, I wanted to be like him.

It wasn’t the spectacle that appealed to me so much as what he seemed to represent. He was courageous and defiant. He confronted powerful people. He called out hypocrisy. He was willing to make himself unpopular if he believed something wasn’t right. Of all the sides of Jesus available to me, that was the one I found heroic.

For years, I assumed my attraction to that particular Jesus simply told me something about Jesus. Lately, though, I’ve started wondering whether it was telling me something about myself.

After all, there were plenty of other sides of Jesus I could have latched onto. There was the Jesus who withdrew rather than confronted, the Jesus who wept, the Jesus who remained silent when falsely accused, the Jesus who told Peter to put away his sword and the Jesus who knelt down and washed people’s feet. I knew those stories too, but they weren’t the ones I kept coming back to.

The table-flipping Jesus was.

When I look at my own life, that makes a certain amount of sense. I’ve never been particularly good with authority for authority’s sake. I’ve always had a strong reaction to people using power badly, and I’ve spent a fair bit of my life questioning institutions, pushing against rules that didn’t make sense to me and occasionally getting myself into trouble because I couldn’t leave something alone when I thought it was wrong.

Maybe I loved the table-flipping Jesus because I recognised something of myself in him. Or perhaps it worked the other way around. Maybe he embodied something I wanted to be. Perhaps that Jesus gave me permission to express a part of myself that was already there.

That’s where this gets interesting.

None of us comes to the Gospels as a blank slate. We bring our personalities, our childhood, our relationships, our experiences with authority, our wounds, our fears, our anger and the things we have spent years trying to get from other people. All of that shapes what catches our attention, what moves us and what feels important.

And there is good reason to think this doesn’t suddenly stop happening when we open a Bible.

Human beings are selective creatures. We can be exposed to the same person, the same story or the same set of facts and come away noticing completely different things. What stands out to us is shaped, at least in part, by what we have already experienced and what we are carrying with us.

I wonder if that’s happening when we read about Jesus too.

We think we’re simply reading the stories and discovering what Jesus was like, but perhaps there is another process happening at the same time. Out of everything Jesus says and does, certain moments grab us. Certain words stay with us. Certain sides of him feel particularly important, compelling or even necessary.

Why those ones?

That’s the question I’ve become interested in.

Because I suspect our favourite side of Jesus sometimes reflects something already present in us, as I think the table-flipping Jesus did for me. But it may also work in another, more surprising way. Sometimes we are drawn to something precisely because we don’t have enough of it ourselves.

Psychologists have various ways of making sense of this. Our early relationships shape what we expect from others. Our experiences influence what feels safe or threatening. Our unmet needs can affect what we seek out in relationships, often without us being particularly conscious that we’re doing it. Even our attention is biased towards certain things while filtering out others.

If all of that is true, then perhaps the Jesus we gravitate towards is worth paying attention to.

So, I want to look at some of the different sides of Jesus people tend to love and what might be going on underneath that attraction. Not because your favourite Jesus can diagnose you, and certainly not because any of these sides of Jesus are somehow less real than the others. I’m more interested in what our preferences might reveal about the people doing the preferring.

Because perhaps the Jesus you love tells you something about what you value, what you’ve experienced, what you’ve been missing, or what some part of you is still looking for.

And then, once we’ve figured that out, there’s another question I want to ask.

What about the sides of Jesus you don’t like?

So, Which Jesus Is Yours?

Let’s start with the table-flipping Jesus, since I’ve already confessed that he’s mine.

There is actually a psychological concept that might help explain why I was so drawn to him: identification. In simple terms, we are often attracted to people who embody qualities we recognise in ourselves but also qualities we wish we possessed more fully.

Sometimes the people we admire aren’t like us at all. They are like the person we wish we could be. A timid person can become fascinated by someone fearless. Someone who has spent their life keeping everyone happy might admire a person who doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks. Someone who grew up being told to keep quiet may feel something surprisingly powerful when they encounter a person who refuses to shut up.

In that sense, admiration can sometimes point towards a deficit. We notice in someone else what we feel is missing, suppressed or underdeveloped in ourselves.

Which makes the temple story interesting.

The Jesus in that story doesn’t ask permission. He doesn’t form a committee, lodge a complaint or worry about whether the religious authorities will think he’s being difficult. He sees something he considers wrong and acts.

For someone who has spent much of their life feeling powerless, silenced, controlled or unable to express anger, the idea that Jesus can be enormously appealing. He embodies agency. He takes up space. He expresses anger without apparently being ashamed of it. He confronts the people who have power rather than accommodating them.

And perhaps that is why this particular Jesus has become especially popular in some corners of Christianity today. It’s easy to see why people emerging from controlling churches might find themselves drawn to the table-flipping Jesus. Same with people angry about abuse, hypocrisy, injustice and the misuse of religious power. The story gives them something they may not have been given before: permission to believe that anger can sometimes be appropriate.

Of course, none of that means everyone who loves this story has been silenced or controlled. Human beings aren’t that simple, and I’m not interested in turning the Gospels into some kind of spiritual Rorschach test.

But it does give us a question worth asking.

If table-flipping Jesus is your Jesus, what exactly do you love about him?

Is it his courage? His anger? His willingness to confront authority? His refusal to play nicely when something is wrong? And if one of those qualities resonates particularly strongly, why?

Perhaps you recognise it in yourself.

Or perhaps you’re looking at something you haven’t yet learned how to become.

The Gentle Jesus

Then there is the gentle Jesus. This is the Jesus who touches the people nobody else wants to touch, welcomes children when his disciples are trying to shoo them away, eats with people of questionable reputation and seems remarkably comfortable around people who have made a mess of their lives.

For some people, this is the Jesus they can’t get enough of.

What interests me is that there may be a psychological reason why.

One of the most powerful forces shaping a human being is shame. Shame is different from guilt. Guilt says, I did something bad. Shame goes further and says, There is something bad about me.

If you grow up with enough criticism, rejection, conditional approval or religious messages about your own sinfulness, that distinction can become very blurry. You don’t simply learn that you’ve done things wrong. You can begin to carry a much deeper suspicion that there is something fundamentally wrong with you.

And people who carry shame often become very good at managing it.

They achieve. They behave. They keep people happy. They apologise too much. They hide the parts of themselves they think other people won’t accept. They become extremely sensitive to disappointment or criticism. Sometimes they spend their entire lives trying to earn the feeling that they are okay.

Now imagine encountering a Jesus who seems remarkably uninterested in making people prove themselves before he moves towards them.

He touches the untouchable. He eats with the morally suspect. He allows people with terrible reputations into his company. Again and again, the people everybody else has decided are too dirty, too sinful, too embarrassing or simply too much trouble find themselves being treated as though they still belong.

If you carry shame, that Jesus can feel like water in a desert.

Perhaps that’s because he offers something you have spent your life looking for: acceptance that doesn’t have to be earned first.

This is where attachment psychology becomes interesting. From our earliest relationships, we begin learning whether other people are safe, whether love is dependable and what we have to do to keep connection. If affection was inconsistent, conditional or easily withdrawn, we can carry those expectations into later relationships without even realising it.

And there is no obvious reason why our relationship with God would be exempt.

A person who has spent their life worrying that love can be withdrawn may be particularly sensitive to the moments when Jesus refuses to withdraw it. The stories that stay with them may be the ones in which somebody expects rejection and receives compassion instead.

That doesn’t mean their understanding of Jesus is merely the product of childhood wounds. The compassion is actually there in the Gospels. The interesting question is why that side of Jesus feels so important to them.

Maybe they simply value kindness.

But perhaps they need him to be gentle because somewhere along the way, gentleness was in short supply. And if the gentle Jesus is the one you keep returning to, it might be worth asking yourself what exactly happens inside you when you encounter him. Is it his kindness that moves you? His acceptance? The fact that he doesn’t seem disgusted by people other religious people reject?

Because sometimes the Jesus we love most isn’t showing us who we are.

Sometimes he’s showing us what we needed and didn’t get.

What Your Jesus Might Be Telling You

Once you start looking at Jesus this way, you begin to see the pattern in all sorts of places.

Take the rule-breaking Jesus. This is the Jesus who heals on the Sabbath, touches people considered unclean and seems remarkably willing to ignore religious conventions when they get in the way of helping somebody. I can imagine why this Jesus might become particularly important to someone who has spent years inside a rigid or controlling religious environment. If you’ve spent your life being told to obey, conform and not ask too many questions, there is something wonderfully liberating about discovering that Jesus himself didn’t always play by the rules.

Then there is Jesus the judge. This is probably one of the least fashionable versions of Jesus in progressive Christian circles, but psychologically I think he’s fascinating. If you have experienced serious injustice, particularly injustice that was never acknowledged or put right, the idea that somebody, somewhere, ultimately sees what happened and will hold people accountable can be enormously comforting. Perhaps the attraction isn’t punishment at all. Perhaps it’s the deep human need to believe that evil doesn’t simply get the last word.

For other people, it’s the healing Jesus who seems to dominate the Gospels. They notice the blind seeing, the lame walking, the sick being restored and desperate people pushing through crowds just to touch him. It isn’t difficult to imagine why this Jesus might become particularly important during periods of illness, grief or helplessness. When life presents us with something we cannot fix ourselves, the Jesus who can restore what appears beyond restoration suddenly matters enormously.

Then there is the outsider Jesus. He eats with tax collectors, speaks with Samaritans, touches lepers and repeatedly crosses boundaries respectable people thought should remain firmly in place. If you’ve spent your life feeling different, excluded, unwanted or as though you don’t quite belong, perhaps it’s no surprise that this is the Jesus you notice. He keeps moving towards the people everybody else is moving away from.

Some people are drawn particularly to the suffering Jesus. Not the triumphant Christ of Easter morning, but the man in Gethsemane who is overwhelmed with sorrow; the Jesus who weeps at the grave of his friend and eventually cries out from the cross, asking why God has abandoned him. That Jesus can become incredibly important when life hurts. Sometimes we don’t need a God who explains suffering. We need one who knows what suffering feels like.

Others gravitate towards the revolutionary Jesus, the one who announces a new kingdom, challenges wealth and status and talks about a world in which the first become last and the last become first. People with a strong sensitivity to injustice may naturally find themselves here. They aren’t primarily looking to Jesus for personal comfort. They are looking for someone who shares their conviction that the world as it currently exists is not the world as it ought to be.

Then there is the contemplative Jesus, constantly slipping away from crowds, going up mountains and disappearing into lonely places to pray. This Jesus can become particularly attractive to people exhausted by noise, performance and institutional religion. Sometimes what we’re looking for isn’t another answer, doctrine or cause. It’s silence, transcendence and the possibility of encountering God without anybody else telling us what the experience is supposed to mean.

And finally, there is the certain Jesus. The Jesus who speaks in absolutes makes demands and seems to know exactly what is true. It’s easy to dismiss people who gravitate towards this Jesus as rigid or fundamentalist, but I think that’s too easy. Certainty can feel incredibly safe when the rest of life doesn’t. When your world feels unstable, ambiguous or frightening, a Jesus who knows exactly where he stands can provide something psychologically valuable: solid ground.

There are others, of course. That’s partly the point. Jesus is far too complicated to fit neatly into any of these categories, and so are we.

But look back over that list and notice whether one of them did something to you.

Perhaps one felt immediately familiar. Perhaps another irritated you. Maybe there was one you wanted me to describe differently because I hadn’t quite captured the Jesus you know.

Pay attention to that.

Because underneath each attraction there may be a need, an experience or a part of ourselves looking for expression. The controlled person may notice the rule-breaker. The person wounded by injustice may need the judge. The sick person may look for the healer. The excluded person may find the outsider. The grieving person may cling to the sufferer. The activist may find the revolutionary. The exhausted person may discover the contemplative. The frightened person may find safety in certainty.

None of that makes the Jesus they see imaginary.

But it might help explain why, out of all the sides of Jesus available to them, that’s the one they can’t stop looking at.

But What About the Jesus You Don’t Like?

Of course, there are also sides of Jesus I don’t particularly like. For example, I’ve never been able to get past the Jesus who spits in the dirt. You remember that story? Jesus encounters a man who has been blind from birth. He spits on the ground, mixes his saliva with the dirt, makes some mud and rubs it onto the man’s eyes.

I realise there are probably very profound explanations for what is happening here, but every time I read it, my first thought is still: Why the hell did you have to spit?

Just heal the guy.

Admittedly, my aversion to saliva-based miracles probably doesn’t reveal some deep, unexplored part of my psyche. Sometimes you don’t like something because it’s gross.

But there are other sides of Jesus that make us uncomfortable for reasons that might be worth paying attention to. And perhaps this is where the exercise becomes even more interesting.

So far, I’ve been asking which Jesus you’re drawn to and what that attraction might reveal. But psychologists are also interested in the things we resist, avoid or react strongly against. Sometimes those reactions are simply reasonable responses to something we disagree with. But sometimes we react strongly because something has touched a nerve.

Carl Jung famously wrote about the shadow, by which he meant the parts of ourselves we have pushed out of conscious awareness because they don’t fit with the person we believe ourselves to be. The shadow isn’t necessarily something dark or sinister. It can contain perfectly healthy parts of ourselves that, somewhere along the way, we learned were unacceptable.

A person who learned that anger was bad, for example, might become deeply uncomfortable around angry people. Someone who has built their identity around being strong may find vulnerability almost unbearable to watch. A lifelong people-pleaser might describe an assertive person as selfish. Someone who prides themselves on being rational may become irritated by displays of emotion.

Sometimes the quality we react against in another person is the very quality we have refused to allow in ourselves.

Which makes me wonder about the sides of Jesus we would rather skip over.

Someone who loves the table-flipping Jesus might find the silent Jesus much harder to deal with: the Jesus who stands before his accusers and doesn’t defend himself, doesn’t win the argument and doesn’t put anybody in their place. If you have built your identity around speaking up and fighting back, perhaps there is something deeply uncomfortable about a Jesus who sometimes chooses not to.

Someone drawn to the gentle, endlessly accepting Jesus might struggle with the Jesus who confronts people, sets hard boundaries and makes uncomfortable demands. If your survival strategy has always been keeping the peace, perhaps confrontation feels wrong even when it is necessary.

Someone who loves the revolutionary Jesus might find the contemplative Jesus frustrating. There are problems to solve, injustices to confront and people who need help, yet Jesus keeps disappearing into lonely places to pray. For a person whose identity is built around action, stillness can feel suspiciously like doing nothing.

And someone who needs certainty might struggle with the Jesus who tells strange stories, answers questions with other questions and sometimes seems perfectly content to leave people confused. Perhaps it isn’t that this Jesus is unclear. Perhaps ambiguity itself is difficult for us to tolerate.

I want to be careful here, because this idea could easily become another way of dismissing legitimate disagreement. Sometimes a saying of Jesus troubles us because it genuinely is troubling. Sometimes our discomfort comes from the way a particular passage has been interpreted or weaponised against us. Not every negative reaction is evidence of some hidden psychological problem.

But our reactions can still be useful information.

If there is a side of Jesus you consistently minimise, explain away or wish wasn’t there, it might be worth sitting with your reaction for a little longer before trying to resolve it.

What exactly bothers you about him?

What would it mean if that side of Jesus had something to teach you?

And perhaps most uncomfortably, does he embody something you have never given yourself permission to be?

Because the Jesus you love may reveal something about what you need.

But the Jesus you resist might reveal something about what you avoid.

What Do You Do With This?

So, what do you actually do with any of this?

Start by working out which Jesus is yours. You probably have a fair idea by now. Think about the stories you return to, the sayings you quote, the qualities you admire and the things about Jesus you wish other Christians would pay more attention to. Somewhere in there, you’ll probably find a pattern.

Then ask yourself what that Jesus has been giving you.

Perhaps he gave you permission to be angry when you’d spent years swallowing it. Perhaps he gave you acceptance when you carried shame, certainty when life felt frightening, hope when you felt powerless, belonging when you felt excluded, or permission to rest when you were exhausted.

Whatever you discover, take it seriously. There may be a very good reason you needed that side of Jesus.

But here’s the part that might actually help you grow.

For the next little while, deliberately pay attention to the Jesus you normally overlook. If you love the Jesus who overturns tables, spend some time with the Jesus who refuses to fight back. If you love the Jesus who welcomes everybody, sit with the Jesus who makes difficult demands. If you love the Jesus who speaks with certainty, notice how often he answers questions with questions. If you love the Jesus who changes the world, watch how often he walks away from the crowd and disappears somewhere quiet.

Your favourite Jesus isn’t wrong. He may simply be the Jesus who is already telling you something you know.

The sides you overlook might have something different to teach you.

I started this article by telling you that I’ve always loved the table-flipping Jesus. Having thought about it, I understand a little better why. That Jesus appeals to something deeply ingrained in me, and I don’t imagine that’s going to change.

But perhaps I’ve spent enough time watching Jesus flip tables.

There are other sides of him I haven’t paid nearly as much attention to.

Maybe I should.