I've always had a little trouble with this trite little saying, because it just seems kinda cheap to me. It feels cheap; and shallow, like too many other modern evangelical sloganisms.
Like, okay, my cell phone bill is now reporting a bunch of line item costs that the sales agent never told me about, and I'm not happy to pay for all of them. So I guess I should ask myself, “What would Jesus do?”
Pfft! I dunno! Would He just pay the bill and move on, or would He vocally point out the salesman’s deficient acquiescence to a system which he knew in his heart was fundamentally designed to take advantage of the less informed consumer’s propensity to sign a lengthy contract, which no actual human could exhaustively read, in order to get access to a technology which society had informed him he actually needs…?
What would Jesus do? I dunno!
It reminds me of a train of thought that I recall having decades ago. I was a kid; maybe age 10 or so… and I'm not particularly proud of this. But I remember pondering to myself the fact that “Jesus never sinned.” I took that as fact, because the Bible said so, and I was not about to dispute the Word of God. But my childish, human mind began to reason… Well, that was before lawn mowers were invented, so Jesus never had to grapple with his responsibility to mow the lawn (a thing I had to deal with), so it must have been easier for Him than for me in that regard…
Seriously, folks! I can remember thinking these thoughts! It's embarrassing at best. But in retrospect, what is the motive behind this kind of imaginatory gymnastics—if not the search for inculpability? My ten-year old mind was looking for a way out. “Well, Jesus had it easier than me, because lawnmowers didn't exist yet.”
So what would Jesus do? “He would mow the lawn, you idiot!” I now tell myself. Duh!
But it still feels cheap. Maybe it's just me; I don't know. So here's what I think is a better question to ask:
“If I had the mind of God, what would I do?”
See, for me this is a better question. “What would I do?” IF… if I had the mind of Christ… what would I do?
Of course this question now imposes upon myself a new layer of responsibility—if I, in fact, seek the answer. For I cannot discover the answer apart from serious pursuit of the contingent: the mind of Christ. It may therefore seem unanswerable, except that there seems to be an access revealed in the scriptures:
The spiritual person, however, can evaluate everything, yet he himself cannot be evaluated by anyone. For who has known the Lord’s mind, that he may instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ.
—1 Corinthians 2:15-16 HCSB
Clearly, there's a bit of mystery here, but the allusion is clear: there is a way to know, or to “have” the mind of Christ.
I would posit that this—whatever it is—is the only way to know
“What would Jesus do?”