This morning I found myself asking a peculiar question: What kinds of meals might Jesus have eaten?
That curiosity led me down an unexpected culinary trail on the internet—interesting enough in its own right—but it soon opened into a deeper, far more compelling question: What would the inner, subjective experience of Jesus have been like?

It is Paul, of course, who “started” the mission that eventually became Christianity; Jesus Himself did not explicitly found a new religion. So what did Jesus think He was doing? How did He understand His place, His mission, and His work? He appears in the historical record as a mystical figure—neither openly proclaiming His greatness nor reducing Himself to “I’m just a philosopher” or “I’m nothing more than a teacher.” He consciously aligned Himself with the lineage of Israel’s prophets—Isaiah, Elijah, and Moses—which means He clearly saw Himself as a prophet at the very least. Like all prophets, He carried a deep sense of calling, a conviction something like: “I am called. I am sent. I must do what the Father has given me.” and “God is acting through me to heal and free people.”

Yet Jesus seemed to view His role differently in several important ways.

First, He experienced a mystical, personal, and intimate relationship with God—one that was not servile or distant but familial. He addressed God as Abba, “Father,” which suggests a spiritual intimacy quite distinct from earlier prophetic figures.

Second, unlike those who emphasized ritual observance, Jesus showed little obsession with rules, purity codes, or temple procedures. His focus was on inner transformation—moral clarity, forgiveness, repentance, compassion, and the integrity of the heart. In His teaching, the moral and mystical dimensions of the divine overshadowed the ritualistic ones.

Third, although He was thoroughly Jewish and therefore monotheistic, Jesus appears to have regarded debates about “which god to worship” as misguided. His mission, as He stated, was “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” but He also spoke of the Kingdom of God as a tree in which “the birds of the air nest”—with the birds symbolizing the nations. In other words, He envisioned the renewal of Israel not as an end in itself, but as the beginning of a divine movement that would, through Israel, embrace all humanity. He replaced ethnic and religious identity that was previosly required in order to belong to the Kingdom of God with a specific ethical identity as the only requirement to belong to the Kingdom of God.

Jesus was not preoccupied with “Worship this God” or “Honor this God” in the manner of Moses. Instead, He redirected attention from ritual to transformation—from outward conformity to inward renewal. And because ritual religion inevitably forces the question “Which God?”, Jesus’ emphasis on the moral-spiritual life effectively sidestepped the “conundrum of other gods.” When religion is centered on worship rituals, the individuality and identity of the deity become paramount. But when the focus shifts to the transformation of the heart, the divine becomes more like an all-pervasive spiritual presence—what Jesus simply called “the Father” or “the Spirit”—and the real priority becomes: Forgive indefinitely. Be truthful. Be merciful. Be transformed internally. Consider yourself to be the last.

And because goodness and moral insight are universal—something Jesus Himself clearly recognized—He effectively bypassed the entire debate of “Which god is real?” Not because He thought the identity of God was unimportant, but because He saw the argument as the wrong question. Epistemology, not metaphysics, is where one meets God.

This is why I imagine that if Jesus encountered a Pharisee and a Gentile arguing heatedly about “the real God,” He would not side with either. I suspect He would simply deflect the argument entirely and redirect them toward something that actually matters in the present moment: compassion, humility, reconciliation, or the condition of the heart. In that sense, the debate over gods becomes secondary or even irrelevant—not because God is irrelevant, but because God is known most deeply through the lived reality of goodness, mercy, and inner transformation.