The Subconscious Jesus

This image is going to seem odd unless I share a story to give some context. At my school, Master's College and Seminary, they hired a new staff member to work as the Dean of Students Assistant who's name is Ryan Jedynak. One day as some of the student leaders at the school (me being one of them) were preparing to leave for a trip, Ryan walked up wearing the sandals that you see him modelling in the picture below.


Without even a hesitation, one of the students said, "hey Ryan, nice Jesus sandals." Since we were all Christians it made sense that we would immediately associate a sandal like that with Jesus. However I was shocked to discover that we were not the only ones to do this.

Ryan told us that the sandals were from Pali Hawaii Sandals and that we should all get a pair. Some friends and I thought about it and decided to check them out. When we went on their page, we discovered that the company themselves called this style of sandal "Jandals." Since we were all Christians and already made a Jesus comment we assumed that this word was a mix between the words "Jesus" and "sandal". However, after doing some research I discovered that it was actually New Zealanders who first coined the phrase "Jandal," and it was a reference to "Japanese sandals" and not "Jesus sandals" (see link).

To be honest I was a little upset with this as I thought I had found a post for my blog. I was still interested in the Pali Hawaii Sandals however so I kept looking at them.  I then found something quite interesting. On their site (as I mentioned above), they call their product "Jandals" but after looking for a reason as to why that was for some time I could not find any explanation. I decided to not worry about it and go on Amazon to see if they would be cheaper and there, right in the description Pali Hawaii Sandals says, "These Jesus Sandals, sometimes called Jandals, are stylish, comfortable, and one of the most popular sandals in Hawaii." Therefore the Pali Hawaii Sandals interpretation of "Jandals" is in fact "Jesus sandals." Based on this discovery I can imply two reasons for their interpretation. Either they were aware of the Japanese version and wanted to intentionally relate their product to Jesus or they were not aware of the Japanese version at all and like many of my friends and I, they made their own connection about sandals looking like something Jesus would have worn.

 Now the question is "so what?" I have been talking about the history of sandals for this whole post but why is this relevant? This is relevant because whether someone is a Christian or even the CEO of a sandal company, when people in North America see these shoes there seems to be this subconscious association of Jesus with the sandals. The reality is that in the time of Jesus everyone would have been wearing some sort of sandal for the most part. We could have called them Hebrew sandals, Roman sandals, but we have landed on Jesus sandals. To me this shows that whether people believe in him or not, Jesus was so significant in his time that people associate the sandals everyone wore in his time to just him. Imagine if 2 000 years from now people who wear New Balance running shoes began to called them "Joshua shoes" (this is a picture of me wearing my shoes, sorry about the socks).


This will never happen because I will never be able to do as much as Jesus did for Christian and secular societies in my own life. I understand that as a whole Canada and even "the West" is becoming quite secular, but this subconscious association shows me that Jesus is still here in our culture, he's just hidden. For believers I see this as a great encouragement. We can know that even if Jesus is not as obviously within our culture as he once was, he is still there. We need to take advantage of this and show Canadians Jesus, who he is and what he has done for them. To the non-believer I would hope that this image shows the true impact of Jesus within our world, our Canadian society today and even our subconscious thoughts. Jesus was not just a man or just a good teacher. There is no such thing as Confucius Sandals.

So the question is, who was this Jesus, a man so popular that we name sandals after him? Who do you think that Jesus is? Is this too far fetched? Let me know what you think.







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