The pastor of the church we attend recently said these words, and because I’ve been slowly reading and writing through the gospels, I found them spot on. It’s amazing to me, but not surprising, that Jesus is the most misunderstood person in history. Amazing because when you read the gospels carefully, Jesus is nothing like the popular cultural conception of him; not even close. Not surprising because the real Jesus is threatening. This is a major apologetics point to imprint on our children: the Jesus of the gospels could not be a figment of human imagination. Sinful, self-centered people don’t make this stuff up.
Reading through the gospels you’ll notice that Jesus was just as divisive in his own day as he is in ours. Everyone who encountered him had an opinion of or response to him; it was never neutral. Even his closest followers were intimated by him, and continually misunderstood him. One of my favorite scenes in the gospels is a great example. Peter has just declared that Jesus is the Messiah, “the son of the living God,” and Jesus tells him he’s so blessed he’s going to build his church on what he’d just said. Immediately after this Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to Jerusalem to suffer, die, and be raised again. Peter rebukes him, saying that this will never happen! How does Jesus respond? He calls Peter Satan! Telling him he has his mind not on the things of God, but of man. This is verisimilitude in spades, and the Bible is full of it. As I’ve taught my kids, the Bible reads real, and not made up.
Unlike the popular cultural conception of Jesus, he never says things people want to naturally hear. But to those who don’t believe that Jesus is who he declared himself to be, Savior and judge, he’s generally some kind of lovey-dovey prophet who affirms everyone. He supposedly reveals to us a God of love, as apposed to the old-meany God of the Old Testament. This is nothing new, going back to a second century heretic named Marcion. At least Marcion, though, wasn’t arguing that Jesus affirmed everything he did or who he was. Not so in our day. Jesus a benevolent big brother who would never harm a flea. This is well reflected in the controversial book written by Rob Bell in 2011 called Love Wins. Everyone, Bell argues in so many words, will be saved. A strange argument to make if one actually reads the words of Jesus, who spoke of hell and judgment more than any other writer of Scripture. Best to not bring that uncomfortable, and divisive, fact up.
Even his family didn’t get him. In John 7 we read that Jesus’ brothers are encouraging him to go to Judea for a big religious festival, they say, because “No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret.” John tells us the reason they said this: “For even his own brothers did not believe in him.” In Mark 3 we see juxtaposed two reactions to Jesus, one from his family, and the other from Jewish religious leaders. It has to be quoted to make the point that nobody was neutral toward Jesus:
20 Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. 21 When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”
22 And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.”
His family thinks he’s psycho, and his enemies think he’s possessed by the Devil! These examples can be multiplied many times over. The important question is why Jesus is this way. As our pastor said, Jesus crashes the party, he speaks truth, he divides. Jesus himself says in a very dividing passage, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” And John tells us the essential nature of this division in the third chapter of his gospel:
19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.
People need to reinvent Jesus because the real one exposes them for who they are: sinners in need of a Savior.
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