This passage is actually key in understanding the general cultural unfamiliarity with Jesus, and where that leads us. Allow me to explain, because I didn't understand this for a long time either. The idea that the larger culture has, is that Jesus, when he came to earth, had a totally great message all about peace and love, man, which his disciples then turned around and promptly ruined.
The notion is that Jesus existed and was a real guy, and he had a lot to say about a lot of things, but over the course of time, they all got twisted up and messed around, to the extent that the only thing that the church ever held on to was the angry mean vicious and twisted things that Jesus never even said.
There's only one problem with that idea, though. It's absolutely not true.
Not that I'm going to tell you what Jesus did or did not say. If you're here and you're a Christian, you probably believe he said all of it. If you're not a Christian, you may very well not care. But go to your local church for a moment, and have a look around. Have a peek at the artwork of Jesus Christ. Go ahead. I'll wait. Odds are, it falls into three categories.
1 - Jesus with long hair looking off into the distance looking dreamy.
2 - Jesus dying on the cross for the sins of all mankind.
3 - Jesus cuddling sheep or children or looking like a consumptive girl.
In all these images, where is the one of Jesus looking mad? He may look hurt, he may look introspective, but he sure isn't angry. Now, in the time that the church has been in operation, it has presented a lot of moments in which Jesus Christ cuddles sheep. Or cuddles children. Or goes out of his way to be blandly and generally inoffensive as much as possible. To my mind ,there exists no statues of Jesus with his brow furrowed in rage at the Pharisees. There are no statues of Jesus flipping over tables in the temple, driving everyone out with a whip. I have never been into a church in which the art has featured prominently a Jesus, face twisted in rage at the brood of vipers crowding around him, or giving Peter the look that caused Peter to break into tears.
And this is actually to our detriment. Because guess what, the world still feels as though Christians are awfully judgmental, no problem there, right? And here's the deal. Because the church has done such a good job of promoting nice Jesus, and yet still talks about sin and shame, people have the quite reasonably opinion that Jesus had nothing to do with all that angry talk, and that this was all something the church had added later. We are, I suppose, a victim of our own success on that one. So it's no wonder, I suppose, when Jesus says stuff like he said on Sunday, that he did not come to bring peace but division, that people would get a little bit strange about it. It seems normal that if people went to Sunday School or VBS for the first few years of their lives and then never again, that they might get the notion that Jesus is just a super cool guy who loves to hang out. And then the church talks about sin and wrath, which seems to go against what Jesus talked about in VBS.
The point I'm trying to get at here, in a roundabout way, is that the whole story is consistent. Part of the trouble is that we're teaching only the super nice super stuff, and not about the need for that stuff to begin with. The trouble is that Jesus is nice, and God and the clergy are mad. But that's not how it works in the Bible. Jesus did not come to earth to be nice. He wasn't, as Douglas Adams theorized, nailed to a piece of wood for saying we should be nice to each other. He was nailed to a piece of wood for daring to claim that we're not as nice to each other as we believe we should be. He was nailed to a piece of wood for saying to the world that would listen that they had a gnawing hunger in them that they weren't who they wanted to be, and that saying 'God is love' wasn't fixing that.
And so Jesus came not to bring peace, but division. Not to be nice, but to be good. Not to tell people that they were okay, not to be the muzak of the theological world, but to tell people the truth about themselves, about God, about all that. And this is big. This is big huge. Here's the at issue, superfriends, is that Jesus is Good. Not nice, not pleasant, but good. And good divides right from wrong.
You wouldn't think a doctor was a good doctor if she was just nice, would you? If she just gave you polite compliments about your hair while ignoring the incredibly serious possibly fatal health problems you've got. You wouldn't think much of a dentist who said how pretty you were while your teeth rotted out of your head. No, to be good is to be more than nice. To be good is to be good. It is to divide good from evil, the wheat from the chaff, the silver from the slag, and to dispense with the waste, and gather the greatness. If you sit down and think long and hard enough, isn't this exactly what you want Jesus Christ to do? Not to bring peace to your life the way it is, but to divide you from all the junk you have crawling all over everything you do. And this is what Jesus is actually for.
If you think that Jesus agrees with you on everything, then you've only gotten as far as Sunday School, friends. But if you believe that Jesus forgives you, even for the stuff he hates, then you're right on the money.
PJ.
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