We’ve been looking at the unaltered, unadulterated, and unchanging Jesus. We have enough challenges in following Jesus without being ignorant about who it is we worship. This post continues the discussion about the Jesus presented in the scriptures to draw some clearer distinctions between the timeless Jesus of history and the pretend one we hear about much too often.
Later when Jesus was eating supper at Matthew’s house with his close followers, a lot of disreputable characters came and joined them. When the Pharisees saw him keeping this kind of company, they had a fit, and lit into Jesus’ followers. “What kind of example is this from your Teacher, acting cozy with crooks and riffraff?”
Jesus, overhearing, shot back, “Who needs a doctor: the healthy or the sick? Go figure out what this Scripture means: ‘I’m after mercy, not religion.’ I’m here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.” -Matthew 9:10-13
Jesus is more likely to be seen out in the slums and projects than he is in the halls of power.
There is a picture of Jesus as this untouchable religious figure that we must confront. I’ll call him Ivory Tower Jesus, he is too busy sipping grape juice with the religious zealots to ever leave their company and go to the ghetto where the reprobates and winebibbers reside. This artificial Jesus condemns sinners regularly (John 3:16-18) and is ever casting stones their way until they get it right (John 8:1-11).
Ivory Tower Jesus doesn’t have the time of day for losers.
This common version of Jesus produces a band of paranoid, knit-picky, and drill sergeant types. Every single activity that doesn’t include bible memorization for these uptight kill-joys is questionable. Nothing is permissible with this Jesus and freedom is not allowed.
Ivory Tower Jesus really isn’t into reaching the poor, the damned, the ill-repute, and the downright disgusting. It’s all public relations. When Jesus goes to the projects and hospitals it’s merely a staged event, a photo shoot. Besides, Ivory Tower Jesus is too concerned with his personal privileges to to step out of his comfort zone (Mark 8:31-32). Ivory Tower Jesus lives to be associated with all of the notables, respected, and revered—any notions of a Jesus who came for the forgotten and despised are put to rest with this version of Jesus. Lawyers, car salesman, and anyone deemed shady are extremely uncomfortable around Ivory Tower Jesus and his high society cronies.
Scholar Dallas Willard wrote a few years back in his best seller and one of my favorites, The Divine Conspiracy:
Blessed are the physically repulsive,
Blessed are those who smell bad,
The twisted, misshappen, deformed,
The too big, too little, too loud,
The bald, the fat, and the old-
For they are all riotously celebrated in the party of Jesus.
Then there are the “seriously” crushed ones: The flunk-outs and drop-outs and burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorced. The HIV positive and herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged, the incurably ill. The barren and the pregnant many-times or at the wrong time. The over-employed, the underemployed, the unemployed. The unemployable. The swindled, shoved aside, the replaced. The parents with children living on the street, the children with parents not dying in the “rest” home. The lonely, the incompetent, the stupid. The emotionally starved or emotionally dead. And on and on and on.
Is it true that ‘Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal?’ It is true! That is precisely the gospel of heaven’s availability that comes to us through the Beatitudes. And you don’t have to wait until you’re dead. Jesus brings to all such people as these the present blessedness of the present kingdom—regardless of circumstances. The condition of life sought for by human beings through the ages is attained in the quietly transforming friendship of Jesus.
Willard continues,Even the moral disasters will be received by God as they come to rely on Jesus, count on Him, and make Him their companion in His kingdom. Murderers and child-molesters. The brutal and the bigoted. Drug lords and pornographers. War criminals and sadists. Terrorists. The perverted and the filthy and the filthy rich. The David Berkowitzs (“Son of Sam”), Jeffrey Dahmers, and Colonel Noriegas.
Can’t we feel some sympathy for Jesus’ contemporaries, who huffed at him, ‘This man is cordial to sinners, and even eats with them!’ Sometimes I feel I don’t really want the kingdom to be open to such people. But it is. That is the heart of God. And, as Jonah learned from his experience preaching to those wretched Ninevites, we can’t shrink Him down to our size.
Can’t add much to that.
