Throughout the New Testament, the only kind of people with whom Jesus consistently took frightful exception were the very “teachers of the law and Pharisees” we see him dressing down in the passages above. One thing that often gets lost in our considerations of Jesus is the degree to which he is exactly the wrong person to piss off. And you don’t have to spend a lot of time in the New Testament before you understand that the only kind of people who seem to ever truly anger him are those who put religious dogma above what he most stood for, which was God’s compassionate will.
...
I’m not exactly sure how we came to so often consider Jesus-formerly-known-as-The-Carpenter as a kind of a soft, dreamy, namby-pamby sort. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) But it’s hard to believe it was from the accounts of Jesus we have in the Gospels. That’s just not the guy on those pages.
Jesus is scary when he’s riled. And the only people who rile him are those who, in His name, set themselves up as sanctimonious judgers of others.
John Shore, johnshore.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment