They put Jesus up on a pedestal and said we should emulate him. They said he was a role model for a young man. Jesus? Not to many men of my generation - even those, who like me, regularly attended church service and Sunday school in our youth. We were only taught about the bland, goody-goody, whitewashed version of Christ that had little inspirational or practical application.
It was hard to get beyond maxims that only seemed workable inside the sweet and comfy walls of a church. This was exemplified by the vanilla version of ‘turn the other cheek’ that we were taught. It simply didn’t work in urban and blue collar neighborhoods; to us it would mean being constantly bullied, teased, and ridiculed as well as having to take the long way home from school or playground. Not many teenage boys aspired to be gentle as a lamb. We hadn’t a clue that Jesus may have been speaking of major league chop busting.
We missed out on learning of the fire inside of Jesus, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.” Matthew 10: 34. We missed out on learning of his high expectations for us, “… From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” Luke 12: 48.
We never had the faintest clue that Jesus was an extremist, that he pursued a radical path… that he chose a unique kingdom model to unveil God’s plan. N. T. Wright fully elaborates on this in The Challenge of Jesus (yes, one must wade through an academic’s grandiloquent and dusty style but his approach and learned insights are well worth the time). One example involves the Temple, the heart and center of Judaism during the time of Christ. Jesus did not merely overthrow some tables and level a charge against a few money changers, “… you have made it a den of thieves.” Mark 11: 15-17. His attitude was not one of reformation; Jesus was attacking a sacred symbol and undercutting the official system. He was announcing a new agenda, putting the focus on himself as the way to bring the Kingdom of God at hand.
Jesus was not a docile do-gooder that most teenage boys bursting with testosterone, idealism and rebellion had little desire to follow. He was a forceful, dynamic revolutionary. Imagine that. How were we to know that there was more to him than the watered down version?
Christianity embraces the meek, mild and weak. Yet; Jesus was none of these things. Christ was strong, determined and innovative; his message is one of challenge. Challenge that goes to the very core of guidelines and expectations for a person and society. Do they teach that in the bible studies and Sunday school classes of your church?
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