Jesus Behaving Badly

The Puzzling Paradoxes of the Man from Galilee

Mark L. Strauss

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780830898114
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Everybody likes Jesus. Don't they? We overlook that Jesus was- Judgmental—preaching hellfire far more than the apostle Paul- Uncompromising—telling people to hate their families- Chauvinistic—excluding women from leadership- Racist—insulting people from other ethnic groups- Anti-environmental—cursing a fig tree and affirming animal sacrifice- Angry—overturning tables and chasing moneychangers in the templeHe demanded moral perfection, told people to cut off body parts, made prophecies that haven't come true, and defied religious and political authorities. While we tend to ignore this troubling behavior, the people around Jesus didn't. Some believed him so dangerous that they found a way to have him killed. The Jesus everybody likes, says Mark Strauss, is not the Jesus found in the Gospels. He's a figure we've created in our own minds. Strauss believes that when we unpack the puzzling paradoxes of the man from Galilee, we find greater insight into his countercultural message and mission than we could ever have imagined.

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Everybody Likes Jesus

I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.

Albert Einstein

I am a historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.

H. G. Wells

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

Mahatma Gandhi

The Doobie Brothers famously sang “Jesus is just alright with me,”1 and that about sums it up. Just about everybody likes Jesus. Muslims like Jesus. They call him by his Arabic name, Isa, and view him as a great prophet, just a little behind Mohammad in power and authority. Jesus is particularly revered for his power to heal. It was later Christians, Muslims claim, who distorted the truth and falsely (and blasphemously) turned him into a deity—the Son of God.

Followers of the New Age love Jesus. They consider him to be one of the most enlightened people who ever lived, someone truly in touch with his divine self. By following his way, people can attain true enlightenment, their deity within. This is the yoga, tofu and wheat-grass Jesus.

Jews—at least those who study him historically—like Jesus. They view him as a reforming Jewish prophet who opposed the pride and hypocrisy of the ruling elite but tragically got himself crucified by the Roman authorities.

Even most atheists like Jesus. To many he was a good man and social reformer who preached that people should love one another and turn the other cheek. But the power-hungry church transformed this humble prophet into a divine miracle worker and Son of God, devising the far-fetched notion that his death paid the penalty for people’s sins.

Yes, almost everyone likes Jesus—at least the particular version they choose to believe in. This is the kind and gentle Jesus. The Mr. Rogers lookalike who shows up on Sunday school flannelgraphs laughing and smiling with children on his lap and a twinkle in his eye. This is the “love your enemies” Jesus who always turns the other cheek. This is the good shepherd Jesus, striding confidently back to the flock with the little lost lamb contentedly draped across his shoulders.

Yet the New Testament itself paints a darker and more complex picture of Jesus. After all, how could the Mr. Rogers Jesus make more enemies than friends over the course of his life? How could he stir up the whole religious establishment to conclude that he was dangerous and must be eliminated? How could he have gotten himself arrested by the Roman authorities and executed in perhaps the most inhumane manner ever devised?

The record shows that Jesus said and did some things that appear puzzling at best and downright contemptible at worst. He told people to hate their families, to cut off body parts, and to eat his flesh and drink his blood.2 He demanded perfection from his followers and warned that most people were straight on their way to hell (Mt 5:48; 7:13-14). He said that those who did not behave themselves would be cut up into little pieces (Mt 24:51//Lk 12:46).

Jesus called those who weren’t Jewish “dogs” and upheld the special status of the Hebrews in a way we would call ethnocentric if not racist (Mk 7:24-30//Mt 15:21-28). With no women among the twelve apostles, he looks pretty chauvinistic. He apparently had anger issues, cursing a fig tree because it didn’t have any fruit on it, and driving merchants out of the temple with a whip (Mk 11:12-24//Mt 21:12-22; Lk 19:45-47). He sent two thousands pigs to their death in the sea (Mk 5:1-20//Mt 8:28-34//Lk 8:26-39).

One person who didn’t think Jesus was so great after all was English philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his famous essay “Why I Am Not a Christian,” Russell claimed that Jesus was mistaken when he predicted that he would return within a generation, and unethical when he cursed a fig tree and caused the death of thousands of pigs. He found Jesus’ teaching about hell particularly reprehensible: “There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.”3

We tend to overlook Jesus’ “bad behavior” and instead create a Jesus who is more palatable—one just like us. Albert Schweitzer pointed this out over a century ago in his classic volume The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer wrote about the so-called first quest for the historical Jesus, when eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rationalistic scholars tried to find the “real” Jesus behind the supposedly naive and embellished accounts in the Gospels.

Schweitzer showed that these authors tended to ignore the context of first-century Judaism. They transformed Jesus from a wild-eyed apocalyptic prophet—the real Jesus according to Schweit­zer—into a nineteenth-century gentleman and philanthropist. For them, Jesus was an inoffensive preacher proclaiming the father­­hood of God and brotherhood of man. In other words, Jesus became the mirror through which they saw themselves.

The same thing happens today. Soft-spoken Sunday school teachers tell stories in which Jesus appears a lot like Santa Claus, speaking kindly to the children and telling them to obey their parents. Punch and cookies await if they will listen and behave. At a men’s conference Jesus is a man’s man, with callused hands and burly muscles (a carpenter, after all!), who clears the temple like a linebacker. No one would mess with him today.

In a Chinese church, the picture of Jesus on the wall portrays him as Asian. In much of the Western world, he is white, with blond hair and blue eyes. Enter an African American church, and you might see a black Jesus.

Each year when I teach the Gospels, I open my first class by showing a variety of film clips from movies about Jesus. An amazing diversity of films have been produced over the years. From the somber, aloof and stilted Jesus of The Greatest Story Ever Told to the clown-faced folk singer of Godspell, to the conflicted, self-doubting and all-too-human Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ, to the laughing, down-to-earth Jesus in Jesus (1999) who gets into a water fight with his disciples!

Why such diverse portraits of the man from Galilee? By almost any account Jesus is the most influential person in human history. About a third of the earth’s population identifies as Christian—followers of Christ. Even our calendars identify his birth as the center point in human history. Everything before him is B.C., “before Christ.” Everything after is A.D., anno Domini, “the year of the Lord.” Though Jesus is the most talked about, written about, argued about and revered person on the planet, he is also the most enigmatic. Thousands of books have been written asking the question, who was this Jesus of Nazareth?

The question is simple but the answer obviously is not. One of the reasons for this is because the New Testament itself presents a complex and puzzling picture of Jesus. At times Jesus’ words are difficult to understand, and scholars scratch their heads over them. What did Jesus mean when he told a man to “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Lk 9:60) or that “Everyone will be salted with fire” (Mk 9:49)? What is the “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit,” and why is it a sin that cannot be forgiven (Mk 3:28-29//Mt 12:31-32)? What does it mean that “violent people” are taking the kingdom of God by force (Mt 11:12)? These are strange and puzzling sayings.

Other times the problem is not that Jesus’ words are difficult to understand but that they are all too clear. As Mark Twain is reported to have quipped, “It’s not those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me; it’s the parts that I do understand!”4 Jesus said some very controversial things.

So who was Jesus? Was he a violent agitator who denounced the powerful elite and called on his followers to take up the sword? Or was he a pacifist calling people to love their enemies, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile and give without expecting anything in return? Was he a hellfire and damnation preacher telling people to repent or burn in hell? Or was he a gentle shepherd proclaiming God’s unconditional love for all people? Was he profamily, encouraging people to stay married and love their children? Or did he tell people they should hate their parents, spouses and children, and join his new spiritual family (like some cults do today)? According to the New Testament Gospels, the answer to all these questions would seem to be yes!

We must resist the temptation to domesticate Jesus, to make him just like us. We have to remember that Jesus was not a twenty-first-century Christian. He lived in a world with major inequalities between men and women, between Romans and Jews, between slave and free. While he may have given indications of the direction these inequalities should go, he didn’t seek immediate upheaval for any of them. Neither did he think or act like someone familiar with space travel, nuclear science, multinational corporations or video games. He came to a people and lived as a person who viewed the world very differently from how we view it today.

So when we observe Jesus’ apparent bad behavior with reference to slaves or family values or the death of pigs or the cursing of fig trees, we are asked to view him as he is, not as we wish he were—not as someone with twenty-first-century sensibilities toward equality or the environment. We may not always be happy with the results, and we probably shouldn’t expect to be. Ultimately we have to decide if we are going to sit in judgment on Jesus or listen and learn from him.

Jesus Behaving Badly looks at some of the puzzling and seemingly offensive things Jesus said and did, and tries to make sense of them. What we just might find is that when Jesus is at his most difficult, he is also at his most profound. When he surprises us, when we at first recoil at his words, deeper reflection brings even deeper truths. Some of the most important things we learn about Jesus and his mission—and about us—can be found in these enigmatic sayings and actions.

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Revolutionary or Pacifist?

The King and His Kingdom

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child;
Pity my simplicity,
Suffer me to come to Thee.

Charles Wesley,
“Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild”

Jay Leno, former host of The Tonight Show, used to do a popular sketch called “Jaywalking,” where he would interview people on the street. The bit could have been called “Are People Really That Dim?” since Leno would ask the most basic of questions and people would reveal their ignorance. For example, he once asked, “Who was the first man on the moon?” When someone answered (correctly!), “Armstrong,” he asked, “And what was his first name?” The young lady replied, “Louie!” He asked another, “How many stars are on that flag?”—pointing to an American flag. The answer was, “I don’t know; it’s flapping too hard to count them.” When asked which countries border the United States, one guy responded, “Hmm . . . Australia . . . and Hawaii?” Pushing the limits of the not-so-bright-o-meter, Leno stumped another with, “Who wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X?” (Knowing the high caliber of IVP book readers, I won’t provide the answers.)

But here’s one that shouldn’t stump anyone: Who said, “Turn the other cheek” and “Blessed are the peacemakers”? My guess is that most people would remember that these are the words of Jesus. If there’s one thing people know about Jesus, it’s that he promoted a radical new ethic of love.

But other sayings of Jesus are not so well known, like, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Mt 10:34) or “I have come to bring fire on the earth!” (Lk 12:49). If Jay Leno asked people who made these statements, you might expect answers like Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible or Saddam Hussein. But not Jesus!

Many people think of Jesus as a pacifist, a cross between Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Barney the Dinosaur. Yet he said some remarkably provocative things—things about swords, and fire and violent death. This is perhaps not surprising when we understand the first-century world in which he was born.

First-Century Palestine: Revolution in the Air

Some names aren’t very popular today. There just aren’t that many parents who name their daughters Jezebel. (Jezebel was the wicked queen of Israel who killed God’s prophets and led Israel into idol worship.) There aren’t many Adolfs or Neros. It’s the same with Judas, which ranks very low in boys’ names. After all, who wants to be named after the great archvillain of the Jesus story, the one who betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver? A kid with that name is probably going to get beat up regularly in school.

But it wasn’t always like that in Jewish history. Judas (or Judah or Jude—different forms of the same Hebrew name, Yehudah) was the name of the tribe of royalty among the twelve tribes of Israel and the one from which the Messiah was prophesied to come (Gen 49:9-10; Jer 23:5-6). It was the tribe of King David, Israel’s greatest king, and of his son Solomon, whose riches and wisdom were world-renowned.

The name Judas gained even greater cachet during the period of the Maccabees in the second century B.C., when, after years of foreign rule, Judas Maccabeus led the Jews in revolt against the evil Syrian dictator Antiochus IV. Antiochus called himself Epiphanes, meaning “the divine one,” but was nicknamed by his opponents Epimanes—“the madman”—because of his megalomania and erratic behavior. Antiochus sought to unite the Seleucid (Syrian) empire by eradicating the Jewish religion and forcibly converting the Jews to his own paganism. He desecrated the Jerusalem temple, offering sacrifices of pigs on the altar and ordering Jews not to circumcise their children. This was a crisis beyond belief, and Judaism teetered on the brink of annihilation.

Yet when a Syrian official came to the Jewish town of Modein to oversee a pagan sacrifice, a Jewish priest named Mattathias—Judas’s father...