Underground Exiles

More likely than not, this post is going to get me in trouble with the elders in charge of H20, as well as an ex-girlfriend, and various other groups of people.

I was recently told that if I would just be a little more meek, my sermons would go down easier. A couple of weeks before that, I was given practically the same advice.

I was raised Southern Baptist, with this image of

“gentle Jesus, meek and mild,”

to quote the old hymn by Charles Wesley. Then I grew up and read the New Testament for myself, and it seemed like Jesus really enjoyed screwing with religious people.

So, since at H2O we’ve finished up our series on the distinction between the law and the gospel, I thought I’d give you a preview of the series on Mark that’s coming up, and an illustration (okay, illustrations) of Jesus messing with people. Lots of them. Regularly.

In Mark chapter 1, Jesus starts the whole she-bang off by yelling at complete strangers to repent of their sins, not unlike the nutbars with billboards that show up at USC and scream at the sorority girls. Shortly after screaming at strangers, Jesus orders some guys to quit their jobs and follow him, and not long after that Jesus is telling a demon to shut up, and then healing a leper only to tell him to shut up too. In the second chapter, Jesus picks a fight with some well-mannered religious types, and then does the equivalent of breaking into the church to make a sandwich with the communion bread because he was hungry.

Then in the third chapter, Jesus gets really angry and also grieves and apparently needs to go on Paxil. Then, he ignores his own mom, which sent Focus on the Hebrew Family into a real frenzy, so they quickly issued a position paper renouncing his actions. In the fourth chapter, Jesus rebukes the wind, pissing off the local pantheists. In chapter five, Jesus kills two thousand pigs, causing the local animal rights activist bloggers to start twitching uncontrollably and simultaneously creating a bacon famine that has yet to be rivaled.

In chapter 6, Jesus really offends some people and apparently needs sensitivity training. In chapter 7, a few religious types have some questions for Jesus, and he responds by calling them “hypocrites” and goes on a lengthy tirade about them, which seems awfully damned intolerant of their alternative theological lifestyle.

In chapter 8, Jesus sighs in frustration, spits on a handicapped guy, and calls Peter “Satan”, although thankfully nobody sued for assault or slander. In chapter 9, Jesus gets sick of folks and asks them, “How long do I have to put up with you?” That’s just before telling some other people to cut off their hands and feet and gouge out their eyes, which led to picketing from the local body dysmorphic disorder recovery group. In chapter 10, Jesus tells a rich guy to sell all his stuff and give the money to the poor, which put him in bad graces with the local prosperity-theology luncheon for pastors, who were hoping for Bling Christ.

In chapter 11, he has on of his boys take a donkey without asking like some kind of kleptomaniac donkey-lifter, proceeds to curse and kill a fig tree, which really sets the environmental activists off since they were promoting justification by recycling, and then goes on to loot some small businesses and whip some small business leaders who were decent, tax-paying Republicans.

In Chapter 12, Jesus tells people they are wrong and don’t know their Bibles, which upset the postmoderns because Jesus was clearly using a narrow modernist epistemology. Jesus also tells some Sunday School teachers that they’re going to hell, which made the universalistic Emergent crowd immediately engage in a conversation about the mythology of hell and fingerpaint about their wounded feelings since he brought up hell. And there’s still three chapters left.

Needless to say that this is not the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, of my childhood, who wandered around Israel doped up on NyQuil and drank decaf while listening to the sounds of relaxing water on his CD player. This is the Jesus of history, who was so not meek with people that were religious and arrogant that they killed him for it.

So before I’m told again about how I need to be more meek, consider the above. My situation isn’t all that different.