Jesus in My Image or No Jesus at All

Picking up on yesterday's post, I wanted to share an excerpt from a book I just finished, "Jesus Is Risen: Paul and the Early Church," by David Limbaugh:

Paul’s conversion was early—perhaps within five years of Christ’s resurrection—so he probably learned about Jesus from eyewitnesses, possibly from Jesus’ followers as well as his enemies. There were still no written Gospels or apostles’ writings, so by word of mouth Paul likely learned a disturbing version of these events—one that would upset anyone with half his devotion to the God he served. 

Consider the facts as they were likely presented to Paul. This imposter Messiah was born out of wedlock, attracted a motley group of misfit followers with no qualifying credentials, cavorted with overt sinners, and demeaned those learned in the true religion and the Law. Despite His interloping corruption, Jesus reportedly healed people, performed other miracles, and adding insult to injury, violated the Sabbath and flouted other sacred laws. Defying the most respected members of the Sanhedrin—the Jewish high council—He challenged and ridiculed the revered Pharisees, and rather than deferring to their holiness, denounced them as whitewashed tombs with an outward appearance of righteousness but full of hypocrisy and lawlessness (Matt. 23:27). He presumed to discard God’s sacrificial system and inserted Himself as the proper medium to forgive people’s sins. Not only did He contradict the Jews’ messianic expectations, He predicted that Jerusalem, instead of becoming the capital of a newly inaugurated messianic empire, would be annihilated and the Temple would be reduced to abject ruins. On top of all this, this faux liberator wholly failed to bring the Jews their long awaited victory and emancipation, instead ending His life in utter defeat, hanged on a “tree” and thus, according to Old Testament Law, accursed by God (Deut. 21:23). 

All this might have been tolerable had this disgraceful fellow’s blasphemies died along with Him, but His death and rumored resurrection resulted in an explosion of the cult. Once Jesus had been crucified and entombed the religious authorities surely assumed this would be the end of the movement, especially because its leader suffered such an ignominious defeat. After all, Jesus’ followers cowered into the darkness when He was arrested, so the authorities reasonably assumed they would hear nothing further from them. But everything changed days later when Jesus rose from the dead and “presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). Even Jesus’ close family members who had been skeptics thereafter became ardent believers. The movement was expanding at an alarming pace and the authorities knew they had to quash it before it spun out of control.

 

I was going to give the book the ol' TSFABPTLFAT treatment (that's "Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet"), but I decided I wanted to add some commentary to this excerpt.  And that commentary is that oftentimes we either make Jesus into whatever image we want him to be, or we actually see him for who really is and are put off by him.  

 

 

Limbaugh's point in the excerpt above is that it is totally unsurprising that someone like Paul would not have taken to Jesus immediately and in fact would be utterly against him.  And I shudder to think that people like me are exactly like this too.  Like Paul, we are religiously well trained, intelligent, and worldly.  The Jesus of the Bible is markedly different from us.  His behavior shocked the religious and respectable of the day.  And his sharpest words were for those same people.  

For many of us modern-day so-called followers of Jesus, his behavior is not shocking, nor do we feel the sting of his sharpest words, and that is because we have not truly engaged with his behavior or words, but rather have made him into our own image.  This is a profound and terrible irony, as is the thought that if we did take the time to truly engage with his behavior and words we too would, like Paul, resist him greatly.  It has come to this, that we who say we are the most devoted to this Jesus, have either made him into our own image, or else reject and oppose him if we truly encountered him.

 

Alas!  Would that God have mercy on us who have hardened our hearts so.  And may God also have mercy on those broken and downtrodden around us who Jesus would have spent his days with, that they would be able to see past our self-righteousness and lack of concern, and know that the God of the entire universe is for them as well.