Jesus As He Should Have Been

It’s been going on for a while now — the re-packaging of Jesus. There’s hippie Jesus, cool Jesus, edgy Jesus. Friendly Jesus. Sexy Jesus. The “He Gets Us” campaign (seen during the Superbowl) is the latest example of what I call “Jesus-washing” — making Jesus look way more palatable than he actually was. This is “Jesus as he should have been.”

Here’s the thing: The “prince of peace” was also the man who said “I bring not peace but a sword.” (1) The guy who said “Your sins are forgiven” (2) also warned of hell “where the worm never dies and the fire is not quenched.” (3) The man who told us to love one another also claimed that the person who didn’t hate their family could not be his disciple. (4)

Given the contradictions of the gospel, it’s pretty easy to make of Jesus what you will. The current trend seems to be to cast him as a radically inclusive, all-forgiving moral innovator. But look more closely. He ate with “sinners”, not to signify his acceptance of the marginalized, but in order to bring them to repentance. He was full of criticism for what he called his “faithless and sinful generation.” His teachings on love are not so different from those of his predecessor Hillel, not to mention the Buddha and Confucius.

Let’s examine Mark’s gospel, the earliest one, possibly written within 40 years of Jesus’s death. It describes a life that was invisible to the wider world and remembered only by a tiny, powerless minority that had been decimated by the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Removing some later additions to the work, we can see a very early record of what struck Jesus’s followers as most important about him. And that was Jesus’s role as Son of God, who was to announce and then usher in the Kingdom of God and judge the world. He made it clear that the end times were imminent (5) and that repentance and belief in him were central to escaping punishment. (6)

In terms of the rest of his message, Mark’s gospel presents us with what I call “Cranky Jesus.” This is not a sensitive, gentle person but one who’s constantly rebuking people for not having sufficient faith in him,(7) and complaining about his disciples’ thick-headedness.(8) He castigates the religious authorities for their hypocrisy, criticizes their understanding of ritual law and makes his own contrasting pronouncements about divorce, fasting, the sabbath and the validity of his authority.(9) In the midst all this, he also performs many healings. He can feed the five thousand, walk on water, calm the waves, and know the future. Mark’s Jesus is an undeniably powerful person, but not necessarily an instantly appealing one.

As a non-Christian, I can have respect for someone bold enough to proclaim himself the Messiah and weather the inevitable resistance to that idea. Though he is sure of the momentary arrival of the Kingdom, he also talks about his own sacrificial death as a precursor to it. In this light his decision to enter Jerusalem and make a scene in the Temple is a courageous act, predictably leading to his crucifixion. I can appreciate the bravery and also the honesty of the man whose last words were “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”(10)

However, I remain aware that the forgiveness and salvation Jesus offered was not unconditional. Indeed the price of escaping hell was repentance, self-denial and belief in him as Saviour. He had confidence in his identity as the Messiah. He had strong feelings about right and wrong. But if I don’t see him as God incarnate, if I see him as just a man, then he isn’t someone I can place above Buddha or Gandhi or the Dalai Lama.

We tend to give Jesus’s words more weight because of the residue left by the ubiquity of Christianity in our culture and history. All that art and music, all those halos and statues and churches give even the non-Christian the vague sense that Jesus was kind of magic, an important, divine figure. So we can remain more impressed by him than by other, more openly human teachers and healers.

I say, don’t Jesus-wash. Hold him to account. Judge his words and actions critically before you give him a pass as a “great teacher” who “gets us.” Christianity has had a huge influence on the world, and not a universally good one. A clearer picture of its founder should factor into how we relate to the Christian message, and how much of that message we allow ourselves to absorb.

1. Matthew 10:34–36: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household”
2. Mark 2: 5
3. Mark 9:48
4. Luke 14:26: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters — yes, even their own life — such a person cannot be my disciple.”
5. Mark 13: 26–30: “At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens….Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”
6. Mark 8:34–38: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it… If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”
7. Mark 9:19:”Oh, what a faithless people you are! How long must I be with you, how long must I put up with you?”
8. Mark 4:13: “Do you really not understand this parable? Then how are you going to understand all the other parables?”
9. Mark 7:6 “”You hypocrites, Isaiah described you beautifully when he wrote — ‘This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” See also Mark 10: 5–9 (divorce), Mark 2: 19–20 (fasting), Mark 2:25–28 (sabbath, and Jesus as master of it).
10. Mark 15:34