Saturday, January 11, 2014

Don't Blend In (Jesus meant what he said)

When I was a kid, I thought that being a follower of Christ meant that you were in the mainstream of society.  Christians were people who would dress nicely, smile a lot, and knew a few special words and phrases.  Certainly, their behavior was completely acceptable because they pretty much just blended in with everyone else.  They weren't really that different than everyone else.  That was the image that I had of a "typical" Christian.

During his earthly ministry, Jesus would have been difficult to classify as mainstream.  He combated the traditions of the religious elite, told his followers to lose their lives in order to follow him, and dined with people with whom most of us would be embarrassed to be seen.  Downtrodden people were honored by him and the people most honored by the rest of society (usually people in positions of authority / power) were most often challenged by him.  Jesus took man-made convention and stomped it into the sand like a scorpion.  The Jesus that I have come to know and love was a counter-culture radical that turned the values of the world on its head.  He continues to do that today.

What if Jesus actually meant what he said and did?  For example, Jesus kept company with some pretty rough characters; he really seemed to prefer the company of the least desirable people.  How might we treat someone who collected taxes for a hostile occupying foreign government and profited from these activities by skimming money from the top?  Would we be embarrassed if a prostitute barged into the room to wash our feet while we dined with the local pastor or priest?  Given the choice, would we choose to spend our time with those on the very lowest rung of our society? Would we try so hard to be first if we really believed him when he said that "the last will be first, and the first will be last"?  Do we really believe that we are loving Christ when we are loving the lost and forgotten - prisoners, homeless, addicted, and broken? Do we really believe the Sermon on the Mount? Or do we skip the hard stuff?  Questions like these make me wonder how accepting we Christians actually are of the One we profess to follow.

This message of Jesus' is as radical today as it was then: the values of this world have no place in a person's heart.  We are simply called to be different.  In his book "The Cost of Discipleship", Dietrich Bonhoeffer disposes of the myth that Jesus' messages were merely an ideal to be merely strived for and not practical to live by.  Executed in a martyr's death in Nazi Germany because of his faith, Bonhoeffer explained that Jesus meant exactly what he said and that we shouldn't skip past the hard stuff - perhaps especially when that means we won't blend in so much.

4 comments:

  1. A very good post! I don't think Jesus was very mainstream. He seemed to have a lot of trouble with the dress smart mainstream types of guys.

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  2. Thank you both. I wish that I would have found this quote by C.S. Lewis before writing this blog post: "He was not at all like the psychologists picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be very well 'adjusted' to your world if it says you 'have a devil' and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood". Pretty much sums up the whole post.

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  3. Great insight and challenging comments for all Christians. It is easy to think the best plan is just to fit in and not make waves. Jesus did not teach us that approach.

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