Christ Said What?

Recently I was scrolling through the website of a famously-liberal denomination which quickly became excruciatingly boring because it was so predictable.  In the early 1980s my (then) Anglican bishop the Right Reverend H. V. R. Short described the group as “humanism with God-talk” and I was curious to see what it was like now.  The answer:  more humanism, less God-talk.  The website was basically a collection of leftist causes with an occasional nod to the notion of “exploring faith”.  Jesus was brought in for the odd cameo appearance to justify their acceptance of… well, pretty much anything so long as it was liberal and on the extreme left.  And it occurred to me that their Jesus bore little resemblance to the one found in the New Testament or in the history of the Church.

       This transformation of the Church’s traditional portrayal of Jesus into the current Jesus favoured by liberal churches is the end result of a long process of change in those churches themselves.  In the words of Frederica Mathews-Green in her brilliant piece “Cradles, Converts, and Orthobros”, she writes that in the modern church “worship is couched in pampering terms, and harps on the worshipers’ pain, weakness, and brokenness. Jesus is depicted as endlessly sympathetic, and endlessly focused on them.”

       Amen. Preach it, sister.  After the idealism of the 1960s, the so-called “Me Generation” arrived and it has been with us ever since.  Now the focus of pretty much everything in society is on ourselves and everyone gets to play the starring role in life’s drama.  In support of this, some churches have invented the Jesus they want and need—a Jesus who is endlessly sympathetic, tolerant, non-judgmental, embracing, affirming, soft, lenient, broad-minded, easy-going. A Jesus who only ever gets upset at the military-industrial complex and people wearing MAGA hats.  A feminized Jesus who only ever smiles, hugs, and makes the peace sign.  Peace and love, y’all!

       The problem with this new Jesus is that He is entirely absent from the pages of the New Testament.  To confirm this, let’s take a quick look at some of the things Jesus actually said. Some may find them surprising.

It would be easy to collect a dossier of denunciation from the Gospels, a thick folder of the unkind things that Christ said about the Pharisees:  He said they were like whited sepulchres, that they were a brood of vipers, doomed to the sentence of hell, blind guides.  But since the Pharisees are famous as “the bad guys” it is easy to dismiss significance of the denunciations.  Of course He denounced bad, religious people. So what?

Of greater significance perhaps is how Christ related to sinners. Consider, for example, the woman taken in adultery.  His adversaries seized her while she was engaged in the adulterous act itself— a set-up probably, because they seemed not to have seized her paramour, who might well have been in on it.  They brought her to Christ and cited the Mosaic Law about stoning adulteresses and asked for His own verdict on what to do with her.  At first He just doodled in the dust with His finger to show His utter contempt for them as if they scarcely warranted His attention.  Then He straightened up and gave His verdict: “Let him who is without sin throw the first stone.” 

Slowly they got the picture and one by one left until she was finally alone with Christ.  He asked her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?”  When she replied, “No one, Lord” He said, “Neither do I condemn you.  Go your way— from now on sin no more.”

Please note not only the refusal to condemn the penitent sinner, but also His final word:  “From now on sin no more.”  We conclude from this that all sinners are welcome as His disciples, provided that they repent and strive for righteousness.  This means that any and all sinners are welcome in Church but they must leave their former sinful lifestyles behind prior to their baptism.  When they emerge newborn from the font, they must go their way and sin no more— or at least try to.

Or consider His word to the man He healed by the pool near the sheep gate.  He had been crippled for thirty-eight years—which is to say pretty all of his adult life.  Christ healed him with a single word, saying, “Arise, take up your pallet and walk” (John 5:8).  He did so and when Christ later found him in the Temple He said to him, “Behold, you have become well! Sin no more lest something worse befall you”.

Note: the gift of healing brought with it responsibility, the responsibility of living righteously for God (possibly indicating that the man’s affliction was a judgment for his sin).  Just as in His attitude to the woman taken in adultery, so here: Christ was intolerant of sin but compassionate to the penitent sinner.

Next we may look at Christ’s rebuke of some who had become His disciples and had been baptized by the apostles, “those Jews who had believed Him” (John 8:31).  To them He said, “Why do you not understand what I am saying?  It is because you cannot hear My word.  You are of your father the devil and you want to do the desires of your father. But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me” (v. 43-45).

Ouch.  “Of your father the devil”?  Not so sympathetic or affirming.  Rather, His words were a summons to repent and to open their hearts, to leave the effective service of the devil and turn to God.

It is the same with Christ’s words and messages to the baptized believers in the churches of Asia Minor, found in the early chapters of the Book of Revelation.   

Consider, for example, part of His message to the Ephesians found in Revelation 2:1f.  They had grown spiritually cold and left their first love.  Christ therefore said, “Remember from where you have fallen and repent and do the deeds you did at first or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand from its place unless you repent”. 

Note:  unless they repented He would make sure that their church ceased to exist.  Yet He did offer a crumb of consolation:  “Yet this you do have, that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans which I also hate.”  A consolation based on hatred of the Nicolaitans?  Who were the Nicolaitans?

The Nicolaitans were a group of Christians who were easy-going to the point of tolerating sexual immorality and eating food offered to idols. Note that Christ says that He “hates” their deeds.  Again: not so inclusive or non-judgmental.

Concerning the Nicolaitans, Christ had more messages about how He would deal with the churches that tolerated them and their deeds.  To the church in Pergamum He said that they should “repent or else I am coming to you quickly and I will make war with the sword of My mouth”— i.e. by uttering words of judgment which would destroy them (Revelation 2:16).  To the church in Thyatira He said concerning the woman leader of the Nicolaitans, “I gave her time to repent and she does not want to repent of her immorality. Behold, I will cast her upon a bed of sickness and those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation unless they repent of her deeds and I will kill her children [i.e. her disciples] with pestilence and all the churches will know that I am He who searches the minds and hearts and I will give to each one of you according to your deeds” (Revelation 2:21-23).

When taken together this all means that Christ is merciful to the penitent sinner who strives for righteousness, but severe to those who refuse repentance and willingly embrace sin.

That is why, of course, the Church has always insisted that its members live in repentance and righteousness.  The man in Corinth who refused to do this Paul ordered chucked out of the assembly, delivered to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that he might repent and be finally saved in the Day of the Lord Jesus (1 Corinthians 5:5). 

And not just him, but all who similarly embraced sin. As Paul went on to write, “For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. Drive out the wicked person from among you… Do not be deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor catamites, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 5:13, 6:9-10).

This is not an example of ecclesiastical decline as if the Church had by then fallen away from Christ, or a case of Paul being mean when Christ was kind.  It is outworking of Christ’s word to the penitent woman taken in adultery: “From now on sin no more”.  Following the Master, the Church was committed from its outset to striving for holiness.  Of course we often fail in our striving and often need His forgiveness.  When we come to Christ in penitence, He will always accept and forgive us and set us back on our feet.  But our penitence and striving must be genuine.

When we look at the total picture of Christ given in the New Testament and read all His words, we find many things that simply do not fit with the modern picture of Him as non-judging, non-condemning, ever-inclusive and universally-affirming.  He was nothing of the kind and one can only construct such as false portrait of Jesus by wrenching select verses violently out of their context, ignoring all the other verses of the New Testament which contradict our preferred picture.  Such a perverse hermeneutic is not honest.  And, if all the other hard verses about what Jesus said are true, it is also not safe.

Regarding this unsafe Jesus, perhaps the final word should go to Mr. Beaver in C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “Safe?” said Mr. Beaver, “Who said anything about safe?  ‘Course he isn’t safe.  But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”