If Jesus would have given in to the objections of Pharisees and scribes, I think he would have died of niceness. Forget the cross. A lot of USAmerican middle-class Christians probably think that would have been just fine because they are dying everyday of niceness. Bored silly with the faith.

Christians are expected to be nice apparently because they think Jesus was nice. To imagine Jesus as a hotly controversial, cultural rebel turns him, in their thinking, into a disobedient child of God. We just can’t have that. We can’t bring ourselves to follow a leader who was labeled crazy, a demoniac, a huckster, a fraud and a danger to society. He was labeled these things not by the secular, atheistic media, but by the honorable theologians of the the day. Godly people, mind you. Yet, we assume that our sweet Jesus was just not any of those things. Jesus was not called those things because he brought pies to the church bake sale. He was called those things because he was an intentional and regular law-breaker.

When we turn to the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), we discover some packaged episodes titled “controversy” and “Sabbath controversy.” Because we are so used to reading “nice church” into the life of Jesus, we do not connect with the shocking enormity of his lawlessness.  For religious conservative leaders who idolized the Temple in Jerusalem because that’s where God lived and where forgiveness was granted to hear a scraggy little Galilean Jewish carpenter say publicly, “Son, your sins are forgiven” almost put those leaders into cardiac arrest. Then to their utterly sputtering amazement the little Jewish nobody healed the man to prove that he, indeed, had authority to forgive sins on the spot. No Temple, no priest, no sacrifice. Just a word. To the religious ones, Jesus had to be demonic. Too much of what they stood for was riding on Jesus’ being who he said and acted like he actually was.

Jesus hung out with whores. This was not good. Nice messiahs don’t do that. Jesus hung out with mafia (my own free paraphrase of tax-collectors). Jesus kicked back and enjoyed a rip-roaring party thrown for him by a rich, mafia man named Matthew. Doing surveillance at the windows were, you guessed it, the religiously nice people. Hardly containing their percolating scorn, they grilled Jesus’ chosen friends about how Jesus could dare associate with such gutter types. The Pharisees were convinced that should the Messiah show up, his first request would be to share a cup of wine with them. God hangs around with godly people, you know.

Jesus was not serious about the faith. He laughed too much. Everything for Jesus was a party. Where was the fasting? The long, godly face? Where is the sonorous intoning of “our Most Holy, thrice Hoooooly Gaaawdt”?  Everything for Jesus was a wedding banquet. In the midst of the laughter, he even made himself out to be the bridegroom. What?! Anybody who knows their Old Testament knows that God, and only God is the bridegroom. Who does this little, twangy-accented Galilean hillbilly think he is? Bridegroom, my eye.  Can you spell b-l-a-s-p-h-e-m-y?

If I were alive at the time,  I would have sold disciple insurance because it was tremendously risky being associated with Jesus. Insurance and Tums.

Don’t get me going on Jesus’ utter disregard for the most Holy day–the Sabbath. His complete disrespect for Sabbath laws is a pretty good hint at his disregard for the entire Torah. This man Jesus is a dyed-in-the-wool rebel. This so-called Rabbi allowed his disciples to pluck and eat grain on the Sabbath, and this with unwashed hands. Yuck. How low will this man and his friends go? At least use a wet-wipe or some hand sanitizer. When it was pointed out to him that he and his disciples were law-breakers, this Jesus had the raw audacity to say, in effect, “Chill. I am boss of the Sabbath. It’s not my boss or boss over human need.” Imagine. But it gets worse. Jesus from nowheresville Nazareth tells the religious conservatives that their hearts were in a different galaxy than God’s heart. That was not a very nice thing to say to those who diligently search the Scriptures (John 5:39).

The irony of all of this controversy is this: everything the religious leaders accused Jesus of as wrong, they were guilty of, for real. We know Jesus was always and only saying and doing the will of his Father. The religious conservatives, having reduced the faith to support their place in society, concluded Jesus was a demonized madman. Jesus had to tell those leaders, “You, you are of your father the devil.”

A Christian life without controversy is not the Christian life…if Jesus has anything to do with it. I wonder if we’ve lost a generation of youth because the church and parents thought the aim of discipleship was to make “nice little boys and girls”?

Some of these religious, conservative leaders were in the crowd that shouted, “We have no king but Caesar!” Sad.

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