Jesus disturbs me
For a long time now there has been a desire to discover what the real Jesus is actually like. Some took this to mean that we need to debunk what the gospels say to get to the real Jesus. This is based on the assumption that the gospels are biased and paint a distorted vision of what the real Jesus is actually like. On the surface it seems like a good idea but it ends in disaster. You see what we end up with is a Jesus who is a reflection of the person who does the research. It turns out that none of us can be completely neutral about things. We all bring our assumptions and desires to bear when we try to work out who Jesus is. This results in the kind of nonsense that some scholars have come up with where Jesus ends up a shadow of the Jesus of the gospels. We end up with a Jesus that looks just like the scholar who investigated the historical Jesus and sometimes that scholar is a little wierd and uninteresting.
So then we have to ask certain questions about Jesus and the gospels.
1. Does being biased mean that you cannot be accurate or realistic? The answer has to be no. Just because you think favourably towards someone does not mean that you are blinded to the truth about them. I love my children and my wife but that doesn’t mean that I don’t see their faults – or they mine for that matter. Who is to say that someone who thinks positively towards someone has the wrong view when a sceptic has the right one? We also have to understand that the sources of the gospels (e.g. the apostles) come off very badly in the gospels themselves. This suggests that when they told the stories they most probably told them accuratly because they don’t attempt to cover anything about themselves up, they admit their faults. So the gospel portraits of Jesus, in my opinon, are accurate.
2. If the gospels are accurate what kind of Jesus do we find? Well, Jesus turns out not to be the kind of person we find portrayed in many T.V. programmes. Jesus is disturbing. He claims some pretty amazing things about himself and he tells us things about life that few of us really want to hear. Jesus is often hard to listen to.
I’ve come across lots of people who say that the bible is hard to understand. My feeling is that it is actually quite easy to understand but we just don’t like what we read.
Jesus disturbs me. He challenges me every day to be a better person and often upsets my way of thinking. Every time I read the gospels I find a Jesus who I want to follow but who I’m embrassed by because I do such a bad job of following. If you think that Jesus is just a nice person who tells everyone they are doing a wonderful job then maybe you haven’t really read the gospels.
