“If the world hates you, keep in
mind that it hated me first. If you
belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but
I have chosen you out of the world. That
is why the world hates you.” --John
15:18-19
To
start with, you should all know that this article is probably not very well
organized, due to the fact that I received very short notice on actually being
asked to write it, and then being gone the week after being asked,
coincidentally also the week before this was due to be published. So
please don’t judge me too harshly. :) In fact, a friend, on being
asked (frantically) for ideas, suggested I keep it short and sweet: “Jesus is
Awesome. The end.” I figured neither the editor nor you
all would appreciate that, and I’d probably get unceremoniously kicked off
staff after just having been welcomed back. (I'm kidding, if you didn't
notice. About being kicked off, that is. The rest of it? All
very, very true.) So here is my slightly more-thought-out idea on
the topic of Jesus As A Rebel. …And I
may also go slightly off-topic on some of my points, due to my current lack of
brain cells… Please forgive me.
---
As
Christians today, we often think of Jesus as the one person in the world who
has never sinned. As I explained to my
VBS kiddo’s, that means He didn’t ever do anything
wrong. So why is this article titled
“Jesus As A Rebel”? Well, society’s
view of Jesus now is very different than it was when He was actually physically
here on earth. As they say, hindsight is
20/20; we have the advantage of having the Bible to read, where we can get more
of an inside look at things and see that Jesus really was following the Law
(for definition purposes, “the Law” – which shall be capitalized as such to
differentiate between it and other laws – are the laws that God instituted back
in the Old Testament to Moses and the Israelites) and never sinning, whereas
the Pharisees (the religious authority during Jesus’ time) and the majority of
the Jewish population saw Jesus as quite radical – according to their religious
ideology, societal norms, and also when placed next to their expectations for a
savior.
Over
time, the Pharisees had added quite a few “little” laws to the Law instituted
by God and held them as equally important, not to mention they held to the very
letter
of the Law – as can be seen in the passage about The Lord of the Sabbath (or at
least, that’s the heading in my Bible) in Matthew 12:1-14, Mark 2:23-3:6, and
Luke 6:1-11 where the Pharisee’s “complained” to Jesus about his disciples
picking heads of grain to eat on the Sabbath because they were hungry. “This goes against the Law!” was pretty much
their argument. Jesus’s response? “Here, take a look at how King David – you know,
that guy that you all really look up to? – acted in a similar situation. He did something probably even more
unlawful! He went into the House of God
and he and his men ate bread that was set aside only for the Priests! And you think what these guys are doing is
bad…” (Okay, so not exactly what He
said, but pretty close.) In that very
same passage, just a few verses later, we see Jesus being asked by the Pharisee’s
if it was lawful to heal a man on the Sabbath.
I’m sure you can guess His response; “If one of your sheep managed to
get itself into a pit, wouldn’t you pull it out, even though it was the
Sabbath? And just so you know, if you
say yes, you’re implying that you care more about your sheep than you do about
another human being. And we all know
you’re not going to say no, because you really care about your property. Thinking that through, are you sure you even
want to be asking me that?” The last
example (there are tons more!) I’m
going to share is the time Jesus “literally ‘turned the tables’” as one of my
friends put it. (Matthew 21:12-13, Mark
11:15-17, and Luke 19:45-46) See, it had
become perfectly acceptable (encouraged, even) for different booths to be set
up just inside the temple where men sold doves and other sacrifices, as well as
moneychangers. None of these were
originally intended to be in the Temple and doing business in God’s house was
very disrespectful to its actual purpose, so Jesus literally flipped their tables
over and kicked them out. This is, I
think, probably the only time in history where there has been a real display of
righteous anger by a human being.1 Anyway, as you’ve seen, the whole
“doing ‘work’ on the Sabbath” thing didn’t go over very well with the religious
community. Nor did the fact that Jesus
was using their own laws and the historical figures they respected to show the
flaws in their nitpicky2 laws. Oh, and did I mention that He claimed to be
God? You can be sure that went over well.
Obviously,
Jesus upset many in the religious sect by His apparent disregard for the rules,
but He also upset even those who weren’t very interested in religion. As they saw it, He rebelled even against what
was seen as socially acceptable. He
could often be found around those in society that were seen as the
“untouchables”3, such as tax collectors (became rich off of charging
you more than you actually owed), Samaritans (imposters from during the
Babylonian captivity), prostitutes (the horror!), etc. Oh, and His disciples! Some of them were fisherman (not the
brightest, you know) and at least one was a tax collector! Can you imagine how they saw it? Not only did this man who claimed to be God
spend much of his time with these horrid people, but many of his closest
friends were listed among them! And some
of those “rules” of his… Not retaliating when someone hit you across the
face? Actually turning to let them hit
you on the other side of your face? That
was basically asking the other person to attack you! What kind of crazy guy was this?
Even
more than all that, though, Jesus rebelled against the “popular belief” about
who the Savior was supposed to be, what he was supposed to be like, and what
his purpose was. See, though Jesus
claimed to be God, and subsequently the Savior, He didn’t really act how the
Jew’s thought their Savior would. They
expected a military leader who would free them from the Roman’s rule, but
instead of ridding in on a warhorse, He came on a donkey – a sign of peace
instead of war. (Matthew 21:1-6, Mark 11:1-7, Luke 19:28-35, and Mark
12:12-16) Not to mention that He was
constantly preaching to “love your enemy” and other things that went directly
against that idea. They expected a King,
the Son of David, who would lead them after they were free from Rome, but
instead, Jesus talked about a kingdom that was not of this earth.
In
the end, Jesus was really just a rebel against mankind’s wrong ideas of what a
person should act like. He wasn’t a
rebel in the areas where “behavior” really mattered. He upheld all of God’s
laws perfectly, set the standard for how Christian’s should treat each other
and those around them, and was the perfect Savior – even if He wasn’t quite
what everyone expected.
The
Comma Queen
1I
know that many people would disagree with me, but please notice that I’m simply
saying that it’s my opinion, not something I know for sure.
2For
those of you who didn’t grow up with a dad who uses crazy phrases like
“nitpicky”, it means (according to Dictionary.com) “Adj. Overly critical,
especially on trivial matters; focused on only trivial aspects.”
Those of you who already knew and are
nodding your head in a bored manner, brownie points to you!
3“Untouchables”
is actually a level in India’s caste system – these people are the lowest of
the low, given the worst jobs, and everyone else literally refuses to touch
them because of how “filthy” they are seen to be. Technically, they aren’t even a level – they
are below even that.
