Why does the world struggle so fiercely....so radically...to avoid the most wonderful man to ever walk in sandals...Jesus? This is of greatest irony.
One of the biggest problems is Jesus won't let us continue to think highly of ourselves. When it gets down to brass tacks, this is a huge rub against the ego-mania of.....each of us! None are exempt.
It is for this reason we must lose our lives. Jim McGuiggan once said something like, Everywhere I go...I go. And everywhere I go...I get in my way. We are in our own way.
Martin Luther wrote, The glory of the grace of God is to make us enemies of ourselves. Insightfully brilliant...yet, so difficult to translate into realization. Tougher still to remember!
William Willimon bravely declared, We have met the scoundrel, and he is us. Our face is all over the story. We really are a moral mess. We really do need someone to save us, someone who is not too respectable, for we certainly are not. We could use a crook like us. And he was. He broke the Sabbath. He consorted and partied with crooks and harlots. He outraged the scholars in the department of religion. He died, a criminal on either side, as a crook himself.
A respectable savior could never have loved and saved a crowd of rogues like us.
Therefore, Willimon is correct when after this portrayal he points out that the gospel doesn't come naturally. It comes as Jesus.
2 comments:
I get what Willimon is saying, but I struggle with it, too.
Maybe I don't want to get out of my own way and see Jesus the way the "religious" law keepers saw him. As you put it, "a rogue".
I don't know, I am baffled somewhat by the post.
Terry, I love the question you ask. In my own life, I have found out that the Jesus I thought I knew didn't really exist at all.
My suspicion is that many people don't come to Jesus because those who claim to know him (this very big finger is pointed in my direction, mind you) have no clue at all who he really is.
I wonder how things would change if those who claimed to have a relationship with him, actually sought a relationship with the living, breathing Jesus Christ, and not with his teachings.
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