Where Everybody's Crazy

Familiarity with the Gospels can so often rob us of their revolutionary nature. We know by now that Jesus is the good guy and the Pharisees are the bad guys, and we adjust our expectations of the text accordingly. We don't, on the whole, recognise Jesus' behaviour as radical and socially extraordinary, because the point of the story is that he comes out on top. But at the time, the people watching Jesus really did see "remarkable things".

And actually it makes it very difficult to preach the Gospel - not if you lose a sense of the revolutionary nature of Jesus' work, but if you gain it. Luke and Mark particularly are dangerous books. They turn upside down a lot of ideas that we, through familiarity, can take for granted.

For instance, the Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day. They were good folks, devoting their lives to helping the people find their way to God and ushering in the Messiah. They were precisely the kind of people who, in our day, are pastors and missionaries and preachers. When we see the Pharisees in the Bible, we need to stop thinking "them" and start thinking "us".

I'm preparing a sermon on Jesus' healing the paralysed man who comes down through the roof. This is hardly socially acceptable behaviour. We don't want this kind of behaviour in our church. But the reason these guys had to resort to violence and defacing of property in order to get to Jesus was because the room was full of pastors and preachers who'd come from all over the country to sit at Jesus' feet, having a nice cosy weekend retreat drinking deep from the well of God's love, and they were in the bloody way of real, hurting people who needed to get healed. The inference is clear: the pastors who were trying to help people get to God were actually, despite their best intentions, stopping people getting to God. The religious professionals, throughout the gospels, were far more often part of the problem than part of the solution, and mainly because they don't like the way that Jesus goes around messing stuff up. See why I feel a bit uncomfortable preaching this?

Then a bit before that there's the part when Jesus touches a man with leprosy and heals him. I've mentioned before that there's quite a Puritan streak in the church in Japan, particularly around what you do and where you go and who you associate with. Hang around unholy places and you'll get defiled. Jesus does exactly the opposite; he involves himself with defiled people and places and they get purified. His behaviour basically turns the "Holiness Movement" understanding of holiness upside down. ("The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look at him, a glutton and a drunk, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'") Again, I have to preach this?

It's uncomfortable but at the same time, the point of reading the Bible is that it changes us and challenges. If all it does is reinforce our existing prejudices there's just no point to it at all. So I will preach an unsafe and an uncomfortable sermon, hopefully in a subtle enough way not to get myself in trouble, but hopefully with enough in there that the inference is unambiguous: Jesus was a revolutionary. His ministry was messy and socially obnoxious and the worst nightmare of the pastor who wants to maintain control, organisation and decorum.

Adrian Plass wrote a book called "Jesus: Safe, Tender, Extreme." I hate that title. Jesus was by no means safe. He's only safe if we manage to domesticate him by shrinking in fear or familiarity from the revolutionary nature of his message, and the sheer chaotic wonder of all that happened around him. Preaching a safe Jesus is a lot easier, and a lot more socially acceptable, but it doesn't do justice to the Jesus of the Bible.