The Jesus we don't want to know

 

Luke 13: 1-9
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
March 23, 2025

Photo of a fig leaf with the sun shining from behind and through it. Everything else--the sunlight, other leaves and branches--are softer greens, yellows, white, blue, and purple, and out of focus. As yet there is no fruit on this tree.

Back in the late 1980s when I was in seminary, there was a course offered with a self-described title: “Evangelizing the Intelligentsia”. A few of my male Baptist friends signed up for this class and loved to discuss it over dinner in the cafeteria. Now I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent person, but I had to go to the dictionary to figure out what this class was about.



This is what the AI assistant on Google had to say about evangelizing the intelligentsia: “…reaching out to highly educated and intellectual individuals with a religious message often requires a nuanced approach that acknowledges their intellectual curiosity and critical thinking skills, while presenting faith in a thoughtful and respectful manner.” Which to my ears sounds like making the gospel more palatable or reasonable. Which I think would, as Anne Lamott wrote, make Jesus drink gin straight out of the cat dish.



I don’t know about you, but isn’t it kind of insulting that highly educated people are too smart for the gospel? And I don’t mean insulting to smart people but insulting to the gospel. How educated do we have to be to understand love your neighbor as yourself? Or if you got two coats, give one away? Or blessed are the poor? Or it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kin-dom of God? Because, like most faith traditions, the Christian faith is less about what to believe but more about how to live.



I think most people understand the gospel the first time, but there are times we just don’t like what Jesus is saying. Evangelical Christians are accused of cherry-picking verses from the bible but we all do it. We all gravitate to the verses and stories we love like the prodigal child or the good Samaritan when Jesus is preaching mercy, but not the ones when we encounter judgy Jesus, like this passage from Luke.



Jesus is addressing concerns from the huge crowd that has come to hear him speak. In the previous chapter he reassures them that worry does not add one hour to their lives but instead they are to seek first the kin-dom of God. Now they inform him about some Galileans who were killed and how the Roman governor Pilate mixed their blood with the blood of sacrifices offered in the Temple, which is intended to be not just disrespectful but demeaning and dehumanizing. We hear the people’s question in Jesus’ answer: were these Galileans worse sinners because of this? Or those 18 people who were killed when a tower fell on them—were they worse offenders because of how they died?



For thousands of years, because this line of thought still persists today, people have believed that bad things happen to people because of the consequences of sin: they deserved it because they were bad people. It’s a kind of magical thinking that helps us explain the unexplainable, random, wrong place at the wrong time things that happen to people, people who are a mixture of both good and bad.



It’s magical thinking that often helps us get through loss and grief, like “God has a plan” or “everything happens for a reason”, but it’s not a place to live. Duke Divinity school professor Kate Bowler, in her book about her experience with cancer entitled Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved, writes: “When someone is drowning, the only thing worse than failing to throw them a life preserver is handing them a reason.” She goes on to say, “What if being people of ‘the gospel’ meant that we are simply people with good news? God is here. We are loved. It is enough.”



And yet it’s also more than that. God is here. We are loved. It is enough. And we are dust and to dust we shall return. Repent, make that U-turn, change your thinking, your purpose, open your heart to all of what Jesus has to say because our time here is short and nothing is guaranteed.



Over the centuries we Christians of all stripes have severed Jesus from the things he said that we didn’t like: the Beatitudes, what he repeatedly said about money, his refusal to pick up a weapon, the fact that he was a Palestinian Jew living as a refugee in his own country. We severed Mother Hen Jesus from Judgy Jesus, saving one for ourselves and the other for those whose person we may love but whose sin we hate. Because that’s what empire does. Empire cuts people into pieces, declaring some parts as good, others as bad, because a human being in pieces is easier to control, feed lies to and starve them from the truth to the point that half a life is seen as better than no life at all. When we are severed from our pain or live in it constantly, we can be made to do just about anything.



Which leads to severing humanity from itself: disabled people from able-bodied, workers from those with wealth, queer people from straight people, trans people from cisgender people, unhoused people from people with housing and property, White people from people of color, immigrants from citizens, Indigenous people from their land and everyone else. When we do this, we sever others away from our resources and ourselves from compassion.



Lately, though, it seems that some Christians are more ready to speak and to hear the whole gospel, the whole of what Jesus had to say because our chickens are coming home to roost. We are living through the outcome of what happens when empire cuts Jesus and our humanity into pieces. We ignore Judgy Jesus at our peril. We realize hopefully not too late that humanity desperately needs to make a U-turn to not only compassion but also to condemn and change how we protect wealth more than we protect the vulnerable.



Judgy Jesus, the Jesus we don’t want to know, we don’t want to remember, says, “Enough of this! I’ve given you three years and still I don’t see results. Give it one more year. Put your manure around your tree but if it still doesn’t bear fruit, tear it out.” Harsh words and yet God’s mercy and God’s justice go hand in hand. Unconditional love without course correction is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”.



When we believe that suffering is a consequence of sin—people are poor or homeless because of bad choices and behavior—it makes it possible for us to ignore systemic sins and injustice and our participation in them. We can write off our responsibility to our neighbors and hence, ignore the Jesus we don’t want to know. But if we are to love mercy and do justice in remembrance of Jesus, if we are going to heal the sick, we also need to address the systemic reasons why people are sick. If we’re going to feed the hungry, we also need to do something about wages and food deserts. If we’re going to open the door to our neighbors and let them in, we can’t be questioning who our neighbor is or who is deserving.



Empire Christianity is about what you believe, who’s in and who’s out. Jesus is about how we live with our neighbor. Jesus is merciful but Jesus is also impatient for God’s kin-dom on earth. If we’re going to remember Jesus—Mother Hen Jesus and Judgy Jesus—we need to be just as impatient for the kin-dom as he is and then behave that way. Amen.

Benediction


Go forth into the world in peace.
Be of good courage.
Hold fast to that which is good
and render to no one evil for evil.
Strengthen the faint-hearted;
support the weak; help the afflicted.
Honor all people.
Love and serve God,
rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.
The grace of our Savior Jesus Christ be with us all. Amen.